Richard's Blog

Raising Money to Fight Prostate Cancer

2010-08-26T11:07:00.005+01:00

This year I am taking part in The Prostate Cancer Charity's Tour Ride, I am helping to fight the most common cancer in men in the UK. The money raised will help The Prostate Cancer Charity to provide men affected by prostate cancer with the best support possible. We depend on people like you - without your sponsorship, we wouldn't be able to invest in vital research and services to those that need them most. Thank you for your support.

http://www.prostatecancercharity.org.uk/personalPage.aspx?registrationID=322280

If enough people sponsor me, maybe I'll say what happened to Steel's Roofing!!

One Step Forward...

2010-01-31T19:11:00.001Z

Well, I thought I had finally won a great triumph and actually got backup working on my PC. A KB fix was to have been issued with Microsoft’s monthly updates so everyone could benefit from my perseverance. After Saransh had been working remotely on the problem from New Delhi for a couple of hours, we got to the stage when backup clearly was copying files to my external drive but, sadly, the program failed right at the end because it couldn’t create zip files. Now, when I try, I’m back to the original error!

The Steel’s Roofing website is now being found by search engines (Google and Yahoo, anyway) if not by customers, as yet! You can also now find us in a number of trade directories, although I’m keeping to just those that provide free listings, for now. There are quite a few sites that charge for leads, and some of the propositions seem more than reasonable. However, in most cases, when you research a little further, you find many complaints, and claims that the vendors failed to live up to their promise – and that includes one of the biggest (and most expensive) – a household name.

We are continuing to get work through Lorne’s previous contacts, and I’m glad to know that we’re delivering good value, and invited back. Tomorrow (Monday) Lorne is starting on his third job for a local property owner.

I’m using Microsoft Office Live for Small Businesses for the website as well as file storage and document sharing, which are all pretty straight-forward to set-up.

We’ve got some signage for the van, now, ‘though I’m not all that happy with it and would like to get a proper paint job done. Lorne pointed-out to me that signage had to be removable because, if we are sub-contracting, the main contractor is unlikely to want us advertising ourselves at his expense. However, I reckon our approach should be to cover-up painted signage with blank magnetic decals, when necessary.

On Tenterhooks

2010-01-22T12:11:00.009Z

I've decided to start blogging again. The new Richard's Blog will be more generalised and ad hoc than the old, but the trials and tribulations in setting-up a roofing company with my nephew, Lorne, will be a key theme.

We decided to set-up a limited company with me, initially, as the only shareholder! Registering the company, buying and insuring a van, and sorting-out a website, e-mail, FAX and 'phone were the easy bits. We've opened a business account, designed a logo and ordered business cards and signage for the van.

I've spent a helluva lot of time, this week, in setting-up (hopefully) appropriate keyword metatags for the website and registering with search engines and trade directories. (Google was first to find us.)The main result, so far, is that the calls from businesses wanting to sell us their marketing services have started to flood-in! Please click on our site to help raise its profile.

On Tuesday, Lorne and I attended a Business Links "Foundations for Success" workshop, which was very good, and we've booked three follow-up workshops over two weekends in February.

As a result of advice received at the workshop, I've made an appointment at a local Chartered Accountancy firm to discuss accounts, payroll and VAT registration, 'though I hope to deal with most of this myself once I've had some initial advice.
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On Wednesday morning I was in town for a Socitm Commercial Board. It was the first for Karl Grundy, our new Head of Business Development. His is the last of the key roles we set-out to establish when we embarked-upon the turnaround of Socitm, and he soon demonstrated just why we need it by disabusing me of misconceptions about the environment for a proposed new service.

From there, I went for a reunion, and a long and boozy lunch at Smith's of Smithfield, with former colleagues from the North-East London Teleregion.
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During the week, Lorne started on a flat-roofing job that he picked-up by word of mouth, and we are waiting to be able to start work on another job he quoted successfully for. A friend of mine also asked us to quote for reroofing his house after I e-mailed details of our venture to a number of my friends and contacts.

All-in-all, 'though, I'm feeling very nervous!

Helping my nephew...

2010-01-15T18:29:00.004Z

Hello. Since I still have this site, in case anyone happens-by, I thought I'd just mention that my New Year's project for 2010 is to help my nephew, Lorne, set-up his roofing business!

If you live in SE England and your roof has been damaged by that strange white stuff that's been around lately, or for any other roofing works, try Steel's Roofing Limited.

In case you were wondering, I'm still with Socitm, and pleased that it continues to steadily build its resource and capabilities.

TTFN
Richard

2009-08-11T15:16:00.005+01:00

Signing off...

2009-07-31T17:48:00.001+01:00

Today is my last working for Newham and so, for now at least, after well over 300 entries since starting at the beginning of 2007, it’s time to retire my Blog.

Many thanks for the many warm wishes and compliments that I’ve received, and thanks, also, to those who’ve shared their less than complimentary views in various ways (‘though I personally think that name-calling, febrile comments and anonymity from some, diminish their value!)

I was again reminded of the need to keep things in perspective, when I heard the sad news, this week, that Socitm’s Auditor, Christine Peacock, lost her fight with cancer last weekend, and I’m more than ever looking forward to redressing my own work-life balance for a bit.

So I guess that the value of my views may also be diminished, as I take the money and run, but I really do think that the current economic environment and the drive for Government efficiency and savings create the best opportunity that there will ever be for ICT to show how truly transformative it can be. My greatest disappointment, as Socitm President, was in the realisation that a few of my peers prefer to criticise and obstruct rather than get involved, find solutions and make a difference, but there are many who truly inspire and whose influence, now, is increasingly holding sway.

May you continue to live in interesting times!

Under A Cloud

2009-07-30T09:06:00.002+01:00

Wednesday started with a self-inflicted headache after I attended, on Tuesday evening, 2e2’s annual reception hosted by Lord St. John of Bletso on the House of Lords Terrace. I’d decided to leave the car behind – bad move – and clearly I overdid the vino tinto!

Socitm’s Board meeting was held at Camden Town Hall. I’m glad to say we agreed a contract for non-Executive Directors, setting-out responsibilities and commitments, and a code of conduct.

We were rightly taken to task by the NAC for having requested it to change the date of its meeting to facilitate board representation, and then failed to ensure adequate representation. This clearly was unintended, and happened because of the shifting requirements of, and commitments to, Directors’ employers. In fact, our calendar has become rather a mess; I’ve struggled to keep-up. We’ve resolved therefore to reset a logically ordered calendar of meetings, and then stick with it – accepting that sometimes key individuals may need to miss the occasional meeting.

The decision to recruit of Heads of Membership Services and of Business Development was confirmed. These are two crucial appointments to continue to build capacity and expand our membership. The appointments will require some investment of reserves in the short to medium term, but ultimately should be self-financing. Finances are continuing to hold-up well, although we of course recognised the need to continue to monitor the position closely in the adverse economic environment that we’ll all continue to face for some time into the future.

Neil Harvey, from the NAC, did a really great job on reworking our draft Value Proposition, and this should now provide the basis for marketing/public relations collateral going forward. Frances Kettleday also provided us with seminal advice on how to make our briefings and reports work better for us - by including information about who we are and how to get in-touch, for example!

Conference bookings are down a little, at this stage. Edinburgh is traditionally our most popular venue, and we have a great programme – reinventing local public services – radical thinking, practical solutions – so, if you haven’t already, book-up quickly before the early bird discount runs-out!

I had to leave the Board Meeting before lunch to go across to a Public Sector Infrastructure Team Executive Board meeting at the DWP’s offices in the former Adelphi Hotel, in the Strand, where I was both representing Martin Ferguson, who’s on holiday in Turkey, and feeding-back from the Unified Communications sub-group meeting that I recently hosted at Newham Dockside.

At the UC meeting we had first defined what we mean by “Unified Communications” – fixed and mobile, covering voice, e-mail, messaging, and video, encompassing desktop and advanced business applications and, crucially, presence – and then proposed a vision statement… “This transformation agenda requires that services, processes and information are extended across the traditional ‘machinery of government’ silos, integrating service delivery around customer needs and cross-government policies, whilst also exploiting economies of scale and commonality in key areas”, backed-up by a list of key requirements.

The PSIT Executive Board will incorporate other key considerations, such as Information Assurance, and “secure telephony” (which is surely missing the point… unified communications obviously mean that all communications are now just bits and bytes, and must be managed accordingly). The vision, when ratified, will be published in due course but, in the meantime, my presentation is in the Socitm Futures GovX space, for those who have access, and the detailed paper is available in the Cabinet Office Government e-Room for those who have access to that.

The main business of the meeting was a presentation by Martin Bellamy, from the Cabinet Office, on “Government Data Centres, the G-Cloud and the Apps. Store”, followed by discussion and feedback from us all. This is mooted as a new programme responding to drivers such as the Operational Efficiency Programme, the Green Agenda and Digital Britain. It’s likely to become a major strand of the new Government IT Strategy (see John Suffolk’s new Blog) and to launch early next year.

I wonder whether this might provide an alternative to G-Cloud?

At the PSIT Executive Board we again alluded to the need for pan-Government security vision, supporting role-based access, ID management, authentication etc etc. I’ve always felt that identity should be federated so individuals don’t have to cope with different systems for different sectors and suppliers, and this story therefore caught my interest.

I read in Municipal Journal that “the Internet giant has launched a website in partnership with DirectGov and Socitm… http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/localgov/

Continuing my Swan-Song...

2009-07-25T09:42:00.003+01:00

Geoff asked me to review ICT pay and allowances in the light of the present economic environment, so that’s what I’ve been doing, this week, and have arranged to discuss the prognosis and recommendations with managers next week.

Socitm’s Events Group met, on Friday, at David Wilde’s new offices in St. John’s Wood. Andrew Unsworth, from Edinburgh City Council, joined us to help in planning for the annual conference (being held in Edinburgh) which provided most of our agenda. Elaine Davis joined us by video-conference from her motor-home, now in Oregon, where it was 2.00 am as we started our meeting. She informed us that sponsorship and exhibition bookings are holding up very well, despite the recession.

We discussed final agenda items to enable an updated flyer to be published during August. Scottish content will include the national citizen card (later, the London Regional Committee discussed a new feasibility study for London) approaches to the Cloud in Scotland and an Edinburgh contribution to different approaches to/ perspectives on outsourcing.

Prospective innovations for this year include the facility to provide conference feedback via an IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) system provided by Oni – one of the confirmed sponsors – online meeting facilitation from “MustMeet” and a simultaneous virtual conference through HBL.
We also discussed a spring event, next year, with the NEC, or Motorcycle Museum, as possible venues. I am to get a steer on this and other issues from next week’s Board Meeting.

After lunch, David gave me a lift to the Socitm London Committee meeting at 59 ½ Southwark Street, which, as a storm broke, I was most grateful for. We dropped Andrew Unsworth and Martin Fuggles at their stations on the way.

Damian Acklam, of Cidway UK, was invited to address the start of our meeting. Cidway have produced software enabling two-factor authentication on any Java-enabled Cell ‘Phone. There was a lot of interest from Committee members – no doubt, hastened by the imperative to facilitate self-service for Council services as part of the efficiency drive.

As mentioned above, Steve Pennant advised as that Capital Ambition is tendering a feasibility study for a London Citizen/ Smart Card, hopefully capitalising on developments such as Hillingdon’s, and the earlier efforts from Newham and South-East London.

The next Socitm London Branch meeting will be on 17th September. That should provide the opportunity to feedback from the special CIO Event being held on Public Sector Network earlier in the week, and considerations for the London PSN development. Digital telephony convergence/ security will also be on the agenda.

Some of the stories that caught my attention in the last week are…

Telecare offers crucial opportunity to help save health and social care systems which refers to Professor Sue Yeandle’s report at http://www.bowgroup.org/harriercollectionitems/telecare%20final.doc

Also, Too late for CIOs to get lean and agile? And…

(Global CIOs:) Why CIOs without Customer Engagement Will Fail. I liked this CEO/CIO conversational scenario, but didn’t see why it referred just to “global” CIOs.

Too much flexibility!

2009-07-16T09:05:00.002+01:00

On Monday Glyn Moody wrote in Linux Journal of his having agreed with Microsoft to cancel the planned discussion of the OXML ISO standardisation process. He says this was because the meeting was only being held for my benefit. Actually, I neither sought nor expected to gain any benefit from the meeting. I invited the two parties to discuss the process out of interest, and because I thought it quite likely that many others would also be interested, but expected any benefit to accrue to one or both of them.

I rather liked the recent ZDNet article by Glyn’s mate, Mark Taylor. His analogy with the US Car-Makers is similar to others, like the US Railroads losing out to airlines because they thought they were in the rail business rather than the travel business, and could be configured to apply to other potential pitfalls for our profession; CIO’s thinking they are in a technology business rather than the creation of value through knowledge management, perhaps? I don’t, however, think there’s much evidence that major IT vendors (like Google and Microsoft) have any intention of holding on to inflexible business models. This article in Information Week, and this, on the BBC News Website, are among many that discuss how they are reacting.

The Socitm Futures Group met at Siemens’ offices, in Old Bailey, on Monday. There was discussion of our recent response to the Digital Britain report, and whether this was sufficiently radical. Views were mixed; my own being that it said all that it needed to in a measured and dispassionate way, but the Group would be pleased to hear other Socitm members’ thoughts. Andrew Stott, the new Digital “Czar” was attending, in the afternoon, to discuss his new role, and how the Society can support his work, but I was unable to stay for that.

Some of the discussion, led by the Chair, Glyn Evans, which I thought most useful, was of ICT service typology – supporting regeneration and developing SME capacity, for example – not just personalisation of Council services etc.

We also discussed a draft response to the Operational Efficiency Programme. The report considers short, medium and long term actions, urges avoidance of knee-jerk reactions that could damage services, and effective use of benchmarking to substantiate best value. We resolved to add a checklist of the all things we recommend that all organisations should be doing.

We received updates on information assurance/ resilience work and pan-Government security vision. Mark Brett has so far responded to over 400 queries related to the Government Connect CoCo from local public sector colleagues. Overall, ‘though, we think we’re rather more compliant than central government, having achieved all the “should”, as well as the “musts”. Mark advised that we should now be thinking about how to label e-mails in accordance with security classification requirements. We agreed that the next Socitm Futures meeting would include a session on secure e-mail. Mark has also made great progress with regional engagement with security matters through “WARP”s (Warning, Advice & Reporting Point). Only the NW now does not have one.

On Wednesday, following rescheduling of the Socitm National Advisory Council, I was double-booked, and was therefore not able to attend that meeting, which would have been my last.

The other meeting, which I attended, was the Commercial Board, held at Camden Town Hall. Initial discussion among the select group, of the Chair, David Bryant, David Houston and Suzanne, taking notes, and myself was of the need to sort-out the scheduling of Socitm meetings, which has gone awry, and is adversely affecting attendance.

Considering the economic climate, the performance of our Consulting and Insight services is holding-up very well, and both are on target to achieve budgeted returns to the Society.

A major concern was that progress on the Software Supplier/ e-Governmment Index merger had stalled, and we asked for this to be urgently addressed by the main board.

The other major discussion was of Adrian’s report recommending the recruitment of a Commercial Manager; (he joined us at lunchtime, from the NAC, which was meeting at Euston Square, and which had already endorsed the report). We also agreed that this is now a priority.

Finally, I thought it worth flagging-up an ICT good news story from Britvic, which has a factory and Depot in Newham, and also Cliff Saran’s report of Easyjet’s planned use of Windows Azure.

Reinvigorating PSUC

2009-07-10T08:59:00.003+01:00

There’s been a lot in the computer press, this week, about Google’s announcement that it will launch its “Chrome Operating System”. E.g. “Google OS a worry for Linux”. Whilst there’s an interesting debate around who’s threatened more – Microsoft or other Open Source product vendors – I think the real interest is in “Chrome may eventually become a dominant Linux distribution but it will take time for Google to iron out the kinks”, and “creating a cool software product is a good thing, but enabling it on a hardware platform is another thing”. It seems to me that a shared challenge for both Microsoft and Google is creating reliable and effective products for generic hardware from a multitude of suppliers - unlike Apple, whose Mac hardware and software are made for one another.

London’s shared DR procurement process has been completed with the disappointing result that no tender met the quality threshold. However, the boroughs involved are still keen to work together to find a means of achieving the requirements. They decided to separate data backup from application server provision within the original specification. In the short term they will look at using a more dedicated Buying Solutions Framework to procure data backup individually, and in the longer term at designing a possible shared application server solution. There were valuable lessons learned, and these will be compiled and sent to Buying Solutions. All existing documentation, including the shared DR specification is available on the LPSN GovX space.

Oops – I misremembered the new PSMP branding. It’s “MyLoMo” (not “MyLoBo”). This is the logo…

On Friday I hosted a meeting at Newham Dockside to “Reinvigorate Cross Government Unified Communications Strategy” as part of the Public Sector Network. The HMRC’s Jim Boyle organised the meeting, and we were joined by representatives from the CESG and NHS, with input from Andy Williamson related to unified communications network procurement in Wales. We reviewed and updated a vision paper circulated by Jim in advance of the meeting, which I’m to present at the next Public Sector Infrastructure Team Executive Group on 29th July. I’m attending as Martin Ferguson will be on holiday, so this will be part of my “Swan Song”.

We agreed we should focus on the long-term UC requirements, covering all infrastructure – fixed and wireless - flagging practical considerations, many of which related to the need to accommodate multiple devices and presence states, but not allow these to compromise the vision. Mobile operators haven’t yet been represented in the consultative groups, which we resolved to address.

Mobile Media Is Key

2009-07-08T15:44:00.002+01:00

Capital Ambition’s “London Mobile Portal Event” at Prospero House (241 Borough High Street), on Tuesday, was a “sell-out”. There were excellent presentations from Geoff Connell on the PSMP (which I understand is to be rebranded “MyLoBo”), Gill Elderfield on Mobile DirectGov, Gary McFarlane on “Blue Badge Finder” and accessibility, Hans Grefte on ReportIT, and Vince Tooke on TfL’s perspective on the future of mobile information services.

The presentations, except for Gary’s (which I believe is to be added) are on the London Councils site at http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/capitalambition/events/event.htm?pk=62 There is an excellent short video about the “BlueBadge Finder” and “BlueWatch” applications at http://www.bluebadgefinder.com/ These will shortly be featured on the PSMP. Gary highlighted the overwhelming advantage of mobile portals for people with disabilities. Whereas 32% use a PC, 85% use mobile ‘phones.

In her presentation, Gill demonstrated that mobile media is key. Over 30% of the UK population are using mobile media every month, and the latest year-on-year growth of mobile search is 36%, compared with just 8% for PCs.

Following coffee, discussion groups were formed to consider the general mobile portal requirements of Londoners, and collaborative opportunities and next steps. Each group presented its feedback, which is providing the initial content for a new GovX Collaboration Space (membership required) to continue to discuss and develop ideas.

The Identity & Passport Service published its Safeguarding Identity Strategy two weeks ago. This is an important and overdue contribution to the Information Assurance and Security agenda, which I urge IT professionals to familiarise themselves with; not least, because it’s among the tools we have to better inform the public about what identity is and why it’s important to protect it. There’s a useful timetable of next steps on pages 26/ 27.

Ian Cooper helpfully summarised, among other things, the “key selling points” in the Socitm Futures GovX Space; I hope he doesn’t mind my plagiarising his summary:-

In future, everyone should expect to be able to:

• register their identity once and use it many times to make access to public services safe, easy and convenient;
• know that public services will only ask them for the minimum necessary information and will do whatever is necessary to keep their identity information safe;
• see the personal identity information held about them – and correct it if it is wrong;
• give informed consent to public services using their personal identity information to provide services tailored to their needs; and
• know that there is effective oversight of how their personal identity information is used."

“Northgate passes public sector 'late payments' on to own suppliers.” No (further) comment.

I forgot to mention that, at last week’s Local CIO Council, I resigned and nominated Geoff Connell as my successor, which was agreed.

On Monday, I wrote to Glyn Moody & Charles Eales with regard to the debate that was to have happened on Tuesday night, saying “in the circumstances (of my impending retirement) I would prefer that you continue with the planned debate in private. I will not be in a position, or think it right to, influence any decisions in Newham going forward... Obviously, you must deal with any reporting from the meeting in whatever ways you think fit”. Glyn replied to let me know that he was just drafting an e-mail to Charles about how to take things forward, and Charles later replied to say Glyn had cancelled the meeting, but still planned to write a piece on Open XML and the ISO process, but offered sight of the article before publication, and to include a Microsoft response – which seems very fair.

Moving On

2009-07-06T18:43:00.003+01:00

Friday’s combined Central & Local CIO & CTO Councils meeting was mainly about ICT and the Operational Efficiency Programme. How can we cut 20% from all Government ICT spending? In a series of mini workshops we considered the decisions we could make immediately, those that may need a little more (a few weeks’) consideration and what strategic actions we could take in the medium term (ahead of an election). We came-up, I thought, with an impressive list of actions, and John Suffolk rounded the day off with the positive message “our time has come”. I really do agree with that, provided, of course, we won’t be into the crude top-slicing of budgets that too often happens in these circumstances - punishing the prudent, and rewarding the profligate.

The OEP puts ICT Centre Stage; it is a great opportunity, and I’m already having slight misgivings, therefore, about my announcement, today, that I’ll be retiring early from Newham.

When I started on the Socitm secondment, many colleagues expressed the view that I wouldn’t go back to the “day job”, although I had every intention of doing so, at that stage!
Still, a lot can change in a year. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of working with Socitm colleagues to turn-around the Society and, although there’s a lot still to do am proud of what we achieved. I’ve also enjoyed working with Central Government, and believe we’ve come a long way in the last year, after years of inertia. But, earlier this year, I really felt I needed a rest, and I’ve also been saddened by the premature loss of former colleagues. Life, as they say, is not a rehearsal.

I’ve loved my time with Newham, and been very proud of its ICT Service. As Socitm’s President I got to see, or hear about, all sorts of Council organisations, but few could match Newham’s ICT accomplishments – especially now we finally have our shiny new offices. Even so, it was going to be difficult returning to local government bureaucracy after such a different year, and with such a talented team in Newham demonstrating that they can do very well without me, thanks very much, it somehow seemed unfair, in any case, to return and cramp their style. Many congratulations to Geoff and the Team on doing such a great job.

I’m now looking forward to taking two or three months off to spend some time with Chris catching-up with all the things we’ve let or go or meant to do, and to take time to reflect on what to do next; despite the economic woes, there are a lot of opportunities out there, and I’ve had some interesting offers.

I’ll be working until the end of July, when I’ll also be signing-off this Blog.

Here’s that Socitm Digital Britain response that I mentioned last week.

Dining with the Father of the Web

2009-07-03T00:06:00.002+01:00

Over the last week, I’ve had one or two conversations with Microsoft and Buying Solutions colleagues about what was to happen to the PSA09 licensing deal. The introductory offer was initially available until15th June, which was always going to prove challenging for some to take advantage of, especially considering the compressed window of opportunity resulting in slippage in getting the contract agreed and signed. Several colleagues contacted me to say that, although they would benefit from the deal, they had insufficient time to get purchasing authority agreed by the deadline. A colleague from Buying Solutions ‘phoned me yesterday evening to let me know, “hot off the press”, that it had been agreed to extend the deadline to 15th December, which is great news. He was at today’s meeting to report on progress, and also to get LCIO Council input to the terms of reference for negotiation of an Oracle Public Sector Licensing Agreement, and representation on its Governance Board.

Today’s Local CIO Council meeting reconfirmed its commitment to openness – publishing its minutes publicly, and not just in Socitm members’ pages, so I’m not going to say anything about it here.

However, I intended, last night, to mention the mind-blowing statistic reported by Christine Connelly – that the NHS has amassed 10 petabytes (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of images in the 18 months since it switched to digital imaging for X-rays – (but forgot until now).

This (Thursday) evening there was a joint dinner for the Government CIO & CTO Council communities. Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt were guests; John Suffolk introduced Tim, who made a pre-dinner speech in connection with his new role as an adviser to UK Government on public information, in which we were all challenged to identify data that we could liberate to facilitate mash-ups, research and reuse. Andrew Stott, in his new role of Director of Digital Engagement, seems to have planted his people on tables to collect our deliberations.

As a senior local government officer I cannot comment on political aspects of “Opposition to the philosophy and practical implementation of Transformational Government is emerging as a key element in Conservative Party policy as the Tories gear up for the next election”, but I will say that, whatever your views about national ID cards and a”database state”, joined-up public sector infrastructure remains a key service enabler and a critical efficiency objective.

Actually, one of the things we did discuss at today’s LCIO Council meeting, was consideration of party policies and a future item to discuss how we’d effectively engage with Government of whatever persuasion, after next year’s election (but we had to send Roy Marshall out of the room because he’s not even allowed to think such thoughts!)

Help beat this Microsoftie!

2009-07-02T07:55:00.001+01:00

Here’s an interview with Phil Pavitt, who will shortly be moving to the HMRC, which I’m expecting will be one of the most transformative events in Government IT this year, if not decade!

The Local CIO Council is meeting at the School of Government on Thursday, and there is a joint meeting of the Local and Central CIO Councils here on Friday.

Christine Connelly, the NHS CIO, was our after dinner speaker on Wednesday evening. We were impressed with her candour and refreshingly open approach. All the questions were about how the local public sector can engage effectively with what’s generally seen as an immovable public sector silo, and she convinced us that change is afoot. If she’ll at least participate in the CIO Council, unlike her predecessor, that will be a step in the right direction.

In the bar, afterwards, Jos Creese, Glyn Evans, Martin Ferguson and I chatted about how to challenge (many of) our peers to engage more proactively in driving Government transformation, and how to encourage the next generation of leaders – fired up and ready to take-on and change the world – to take-over from our generation, and those of us who persist in seeing ourselves as technologists, rather than business leaders. I observed that, unlike many who seem to prefer to sit on the sidelines criticising and throwing brickbats, some of us find the time to get involved, are prepared to stick our heads above the parapet and work for change, but someone else observed that we all are becoming weary, which I think is possibly true!

I see that Glyn Moody is calling-on his colleagues for back-up to counter the not inconsiderable resources that this “Microsoftie” can bring to bear next week’s debate!

Speaking of Microsoft, this article is about its Data Centre developments to support Azure and Cloud services, I guess, but not the Government Cloud?

Investing in our future...

2009-06-26T17:04:00.002+01:00

Earlier this week, Richard Carde (by teleconference) John Stockwell and I were involved in a discussion with Andre Tytheridge (2e2) about progress in the NTC programme. Richard is working on the updated business case, as part of which we felt a further brain-storming/ SWOT analysis is called-for - given the degree of change since the original vision was established.

For example, the realisation of some infrastructure objectives, as envisaged in 2005, is still proving elusive. Whereas, at that time, Gartner was forecasting that “WiMax access solutions that are suitable for enterprise users that telecommute from rural areas (or urban areas where no alternatives exist) will be available by 2006 and may offer lower costs and multivendor interoperability, compared with other proprietary solutions”, in fact, genuinely broadband wireless solutions, such as WiMax, have been much slower to develop. We are therefore considering other technology, such as LTE (Long Term Evolution).

Other changes include, of course, the economic recession, changes in government policy, leadership changes, supplier positioning and the potential challenge to the exercise of Well Being powers as happened in Brent.

I had the opportunity to review and comment on Socitm’s response and policy briefing on the Digital Britain report, which I think is excellent. Look out for its publication next week!

On Wednesday evening I attended “A Shared Vision for Smarter Services”, chaired by Socitm’s President, Steve Palmer, hosted by Andrew Miller, MP, in the House of Commons Dining Room, and presented jointly by Socitm and Global Action Plan supported by Logicalis, IBM and CA. The event was held to launch a consortium of diverse and influential organisations calling on Central Government for a £1 billion IT stimulus package that will lead to smarter, more environmentally efficient, higher quality public services.

Steve stressed that we weren’t looking for a Government handout; the proposal is that funding be provided strictly on an invest-to-save basis, with agreed repayments being deducted up-front from future budgets as now practised by many local government organisations.

Following Steve’s opening remarks, Andrew Miller spoke in support of the proposition, having just come from the floor of the House where he had been speaking on the just-published Cyber Security Strategy. Andrew chairs PITCOM (the Parliamentary IT Committee) and, as you can see from his biography, is otherwise well positioned to support our cause. He spoke with particular enthusiasm about the innovation of UK companies such as Miniframe in developing products with efficiency and environmental benefits.

Trewin Restorick, Director of Global Action Plan, also spoke, highlighting the economic pressure on future generations that follows from the recent public expenditure commitments to stave-off economic collapse, with the double whammy of the accompanying increased pressure on public services. He highlighted the fact that the Government commitments to 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 (34% by 2020) and the tax of £12 per tonne of emissions on organisations with energy bills above £1m, with accompanying rewards to the most efficient, could result in some interesting cross-subsidies.

There followed a Q&A session for the panel, which included representatives of the sponsors. I asked a question about the rationalisation of supply implied by all this transformation and efficiency and how this can be squared with supporting a thriving, competitive economy and full employment. The answers seemed to imply that I was concerned about protecting public sector jobs; they concerned generating the capacity, through efficiencies, to invest in serving unmet demand (new jobs, I guess) but what I was really getting-at was the effects upon the supply side.
However, this was an interesting event, with unanimous support from the capacity audience and, besides; I always love visiting the Palace of Westminster!

There was lots of news, this week but I’ll confine myself to highlighting the appointments to these two important Cabinet Office IT posts. I wonder if they’ll be at next week’s CIO Council meetings?

Short enough for a Tweet

2009-06-24T16:38:00.001+01:00

It’s great to see that Martin Ferguson and others are continuing a lively Socitm Blog. For me, this represents the best means of keeping up-to-date with Society developments, although I also like the format of the new weekly newsletter.

Apologies, once more, if you’ve been affected, as several have told me they have been, with the continuing problems with the Newham ICT Team’s Byte Night site at JustGiving.

I’m sure you’ve all read about the “Seer Android Beta” in use at Wimbledon, this week? There’s some more stuff about “Augmented Reality”, here.

Meantime, the New Scientist has this story of how e-mail patterns can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point.

Information, Innovation & Improvement

2009-06-22T21:44:00.003+01:00

The problem with e-Government was always that Government somehow created the impression that this was the opportunity for a supplier "feeding frenzy" whereas, as I commented on many occasions, the reality should be quite the opposite; it always had to be about rationalisation. I assumed that the quandary that Government found itself in was the need to encourage efficient public sector services while at the same time maintaining a buoyant economy for IT suppliers.

In this recession, however, it appears that any pretence that service transformation through ICT can be achieved without rationalisation of supply has been abandoned. Whilst, as many commentators have observed, the economic climate is creating opportunities for CIOs to step up to the plate, seize the initiative and require services to use corporate ICT infrastructure effectively, the outlook for suppliers who are unable to innovate to keep market share in a less diverse, and much more competitive, market are bleak. John Suffolk's post about a "Government App Store" is just the latest in a series of pronouncements that no longer equivocate, but finally make clear some of the potentially less positive realities of e-Government.

The banks, not unreasonably, have come in for a lot of stick recently, but well done First Direct for its "Social Media Newsroom".

Socitm has been deliberating branding revisions to reflect the way that it has evolved in the last 18 months, and announced the changes on Friday. The announcement includes a link to downloadable versions of how the new branding will be used, which includes the following, which incorporates a new tagline emphasising our focus on the "I" for information.

Apologies to anyone who has tried to use the Newham ICT Byte Night Team's JustGiving site and had difficulties. It was "upgraded" early on Saturday, which seems to have caused all sorts of problems. The performance was very slow, my Blog widget wasn't being updated, and I couldn't log-in. A lesson in how not to do it! Using Twitter was the only way to find-out what was going on, until JustGiving e-mailed me early this evening. The site now seems to be accepting donations, but other difficulties remain. All in all –this is a pretty poor service to the many charities that increasingly rely on this business.

An Important Customer Service Channel

2009-06-19T16:59:00.000+01:00

On Tuesday 7th July there’s to be a London Public Mobile Portal event at Prospero House (241 Borough High Street), which will include presentation of the TfL/ Newham Public Sector Mobile Portal (PSMP), with Phil Pavitt as a keynote speaker. You can view the agenda and register through Capital Ambition at http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/capitalambition/events/event.htm?pk=62

Earlier this week Richard Carde and I met with James Lee for a PSMP progress review.

Three more London boroughs are now “under construction”, and six are expected to be live within the next three months. Many more boroughs have expressed interest and more than half London’s boroughs have already booked for the above event.

Much needed clarification of the PSMP development phasing has now been provided. (Basically, the phases are Information, Interaction & Transaction.) We realise that we previously created some confusion over what’s available now versus what’s in the pipeline, and now aim to be more precise in our communications.

A number of exciting developments are in-hand, including the ability to pre-reserve parking places, track the availability of park and charge, and blue badge spaces, and a journey planner for roads.

We expect PSMP to play quite an important part in Newham’s new Customer Services strategy.

All Change...

2009-06-18T08:49:00.000+01:00

The racing at Le Mans was great, with Peugeot diesels winning for the first time, and a great performance from a new Aston Martin LMP1 Team, but my travel arrangements were a bit of a disaster. After having spent a lot of money getting my car done-up, it had electrical problems until we broke-down on the motorway just outside Rouen. I have European break-down cover, but the journey home still involved four trailers, a lot of hanging around in depots and at the Calais dockside, and we got home at 2.00am on Tuesday. TVR – Totally Variable Reliability!

Sadly, whilst at Le Mans, we heard that Peter Wheeler, who presided over the marque’s most successful years, has died - in a year that so far seems to me to have been dominated by untimely deaths.

In a week that was busy with reshuffle news we heard that Tessa Jowell would pick-up the Digital Engagement portfolio vacated by Tom Watson, and Tim Berners-Lee will head a panel of experts advising Tessa on how the Government can best use the web to maximise information reuse. We also heard that Lord Carter is to step-down. Yesterday, the Government published its Digital Britain report – its strategic vision for ensuring that “the UK is at the leading edge of the global digital economy”. We heard that Martha Lane Fox is to become the UK’s digital champion but, although responsibility for digital inclusion has passed to Lord Mandelson’s new “Department for Business, Innovation & Skills”, it wasn’t clear whether there was to be a new minister for digital inclusion.

The COI is to audit government departments’ website usage and present comprehensive figures on the cost, quality and use of them by June 2010.

One in five adults who don’t currently have the Internet at home will have within the next six months, but two in five don’t want it.

A possibly radical, market-moving development from Google was announced; it’s set to launch “Fusion Tables” that will sidestep the limitations of conventional databases.

On Wednesday I overslept but thanks to unusually light traffic arrived at the RAF Club, in Piccadilly, for the BCS’s latest CXO Network breakfast. This was a debate under Chatham House rules, with John Suffolk asking questions of the network. Unattributed notes of the meeting will be published in due course; meantime, the notes of the BCS Thought Leadership debate on “The Death of the IT Profession”, which I recently attended, have been published. I do enjoy these debates, which are stimulating and, I find, help clarify and shape thoughts about the subject matter; there is an archive of past debates.

Another Sleepless Night, Please!

2009-06-09T12:03:00.001+01:00

We’re used to the occasional story of how, after 50 years, a war-time letter eventually finds its way to the intended recipient. Well I think I’ve just experienced the e-equivalent. A Socitm e-mail, sent at 16.07 on 09/06/2002, turned-up in my (junk) mail-box yesterday morning!

Socitm strongly agrees with research by Coleman Parkes and Parity suggesting that lack of awareness of online public services is hampering take-up. As Martin Greenwood commented, “we have lots of evidence to back this up. Council are generally poor at marketing and promotion - although, having said that, we know that up to 30% of the population still visit council websites each month.”

The first British Standard for Data Protection – a specification for a personal information management system – has been produced by the British Standards Institute, and the Information Commissioner’s Office has published new guidance on privacy impact assessments.

On Friday 2 October, The Newham ICT Management Team will be joining hundreds of other professionals in a sponsored sleep out on the streets of London. Byte Night raises money to help Action for Children tackle the root causes of youth homelessness and get thousands of children and young people off the streets and into secure accommodation with education and training opportunities that can change the course of their lives.

Each year, at least 75,000 children and young people experience homelessness. One in 3 attempt suicide and 1 in 7 young runaways are physically or sexually assaulted (this figure rises to almost 1 in 2 after a week).

Byte Night is a unique event that takes place across the UK. In 2008, it raised £470,000. Now in its 11th year, it is one of the single biggest fundraisers for Action for Children. Our support of Byte Night is vital to ensuring it continues to support the thousands of vulnerable young people Action for Children work with each year.

Please help us to have a sleepless night!

I’m on a week’s holiday from today, during which I’ll be attending the World’s greatest motor race.

Recently I was notified that I’d been voted onto the Silicon CIO50 list for the third year running. Alas, I will again be unable to attend the Awards Dinner because it clashes with Le Mans!

Musical Chairs...

2009-06-05T08:36:00.004+01:00

Congratulations, Phil Pavitt on your move to the HMRC. Thanks for the great work at TfL. I hope we can sustain and build on that, and continue a productive relationship in your new role.

Tom Watson may have resigned his Cabinet post, but his 1m + followers will be glad to hear he is not leaving Twitter.

Jerry Fishenden has also announced that he is moving-on from Microsoft, but will also maintain his great Blog and Tweets.

On Wednesday I attended Cisco’s launch of its Blueprint for Communities and Local Government at its offices in Finsbury Square. I contributed, slightly, in reviewing the drafts, and Socitm is supporting this great piece of work. The overall framework is reproduced below.

At the event, Steve Palmer, Hillingdon CIO and Socitm President, gave a great presentation of the work done at his borough to turn-around the ICT infrastructure, and position the Authority to achieve the Connected Council and Communities vision. In the next couple of weeks they are issuing 190,000 Citizen (Smart) Cards, but the other things that impressed me most were some of Steve’s previous career responsibilities, which included the coroner’s court, and the incontinent laundry service!

On Thursday I joined Adrian Hancock and Martin Ferguson, who “officially” started work as Socitm’s Policy Officer on Monday (having already got involved in a number of initiatives) to contribute to a briefing and handover of work I’ve been involved-in – particularly membership of Government Working Groups.

Adrian showed me a beta of the new Socitm website, which is looking good, and the format for a new proposed weekly broadcast to consolidate our communications and reduce e-mail clutter – an equally important development! We also discussed the new branding proposals that are under consideration, and we look close to a decision for implementation ahead of the conference, and in conjunction with our domain name change.

Taking breaks from Strategy... to Strategise

2009-06-02T18:38:00.003+01:00

I see that the Government has committed to funding research into ultra-fast broadband. This can’t be about squeezing still more capacity out of copper, so we are talking about upgrading the equipment connected to our fibre? It’s all about photonics – multiplexing light wavelengths – I think I remember from a Gartner, or could have been BT, event, many years ago, which seemed to imply this would be a “piece of cake”, once the fibre infrastructure was in place. On the whole, I’m inclined to agree with “some experts” who would rather see the money spent on improving existing fibre networks.

However, since I’m on a mission to evangelise ICT as our saviour from recession (nice set of theological metaphors, don’t you think?) I was taken by this report – Nanotech, super-cities and Robotics to push UK out of recession.

When chatting to Glyn Moody and Mark Taylor during their visit to Newham Dockside last Tuesday, I was again struck by their level-headedness, knowledge and courtesy as well, of course, their passion for Open Source - or rather, as I think they see it, breaking the establishment’s fixation with proprietary software. I think it was Mark who said that Open Source zealots do their cause a disservice - or words to that effect. For Glyn, a particular complaint about Microsoft was the way it “bought votes” at the International Standards Organisation to get its OXML ratified as a standard. Now this was all news to me (although if I had followed his blog as I now intend to do, I bet I’d have known all about it) so I asked a colleague from Microsoft for its perspective, which was quite different. In fact, Microsoft saw another major supplier as the villain of the piece. I therefore suggested a meeting to discuss either viewpoint, which both “sides” would be free to report as they see fit, although it would be great if we were able to achieve, and report, consensus. Both Glyn and Charles Eales, on behalf of Microsoft, have agreed to this, and we’re aiming to confirm an arrangement early in July, which is the soonest that can be managed because of current diary commitments.

I worked at home on Monday, on strategy which, as expected, has grown into a much bigger project, but which I’m now starting to feel is coming together.

In the afternoon I was involved in another teleconference to agree the agenda, speakers and stream leads for the Local Government, Ocean and PSN Conference at the National School of Government on 15th and 16th September. This will be an Extraordinary Local CIO Council meeting limited, unfortunately, to 50 people, but we are planning for the outputs from this event to be featured in Socitm’s Annual Conference in Edinburgh (11th to 13th October). The introductory sessions will include presentation of the Gartner Benchmark Analysis of Government Connect versus Local Authorities’ prior arrangements/ alternatives. There will then be facilitated discussions on Strategic Investment Management, Identity Management & User Authentication (which I am leading), Transition & Transformation Management and Information Assurance & Security.

In the evening I drove into town for a Chemistry Club Dinner, where Lord West, Minister for Security and Counter-Terrorism, was the guest speaker. Lord West joined the Home Office in 2007 to ensure an effective and coordinated response to the threat of terrorism. This follows a distinguished navel career including commanding HMS Ardent during the Falklands conflict. He went on to hold senior roles in the British Armed Forces including Chief of Defence Intelligence, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. As you may imagine, he made an interesting speaker.

Today, Tuesday, I attended a Buying Solutions IT Services Procurement Workshop, with a number of other representatives of different parts of Government. This was held in a sort of tower room, with great views of Westminster, reached by a spiral staircase, in a Horseguards Parade building. The opportunity, we were told, was to contribute to Innovation in Public Sector ICT Procurement. “Over 500 separate procedures were launched through OJEU in 2008, costing over £200 million for the procurement process alone. Each procurement took 18 months (on average), almost twice as long as comparable procurements in Germany (although some would say that’s because the UK sticks to the rules). Across those projects, over 50% of code and infrastructure was reusable, but most projects started afresh.

We spent a fair amount of time brain-storming the requirements, and discussed some initial ideas for services. I am really keen on effective aggregation of procurement, public sector frameworks and pan-Government contracts but, as I was once more compelled to point-out, our ambitions would be considerably easier to achieve if they could be shaped through the availability of pan-Government Vision and Strategy that helped us all to aim in the same direction.

Safety in Numbers?

2009-05-29T18:19:00.004+01:00

Today, along with a number of other Newham colleagues, I was at the funeral of Paul Bull, our Printing & Reprographics Manager who had bravely fought cancer for the last 14 months. Gary Sussex gave a eulogy, mentioning Paul’s vision for the Council’s printing service that has now been realised at Newham Dockside. Paul and his wife Evonne, who worked alongside him at Newham, shared a love of Ballroom and Latin American Dancing, Gary said, as well as of travel. Paul will be sadly missed, and our thoughts are with Evonne.

On a more cheery note, there will be at least a 400% increase in public sector representation at this year’s Byte Night London Sleep-out in aid of Action for Children, as Geoff Connell, Gary Sussex, Shane Mills and John Friend will be joining me in a Team.

Private sector companies’ work on behalf of the public sector will become subject to FOI, Legal experts have warned.

With the publication of this story – IT leaders oppose large-scale outsourcing – I feel I, too, can finally speak openly. I agree with David Tidey and Phil Pavitt, and would go further; I don’t think it’s possible to identify any successful IT outsourcing (when compared to the same operation run by an efficient internal service)! “I’m a serial insourcer”, says Phil; “I run things cheaper than any outsourcer can”. He should know, as he was involved in setting-up ITNet (now part of Serco) when at Cadbury Schweppes!

Well, the sun’s out, and the forecast for the weekend is great. Have a good one.

Onwards & Upwards!

2009-05-27T21:23:00.004+01:00

Well, I completed a first draft of updated Newham ICT Strategy, yesterday, but I’m anticipating a lot of feedback requiring more work on detail…

The Socitm Board of Directors met today. Steve skilfully chaired, keeping us to topic and time.

The budget is looking pretty healthy, with Consulting and Insight both performing well. There was a fair amount of discussion about the presentation of financial data (a bugbear of mine is that we don’t have commitment accounting, which would simplify analysis) financial regulations, and “banding” of reserves investment, which are to be resolved online.

Thankfully, now that the finances are looking to have stabilised, we can start to take the brakes off investment in much-needed resources.

Steve Hopson fed-back on member consultation he has undertaken on our behalf (all non-attributable) which reflected a fair amount of negativity about developments. Communications is clearly a continuing problem area, which was born-out by our own monitoring of whether broadcasts are opened or links are followed, which we’re able to monitor from the new CRM. We agreed the need for a properly crafted communications strategy (i.e. crafted by a communications expert – which ruled us out) and, probably, the creation of a Communications Manager post, but will be commissioning some professional work to shape these requirements.

Rose, who couldn’t make today’s meeting, is being asked, as Chair of the Membership Board, to tell us what resources are required to complete the work on professional development and member services. Adrian and Steve Hopson were authorised to agree a proposal for the latter to pick-up work on product development and sales, reporting to the Commercial Board.

Between us, we get a great many invitations to speak or participate in events, supply editorial or be interviewed. We need to co-ordinate these better, and Pam agreed, initially to undertake this role.

Mark Brett’s appointment as Head of Information Assurance was confirmed. We are asking Martin Ferguson (Head of Policy) to the next Board meeting to greet him, and discuss how we can help one another.

Adrian was authorised to conclude negotiations with GBTV and e-Learning to create a pilot “Socitm TV” and social media service.

Revised Socitm Director monitoring roles were agreed, covering Events, Information Assurance, Insight, Green IT, IST, Marketing, Membership, Professionalism, HR, Regions, International, Management, External Relations, Finance, Consulting, Commercial Oversight, Audit, Business Development, Third Sector and Social Responsibility.

Adrian and David Houston are half-way through updating Socitm Strategy.

We need to change our constitution to enable electronic voting at AGMs, which we agreed to do (at the October Conference EGM) and are considering its use, which may, or may not be in conjunction with a 2010 Spring event.

Frances Kettleday, last year’s Graham Williamson Award Winner, attended the Socitm Board to take-up her role as our new Board Advisor. She wrote a Blog of the Microsoft-sponsored Study Tour of Sweden, awarded as her prize, which she said, and obviously, was hugely enjoyable. Didn’t understand references to “Ice Queen”, ‘though!

Frances will write-up her thoughts about our meeting, and post them to our GovX space for discussion. She did, however, re-emphasise her views about the need to support personal development.

The Socitm President’s Blog, I am pleased to say, has now become the “Socitm Blog”. I had always intended for mine to be a team blog, and hope that the new incarnation will be well-supported.

Socitm is also on Twitter!

Finally, here’s another report of a report on how many see investment in IT as the way to weather, and survive beyond, the recession, which I certainly hope the new Newham ICT Strategy will facilitate.

Please don't put the kibosh on transformation

2009-05-19T18:57:00.001+01:00

The Cabinet Office published its annual Transformational Government Progress Report, last week. It has produced this useful poster to highlight examples of progress made in 2008. I do think that last year saw some real progress, but I am by no means convinced that progress is yet sustainable.

Government Connect finally delivered, thanks to very robust programme management, with strong support from Socitm and the LGA, and considerable goodwill from Local Authorities despite proscribed timescales being completely out of kilter with their budgetary planning constraints, and frequent problems of contradictory and inconsistent technical advice.

The Public Sector Network tantalises with the promise of genuinely transformative infrastructure to join-up the whole of the public sector, but I already have concerns about resourcing and whether the opportunity is realisable in the absence of clear vision and demonstrable commitment to provide the level of resourcing that’s required.

Although late, Contact Point is now operational, and good progress is being made with Employee Authentication Services, but had we started with a vision and strategy, I think we could have made things rather easier for ourselves.

Transformational Government strategy must be guided by an over-arching vision of public sector security, enabling role-based access to services across a single public sector infrastructure.

The other key lesson, I think, is – if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well and you must stick with it. I really like the idea of the “Dragon’s Den” approach to seeking innovation and ensuring good ideas are taken-forward. “Monitoring the situation to see that the plan maintains momentum and making sure it’s implemented on the frontline” is vital; the reality, to date, has been that there has been no commitment to nourish and sustain new ideas, and it seems Government bores quickly if radical results aren’t immediately delivered. Hence we have seen ideas like “Tell Us Once” hailed in the Transformational Government Report, and also cited as innovation in the Innovators Council announcement, recycled time and again in different guises.

Although Martin Read is worried whether there is the political will to carry-through the reforms proposed in the Operational Efficiency Programme report, also published last week, I worry that it will, and that will put the Kibosh on sustainable transformation of Government services. There’s a lot of common sense in the report but I do worry about the approach to execution of the recommendations. We can’t afford to be led by hype, assume that one size fits all, top slice budgets or realise all the savings without making the investments, or that will inevitably derail transformational government. The commitment by Socitm to engage with Government, to be “inside the camp” lobbying for effective policy is, I am convinced, the right one.

I was therefore pleased that Martin Ferguson, our new Head of Policy (although he doesn’t start formally until 1st June) led a session to start planning our response to the OEP at Monday’s Socitm Futures meeting held in Siemens offices in the Old Bailey. We split into pairs to discuss ideas, then captured them on a flip-chart back in plenary. I’ll provide a summary within the next few days.

Craig Pollard, of Siemens, presented on the NPIA (National Policing Improvement Agency) Identification and Access Management contract won by our hosts. The contract is effectively in two lots – the first providing the central service, and the second the access framework to appropriately connect all other stakeholders. There will be a single route to access any of the 20+ applications, which include the new Police National Database, ensuring that all access is fully audited. It will be possible to search across all the applications and, ultimately, across all local intelligence systems to provide aggregated results.

Colleagues’ main concerns and questions were around the fit with emerging national infrastructure and, of course, PSN. We were advised that it will work with other security infrastructure, but provide an additional authentication overlay to ensure it isn’t possible to bypass the central logging and auditing. We agreed this is something we need to keep an eye on; here, again, clarity is required within an overall Information Assurance vision.

Paul Davidson, from Sedgemoor District Council and LeGSB, presented the approach that Sedgemoor has taken to the development of an Information Asset Register (IAR). Few public sector organisations yet have anything that could reasonably described as an IAR, but it’s a logical requirement stemming from information reuse regulations and the Power of Information Taskforce as well, of course, as good housekeeping and the facilitation of corporate knowledge management – so well done to Sedgemoor for a very constructive and realistic approach.

Richard Quarrell from “Psiphon” attended and, in the afternoon, we discussed how “Psikey”- which is aimed at automating the production of a basic IAR – might work, and could align with the requirements identified by Paul. The planned pilot, by a number of Socitm member organisations, will take place over the next three weeks.

On Tuesday, Glyn Moody and Mark Taylor again visited to further our review of Newham’s ICT infrastructure with a view to proposing how the same can be achieved using non-proprietary technology. This time I’d arranged for Chris Losch to join us as my technical adviser. We spent a couple of hours in quite enjoyable discussion, and I have come to understand some of their points of view – not at all fanatical - but still doubt they’ll be able to convince me of realistic alternatives for Newham.

Not "nil points"...

2009-05-17T10:50:00.002+01:00

There were several good news tidbits to round-off my week.

On Thursday, I was at an IAEAB meeting (which I’m not allowed to report) and was heartened to find signs that the requirement of pan-Government security vision is starting to be recognised in high places.

It’s great that, finally, Alastair Darling has committed the government to bringing digital broadband communications to most communities in Britain. Coincidentally, further research was published, this week, demonstrating that computer technologies can help people move out of poverty. At the very least, we should ensure that ICT is equally accessible to all our communities, and not just another advantage for the affluent.

Well done to Kent Connects for becoming the first partnership to connect all its sites to Government Connect (especially as they will have had to bring the network monitoring that was undertaken from BT’s 24 hour facility in Sao Paulo back to the UK in order to do so).

When I was at GBTV, a few weeks back, the Executive Producer, Dominic Moran, proposed developing a customised programme for Socitm – Socitm TV. Adrian called me on Friday afternoon to let me know he has followed-up in a very positive meeting with Dominic and, subject to Board approval, we will soon be able to get the project up and running.

On Friday, Chris and I spent a lovely evening with Britta Karin and Gert Olson. Their daughter is Anna Karin Jönbrink, who I I first met in her home country, Sweden, where she presented on Green IT at the Kommits Conference. Anna was accompanied by Britta to New Zealand where she presented at the ALGIM event, Chris and Britta palled-up while Anna and I were working, so when Britta and her husband were planning a break in London, she got in-touch. New we’re looking forward to arranging a visit to their remote holiday cottage!

Well done to Newham’s own Jade Ewen. It was always going to be hard to win-over a Eurovision audience that voted Lordi a winner, but you did a great job, and you’re the champion in my eyes.

More Engagement, please...

2009-05-13T19:00:00.002+01:00

There are often complaints about late distribution of papers for meetings but, I’m sorry, Andrew - 1.00am for a meeting later in the morning takes the biscuit! :-)

The meeting, at Admiralty Arch, was the second meeting of the Public Sector Infrastructure Team (PSIT) Executive Board. I managed not to know I was on this select group, and missed the first meeting! The HMRC’s Andrew Bull chaired, and there were half a dozen colleagues from the NHS, Home Office, Ministry of Justice, OGC, Cabinet Office and myself.

In introducing the meeting, Andrew explained that the PSIT had some success over the last three years and had achieved good cross-government representation, with a network of participants who now knew one another and were able to work together but, over the last year, progress had been slow, with response to data losses and Public Sector Network plans taking most of its time. We need to involve more of our teams and to clarify components, descriptions, definitions, ensuring clear boundaries to facilitate procurement of commodity services that would make-up the evolving PSI..He had circulated draft terms of reference, which were broadly agreed and, I was pleased to see included “engaging in the creation of the vision and development of strategy that PSIT is responsible for”. We discussed this at some length, clarifying that, at the highest level, vision must be about the purpose and required outputs, and the criticality of role-based access though ID management and authentication to enable appropriate access to information held in purpose-built systems, obviating the need for file transfers.

I enlarged upon the Local Authority context – that although Councils are sovereign organisations, and not subject to Central Government decree on how they should organise and operate - through Socitm, we seek to assimilate Government policy and standards in areas such as security and information assurance, if we can substantiate that they represents best practice – but will do so only once. At present, there are different protocols for each department that we deal with.

We also discussed “Turkeys and Christmas” – that our success in driving greater efficiency through common infrastructure and standards would mean reduced requirements for the technical architecture roles that presently exist – but noted that there already are not enough good people to go ‘round, and our tasks include change management and people development – generating the capacity to exploit common infrastructure to support service transformation. That led to consideration of what other representation and skills, such as HR, we should bring onto the Board.

Public Sector Teams to be overseen by the PSIT Executive Board cover:
· Infrastructure
· Application
· Process
· Information
· Channel
· Strategy
· Service Management
· Integration
· Information Assurance

The Board is responsible to the Architecture Review Board (ARB) (see “Enterprise Architecture for UK Government”) and the CTO Council. Terms of reference for the ARB and, generically, for each domain team were also circulated.

The Infrastructure Maturity Model used by the NHS was posited as a basis against which to measure our progress.

Today’s meeting covered a lot of ground, which I won’t attempt to report in detail. There were concerns around resourcing, however – both the adequacy of resourcing key commitments, such as Ocean/ PSN, and of the engagement of public sector colleagues in the work that needs to be done. We discussed how to tackle these issues and regarding the latter, accepted direct responsibility for ensuring the engagement of both our peers and own teams in supporting PSI developments.

I think that our discussion of “G-Cloud” is also worth reporting. I am concerned that we need to develop the understanding and strategy for the development of what will essentially be a shared services infrastructure across the PSN, before colleagues, particularly in Local Government, commit themselves to generic Cloud services that will make it hard to comply with cross-Government architecture requirements. A report has been produced for the CTO Council, but is to be further refined.

Congratulations to Andrew Stott, who has been appointed as the Government’s first Head of Digital Engagement. I was told that his job as Deputy CIO was advertised yesterday, and also that a Government CTO position is being advertised, but couldn’t find them anywhere in the brief time I was prepared to spend searching.

In case you missed it, up to 800 frontline practitioners will start to use ContactPoint from next week.

Showing-off Newham Dockside

2009-05-12T19:04:00.001+01:00

On Monday I attended an Equality Impact Assessment Training course, in the City, with other colleagues from across Newham and Waltham Forest Councils. The main case study was on the EQIA conducted for Newham’s proposed Queens Market redevelopment.

This morning I hosted a party of visitors from Brent Council, which is planning its own development of new corporate accommodation, to Newham Dockside. It’s nice to be able to show-off such a nice working environment, and I felt rather proud of the ICT infrastructure, which was favourably commented upon by everyone we met on our tour. I’m learning a lot myself, too; especially from the questions I couldn’t answer, but concerning which promised to check upon and to respond by e-mail with the requested information!

Recession brings-out innovative CIOs, analysts claim. I certainly hope so, as I’m working on our updated strategy!

In a similar vein, I was also interested in this report of a report from Intellect, which I think is a positive move and certainly reflects some of the thinking I’ve heard from suppliers when I’ve been at Intellect for meetings.

ICS to be fixed!

2009-05-09T08:47:00.004+01:00

On Thursday, I took a day's holiday to attend Linda Griffith's funeral. It was "standing room only" at the moving service for this lovely lady who will be sadly missed by many, many people.

Newham colleagues who saw me in the office this week may be reassured to know that this wasn't a figment of your imagination! I'm now officially back with the Council, but taking a little time to get up-to-speed with developments, handover Socitm commitments, and use the luxury of some time to review strategy before I get back into the thick of things.

Problems with ICS to be fixed. Well - that's alright, then! But, really, this looks like very encouraging news.

George. Thanks for your comment. There is comprehensive information about the Microsoft Agreement at http://online.ogcbuyingsolutions.gov.uk/mou/softwarelicence/microsoft You need to be registered to access the commercially restricted information, but I believe that anyone with a valid public sector address can register.

The site includes a statement about maintaining competitive pricing There is a cost calculator to enable you to model your own package, and FAQs, which will, no doubt be updated with any, as yet, unasked questions. Among the questions is "Can I still buy packages in the old format? i.e. MS Desktop Pro." (Yes you can. However, we would encourage you to look at who you are purchasing products for and see if there is a more economic way of selecting your software.)

A New Deal for the Public Sector

2009-05-06T15:58:00.001+01:00

Hurrah! This afternoon, Andrew Gibson 'phoned, as he promised he would, to let me know that the new Public Sector Licensing Agreement with Microsoft had just been signed. I won't go into the details that I've been itching to report, here, as they will have been reported on the Buying Solutions, and other, websites, by tomorrow, when you read this, but I do want to make the point that I think this marks a step-change in collaborative UK public sector IT procurement.

The agreement incorporates a number of "firsts", including licence transferability within the wider public sector (i.e. including most of the voluntary sector) and more granular licensing. For the duration of the contract, if anyone gets a better price, we all get a better price.

Congratulations to the Buying Solutions Team - and also to Microsoft, which has now set the benchmark for future public sector deals with major software suppliers to Government. This is the first of these new deals, but negotiations with another major supplier have already started.

Yesterday, together with John Jackson, Camden’s Head of Corporate IT, I met Moira Gibb, the Camden CE who chairs the Social Care Task Force set-up by the Government post “Baby P”. The Task Force was set-up to look at the barriers faced by Social Workers that prevent them from doing their jobs properly. A review of IT systems, which Lord Laming said in his report hamper the progress of the Integrated Children’s System project, was prioritised, and it’s in that connection that John and I were consulted.

I think there’s little doubt that IT systems for Social Care are complicated – both to use and to maintain. As each new piece of Government legislation comes along, new facilities are bolted-on to comply with the new requirements. The systems, which are now far removed from what they started-out as, would ideally have been redeveloped from scratch, but issues such as time pressure, maintaining continuity of service and cost invariably mean suppliers (the few of them that specialise in this complicated market) try to adapt.

It seems that the complication is added to by the fact that, whereas Social Workers mainly work with family groups, the “Every Child Matters” agenda requires child-centred record keeping, and trying to fulfil both objectives entails extra documentation and duplication, and the feeling that too much time is spent filling forms, and too little looking after children.

My Hobby Horse – the need for a single pan-Government security infrastructure - is also relevant, particularly when dealing with disabilities or special needs requiring extensive multi-agency working. Here the DCSF development of EAS, linked to Government Connect is helpful but, again, if you wanted to start-out on the development of well-integrated, secure, effective and easy to use systems you wouldn’t start here – you’d start with a single comprehensive enabling infrastructure.

My own experience has been that Heads of IT have been slow to engage in understanding and meeting the requirements of ICS and CAF (the Common Assessment Framework). Social Services has been one of those services that tended to rely on in-business ICT support, rather than the corporate service, and this inevitably encouraged silo working. It’s an example of how CIO’s and Heads of Corporate ICT needed to pop their heads above the parapet to advise executive colleagues of the cross-cutting and integration issues based on their helicopter view of Authority’s services.

Lord Laming called for a feasibility study into a single national integrated Children’s System. Newham’s own Kim Bromley-Derry, President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, said such a move would backfire. "It is right that professionals should have quality recording systems and share information effectively. The integrated children's systems are not delivering for us. Some are working better than others. They are a barrier rather than an enabler to effective work - but experience of national IT systems is not good. The several years we would need for a national roll-out would repeat the teething problems of ICS locally but on a national scale."

I’m afraid I agree. We need a period of consolidation, to refine and effectively implement current initiatives, whilst working on a properly thought through strategy that enables tactical development, where appropriate, informed by an agreed vision, rather than knee-jerk tactics in the absence of a guiding strategy. The starting point is a comprehensive enabling infrastructure.

Plans for stress-testing Newham ICT Remote Access Portal, which can support 1,000 concurrent users and unlimited Outlook Web Access, ensuring that we are well-prepared for the impact on working arrangements of any 'flu' pandemic are well-advanced.

Julie Holden sent me the group photo taken at the IRRV function she hosted at Claridges on Red Nose Day, so I thought I'd post it here. Where's the waiter's red nose; that's what I want to know!

My Generation

2009-05-02T05:49:00.001+01:00

On Thursday evening I attended a BCS “Thought Leadership Dinner Debate”, on "IT Futures: the death of the IT Profession, as we know it?" - at the Royal Society, in Carlton Terrace. I argued “yes”; IT is a one generation thing that starts and ends with my own generation. How conceited is that?! IT is an artificial construct mixing a science and an art – engineering and information management – it’s really two professions. We talked about the tremendous rate of change, and made analogies with other professions, such as farming and medicine, which have all been driven by technology – but we don’t have a Faming Technology profession? In my sector – government – the emphasis is on information, but in manufacturing, say, it’s on engineering.

Not everyone agreed with me but, if they had, I may have argued something else!

Friday was a catch-up day, working at home.

Janet de Rochfort brought my attention to a piece of work being undertaken by the “Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology” on Technology for the Olympics, of which I was unaware. Many thanks, Janet. I’ve got in-touch with the Leading Adviser, and we’re arranging to meet.

I finished at 4.30, planted a tree that was delivered in the week, cut the grass, and had a beer in the evening sunshine; a nice way to start the holiday weekend.

Accredited

2009-04-30T23:53:00.002+01:00

Adrian and I met at Intellect’s offices with Vaughan Shayler, Gary McQuade and Leanne Johnson regarding the Accredit UK professional certification programme. “Accredit UK” is now a separate company within the NCC Group, with Vaughan as its Managing Director. Following our previous discussions, Socitm Consulting has designed a Consultancy module for the programme, and is bidding to develop others. Twenty-one of its consultants are training as assessors.

In effect, the Accredit UK programme provides an Operational Process Manual enabling a business to determine which areas of its operations it must focus on and which can be left to others. It was designed with smaller organisations in-mind, but is scalable, with an emphasis on continuous improvement. Existing customers, such as Richard Tubbs, of Netlink, have testified to the effectiveness of the approach.

We agreed Socitm would further work with Accredit UK in promotion through our Regions, arranging to explore, with Socitm Insight & Consulting, the potential for further developing our benchmarking products by building-in appropriate parts of the Accredit UK standard, and would facilitate engagement with the Local CIO Council, and Buying Solutions. We will also explore enrolment in the programme of Socitm member sites and premium partners, with a view to enabling endorsement from “personal” experience.

I met with Richard Paugh and Stuart Roberts of the CEO Board at their offices in Bloomsbury Square, and explained that Adrian is developing an output-based specification of requirements, to be ready in 2-3 weeks, which we will ask the CIO Board and others to respond to. In the meantime, we remain very interested in the CIO Board proposition, and discussed how this may work with the Local CIO Council, for the benefit of the Society generally, and its national events programme, and how it can be funded.

Back at base (Newham Dockside) I joined Geoff and Richard Carde for a meeting with Vince, from TfL and his colleague Matt Wright to discuss our NTC programme, the way we’ve approached office automation in Newham Dockside, PSMP, and opportunities for collaboration, including in procurement.

Becky Furnell and I discussed possible IT links to the Newham – Barnsley partnership, and we agreed to proceed with the suggested workshop to consider what synergies there may be in our IT programmes and infrastructure developments.

It’s great that Newham Dockside visitors, such as Glyn Moody, are impressed by our new offices (and quite a change from the previous position!) There’s no doubt that the accommodation is very nice indeed, but it is also far more efficient to maintain than the 27 premises it replaces, so represents a great deal for Newham’s communities, as well as its staff.

Glyn has rather misinterpreted my comparison of e-mail and instant messaging (or perhaps I didn’t explain it well). Instant messaging is a conversational medium, where as e-mail is “on the record”. Anything that’s on the record is subject to FOI, but that does not, for example, include the process of developing policy. We do not use IM to “sound off” – but for conversational exchanges and much of the power, as I tried to explain is in the availability of tele-presence information that lets you know a colleague’s availability and preferred means of communication. This is a huge boon, especially in remote working by enabling disparate teams to work effectively together.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

2009-04-29T23:41:00.002+01:00

Socitm's National Advisory Council, held today at Friends' House, in Euston, was an interesting affair, described by the Chair, at one point, as "like a Mad Hatter's Tea Party", with which I concur! That's not intended to be in any way derogatory, but reflects the enthusiasm with which the debate was joined.

The "meat" of the meeting was in discussing papers, presented by Adrian, positing a number of questions on membership structure.

I have to confess to some frustration at the number of times colleagues declared themselves uninformed (or words to that effect) about issues under discussion - as we have striven to keep all our membership up to speed with Society developments (as in this Blog, for example). I guess this situation is another demonstration of the reality we now have to face; our members are under intense pressure in their "day jobs" and it's only when you can get them away from the office to meetings like this that they're able to really engage in Socitm's business; then it's like letting the genie out of the bottle!

We agreed, however, proposals for roughly half of regional meeting content being provided through corporate policy themes, with the remainder representing local priorities. There was agreement, also, on proposals for moving towards a “Socitm Group” type of structure with divisions focussed on different membership interests, such as Web Management or Information Assurance.

The meeting was overwhelmingly in favour of maintaining "Socitm" as the master brand, but with a slight change of emphasis - the "Society of Information and Technology Management".

There was a view that most public sector employees are reluctant to pay their own Socitm membership fees because they know that their employers pay their managers' (true, I believe, in most cases) and, not unreasonably, expect the same treatment, even 'though they are happy to pay membership fees to other organisations, such as the BCS. This presents us with quite a challenge, especially in the belt tightening environment that now prevails, given our ambition to drive up membership, and it suggests we must prioritise development and implementation of our corporate membership scheme.

There was some discussion of Directors' portfolio responsibilities, which are currently being reviewed, and which Steve plans for us to discuss at our next board meeting. I was reminded of what I had wanted to raise at the last meeting, but forgot - that, given the pressures on members' time, we aspire to ensure they are supported by paid Socitm officers, when representing the Society in meetings, who ensure that agreed actions are taken-forward. Linked to this, nominated Directors should monitor our various representative activities to ensure effective engagement with Government & other key stakeholders, among their other portfolio responsibilities.

The day finished with a PSMP partners' meeting, held at the RICS Board Room at 12 Great George Street, which has a terrace overlooking Parliament Square to which, at the conclusion of our meeting, we adjourned for celebratory drinks in the evening sunshine. How the other half live, eh!

Finally, today, here is alarming news from Pinsent Masons – “Workers name their price for Company secrets” – which I guess is an increased problem in the present economic downturn.

Comparing Sauces

2009-04-28T21:55:00.002+01:00

The last of this Socitm (Past) President’s reports is here.

Frank Moyer and Mark Bailey of EzGov met me at Newham Dockside, this morning, to explain their “Virtual Government Assistant”. This is a natural language search assistant (Avatar) that has just been implemented on Tandridge Council’s site. (You need to enable pop-ups.) They reckon that this technology has been proven to reduce contact (via ‘phone, Contact Centre) by 10 to 30%, and will offer a SLA guaranteeing it covers its costs. I was interested on several counts – one of which is whether it could complement Socitm’s Customer Access Improvement Service.

Glyn Moody and I had our first meeting to plan our comparison of Newham’s Microsoft-centric infrastructure versus the same functionality and capability deliverable with “Open Source”-centric infrastructure. Glyn was accompanied by Mark Taylor, as his technical adviser. Mark specialises in advising clients on how they can exploit Open Source software in their infrastructure, and is a Socitm member, who was previously active in the Open Source Group that was set-up by Bob Griffith. (This was disbanded some time ago, but the topic remains on the Society’s radar, and is likely to be rekindled as and when we are able to prioritise resourcing further research.) I was supposed to have arranged my own technical adviser, but forgot, and he was at lunch when I needed him!

I overviewed our desktop environment, stressing flexible working, office automation and telepresence requirements, but needed the technical backup to get into the server set-up, where Glyn and Mark say Open Source really makes a difference versus proprietary infrastructure.

I think we agreed that the term “Open Source” isn’t particularly helpful, and is misused. The real issues are Open Standards and interoperability.

Today’s meeting, at least enabled us to meet and agree our broad goals (as above). Mark took some notes, and will copy them to us with the initial queries he has on our server configuration, and we’re arranging a fuller (probably half-day) meeting to develop the detailed specification against which we’ll benchmark, as soon as possible.

After lunch, I was at BERR’s One Victoria Street offices for an initial ALIP2 partnership meeting following our successful bid to the Technology Strategy Board. I blogged about this last October, when the bid was under preparation, and will provide fuller information in due course. For now, suffice to say that Newham is to lead the first work-package, which is to produce specifications of requirements and target pricing. The project is expected to start on 1st June.

Following which, I sat in BERR’s Reception for a Teleconference with other members of the Government Connect Benefits Realisation Fund Ratification Committee (if I correctly remember what we call ourselves!) We approved circa a dozen further bids, exhausting most of the funding pot. We are content that the bids funded will exploit the GC infrastructure, are replicable/ transferable and cover a lot of ground, with little duplication. There’s a possibility of one further, final, review to ensure we’ve covered all the bases.

Remembering Linda

2009-04-27T22:05:00.001+01:00

Congratulations to Martin Ferguson, who was appointed, today, as Socitm’s Head of Policy. Martin is a Past President of Socitm, and comes with a wealth of experience in public sector ICT management, at the IDeA, and as a consultant.

I worked at home, drafting my final monthly report, and completed a number of outstanding commitments for Socitm.

We heard, over the weekend, of the death of Linda Griffith, who died on Thursday evening, after a long battle with cancer. Linda and her husband, Bob, have been long-term Socitm stalwarts. She will be greatly missed. Steve has written to Bob, on behalf of us all, expressing our sadness.

Cream-Crackered

2009-04-26T18:56:00.003+01:00

Initial feedback from the Stoneleigh Conference was very good. Numbers were down a little on previous spring conferences (141 delegates, this year) but probably not surprising in the current economic environment.

The morning keynotes started with Tony Travers excellent (as ever), if depressing, economic analysis, followed by Richard Allan's reporting on the work of the Power of Information Task Force, which he chaired. I was unaware of "SatLav" - well done, Westminster!

Rose's thoughtful presentation on the Society's professional development and membership initiatives, and a call to action to us, as a profession, preceded the AGM, when Steve Palmer was confirmed as our new President. I felt quite moved by his tribute to my year - and I wish I could have recorded it for Chris's "scrap-book"! thanks, Steve; very much appreciated.

Peter Gallon, from Northumberland County Council was elected to fill the vacant Socitm Vice-Presidency.

During the lunch-break, Martin Greenwood, Doug Maclean and I met with Professor Andrew Martin, of Warwick Business School, who contacted me in connection with work he proposes on Information Architecture, and which it appeared could complement Socitm benchmarking activities. Martin will meet Andrew again in the near future to further consider the prospects.

Chris and I left the conference soon after lunch as we had a long drive up to Workington, Cumbria, for a meeting on Friday, and I already felt tired. In truth, I've felt absolutely kn*****ed for some weeks, now, and am hoping to negotiate a bit of a break, soon! We arrived at the Washington Central Hotel soon after 7.00 pm. This is a really nice hotel with superb service and great food but, as I discovered, in the middle of town close to a number of pubs. The noise long into the night from drunken yobs wasn't quite what I had expected in the Lake District!

On Friday morning I joined Cumbria's IT Managers at Allerdale House to discuss Socitm and how we can improve its support for and relationship with members in the regions. Cumbrian Authorities come under the Society's North-West Region, but tend not to have been much involved with its activities in recent years. They made me very welcome, and I felt that following our ninety minutes, or so, of discussion their awareness of Socitm activities was much improved, and there's every prospect of working much more effectively with them in the future. However, just as I've finished my year as President, this was a bit of a wake-up call for me on how much work we still have to do.

Chris and I planned to spend a short break in the area. After my meeting, we went for a walk, had lunch, then spent the rest of Friday dozing in our room until dinner! Then - spent most of Saturday driving home.

Richard's Last

2009-04-22T23:22:00.000+01:00

Well, this is my final post to the Socitm President’s Blog as the President. I will continue a public Blog at http://richardjsteel.blogspot.com/ and the ComputerWorldUK and CIO Magazine sites will also continue to carry my ramblings.

In my Stoneleigh conference opening address I’ll be remarking on a busy year, but looking ahead. We are investing in our future – with today’s appointment of a Head of Policy, planned appointments of a Head of Information Assurance, commercial developments, our rebranding, the launch of our new website, continued work with Government on key issues, such as secure public sector infrastructure, the launch, at the Society’s Edinburgh Conference, of our professional development programme and working more effectively with our Members through the regions.

I’m glad to take this final opportunity to acknowledge the tremendous support given by Socitm’s staff in Northampton, board colleagues, the Events Team, colleagues in Consulting, Insight and Boilerhouse and, of course, the Society’s membership – our lifeblood and reason for being.

My best wishes to the new President for a successful year in building and sustaining our influence on behalf of members. I look forward to continuing to work with the Team and to support, as Past President, and in whatever other capacity I’m able to!

Socitm's Patron

2009-04-21T23:08:00.000+01:00

I took a camera to Birmingham, intending to take photos at the Consulting event, but forgot, as I often do. Chris isn’t very happy, as she is making a scrap-book of my year as Socitm President, but I keep failing to provide her with material!

I remembered the camera as I skirted Parliament Square, today, for an information Assurance Events Advisory Board meeting at One Birdcage Walk, so took a picture of the continuing Tamil demonstration (but then thought better of publishing it!)

There is now a website for the UK’s Information Assurance Community, which includes events information, and a link to IA09, on 6th & 7th July. It’s hoped for a good attendance from Local Government, this year, and we already have two bookings – double last year’s number!

After the IAEAB meeting, I went on to The Adelphi, in John Adam Street, for an “Ocean & PSN Workshop”, chaired by Philip Littleavon, to plan a two day event to promote engagement with the Public Services Network developments by the Local Public Sector. We were joined by representatives of Buying Solutions, the DWP, Cabinet Office, and Vic Freir and Mark Brett on behalf of Socitm.

We decided the event will take place on 15th/ 16th September, probably at the School of Government, in Sunningdale, and target the Local CIO Council and its members’ Heads of Finance to ensure effective financial planning.

Whilst this won’t be a technical event, it’s important we are able to effectively articulate the Public Services Network rationale, and the Ocean Programme’s role. We’ll undertake further work in this regard, ahead of the event, and it’s important we use the opportunity for the local public sector to influence the PSN specification and requirements – especially in areas like flexible working and digital convergence. The work planned last Thursday, on pan-Government security vision, and a single Information Governance model for Government, will hopefully play into this work.

They’ll be a high-profile keynote address, and facilitated streams covering topics such as the Business Case, “Thorny Issues”, the Network and Security. The report-back from the Gartner Benchmark study of Government Connect value versus alternatives will (hopefully) support the case for investment.

You may remember that Lord Anthony St John of Bletso last year hosted a Socitm London Branch meeting at the House of Lords on behalf of 2e2 – our sponsor (and is again doing so, this year, on 7th May). This evening I met Lord Anthony with Terry Burt, 2e2’s Managing Director, and Andre Tytheridge, to discuss Socitm patronage. He entertained us to drinks in the Peers’ Guests Room and, I’m delighted to say, has agreed to become our first Patron! As Socitm’s Patron, Lord Anthony will promote our cause and introduce us to Ministers and Senior Civil Servants when the opportunities arise, when appropriate, will ask questions in the House on our behalf, and host occasional events in the House of Lords. He becomes an honorary member of the Society and will support and facilitate our developing Policy agenda and lobbying for effective Transformational Government Policy.

Lord Anthony is an enthusiastic supporter of ICT as an enabler of efficient Government, and of Community engagement through ICT and, until recently, chaired UK Citizens Online. I’m very grateful to our friends from 2e2 for the introduction.

Considering Consulting

2009-04-21T09:05:00.000+01:00

A major pile-up on the M1 delayed my arrival, on Sunday evening, to a Socitm Consulting Conference held at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Birmingham.

This was the first consultants’ get together in quite a while. Apart from the networking opportunity, the event was arranged to consider how the business will be taken forward in the future and, in particular:

To identify the strengths and weaknesses of the current model.
To identify options for the future ownership, management and governance of Consulting.
To begin to evaluate these options and arrive at a short list of those that should be considered further, with a view to reaching a decision later in 2009 as to the future direction of the business.

Adrian, David Houston and I attended from Socitm Limited, as we were keen to demonstrate our support and offer input on behalf of the Society. (Also, the Society co-funded the event!) A “core team” of 50ish consultants were invited to the event, most of whom (45) were able to attend. (Socitm Consulting has around 150 consultants in total.)

The evening started with a drinks reception, but we had to do some work to earn our Sunday dinner. Doug presented an overview of the business, and then each table was asked to consider what improvements in the Consulting operation were required and what worked well and certainly should not be changed. Communications came-in for some stick; it always does on such occasions! However, a number of opportunities for improvement were identified. We also discovered that some of our correspondence was being blocked in the spam filter of the 1&1 system used by some consultants, which is centrally managed! The things that consultants decided should not change were the Consulting brand, ethos and quality.

Monday was given over to a mixture of break-out sessions and feedbacks considering questions such as –

Who should own the business?
Who should direct the business?
How could we create a structure that Socitm can engage with on a long-term basis? (The current agreement is to a three-year contract.)
How should the consultant roles be structured?

Over the course of the day, the wish for a symbiotic relationship with Socitm was confirmed. A majority of consultants favoured participation in the ownership in the business, and a majority also favoured greater participation in the management of the business. Eighteen people volunteered to work with Doug and Vikki to develop how these objectives could be achieved. One of the issues for us both (Socitm and Socitm Consulting) to consider is whether/ how to raise capital to invest in growing the business.

A great many other issues were covered but, as I’m sure you can appreciate a lot of our discussion was “commercial in confidence”.

We finished just before 5.00 pm, and a small group of us went off in search of real ale, rather than join the throng at the hotel bar. We were taken to “The Wellington”, which for proper beer drinkers is an experience not to be missed! Then, back to the hotel for dinner and a competition between the tables for the most amusing tale of past experience. Chatham House rules, of course!

I was up at 4.30 am on Tuesday for the drive back to London, a quick catch-up and the day’s meetings.

If You Tweet it, They Will Come

2009-04-18T12:57:00.007+01:00

David Pogue found a good use for Twitter. http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/if-you-tweet-it-they-will-come/#more-911

I worked from home, on Friday, spending half my time on a report to the Mayor concerning the liquidation of Caboodle.

Further to yesterday’s post about the “.gov.uk Naming & Approvals Council”, the following graph gives a breakdown if applications received in the last 3+ years, and is followed by a breakdown of the reasons for rejection over the last 3 months.

Aiming for Rational Government!

2009-04-16T23:07:00.000+01:00

I was back at Russell Square House for my first appointment, today, in a Socitm Intellect LG Forum Management Committee – the first, I believe that I’ve been able to make as Socitm President, and definitely the last!

Potential Thought Leadership work was on the agenda. Carla had drawn-up a short paper, from the context of “as suppliers of technology, Intellect members are uniquely positioned to provide an expert view of how technology can be put to better use in order to contribute to the first-class provision of public services in local government” - to provoke our thoughts on issues such as “what will Local Government look like in 10 years?” There was consensus on some of the immediate issues, including public sector aggregated procurement/ asset reuse, the role of the CIO and pervasive & unified community infrastructure.

Among the planned future Forum themes are “E-Government 10 years on” (18th November). I volunteered Priya to present the conclusions from her MBA Thesis on the subject, which she has just embarked upon.

David Pullinger, the COI’s Head of Digital Policy, again attended the start of today’s .gov.uk Naming and Approvals Committee meeting at Hercules House to give us an update on progress and take any questions. He told us that just over 50%, nearly 700, of the websites that were planned to be closed now have been, with commitments to close another 355. The COI is now getting a good grip on .gov.uk, and controlling Government web presence more effectively. Committee members were thanked for their contribution to this important work. The Team was now starting to tackle other Government domains, such as NHS, MOD and Police.

David’s erudite response to my question about the raison d’être for our work, given the power of search (see my Idle Thoughts on 19th March) persuaded me that it is indeed worthwhile. Whilst accepting that search engines are becoming ever more sophisticated and accurate, our work on audience focus, editorial policy and manageability – typically material that’s transferred to DirectGov is reduced to a tenth of its original volume - facilitates reduced bureaucracy and the promotion of trust in government. Tests have shown that DirectGov is now achieving higher trust levels that names like Tesco and the BBC. I mentioned that among our biggest challenges are appeals about requested use of acronyms that cite precedents. Whilst accepting that this can create some consternation, David was clear that precedents don’t count. The Naming & Standards Guidance is now our bible to help achieve consistency and coherence. He often asks people in Government to explain their own acronyms – and they often fail!

David was also asked about policy on portals, such as “My….”. Work on these was being undertaken by the CTO Council, linked to ID Management, with a particular view to avoiding the need for multiple log-ons. There is a “Contact Council”, also, undertaking work in this area - on intermediaries.

The major discussion item for the Committee was a paper covering:

· The maintenance of .gov.uk domain names in perpetuity. A study in 2007 revealed that 60% of the URLs cited in Hansard are broken links leading to 404 errors or ‘Page not found’. To solve this problem, COI has recently introduced new guidance on managing URLs [1] (TG125) which requires central government departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies to maintain all Web domains in perpetuity. This is possible even after a website has closed by maintaining the domain name and implementing redirection to The National Archives. Any public facing websites are to become part of the national archive as part of the public record and, henceforth, all requests for central government cancellations will therefore be referred to the COI.

· All .gov.uk domains that do not comply with eligibility criteria are to be removed. We believe there are quite a few which may have resulted from an organisation’s change of status, or as a result of guidelines having changed or not having been adhered to in the past. Socitm was cited as an example, but there are others, such as http://www.4ps.gov.uk/ It was agreed that all current domain names will be reviewed for eligibility, and that JANET (originally “Joint Academic Network) which is responsible for the administration and registration of .gov.uk domain names, should refer to COI renewals where the continued existence is not obvious. Ninety days be allowed to enable redirects of disqualified websites to their new domains before the DNS (Domain Name System for mapping IP addresses to websites) is withdrawn.

· The current list of central government websites – used in the Website Rationalisation project – contains a sizeable proportion (~25%) of non-government domains (e.g. .org, .co.uk etc). There are also examples of government domains redirecting outside the .gov.uk domain. It was agreed to review the current list of .gov.uk domain names within 6 months, and to review the current website rationalisation list and, where sites are not already due to close, insist on them being reregistered on .gov.uk.

There are, apparently, 3,955 .gov.uk domains at present; 147 were due for renewal in April.

In the afternoon, I met with Paul Davidson (Director of LeGSB) Mark Brett and Adrian Hancock to discuss consolidation of Information Governance Models for Local Government – of which there are many! Paul listed the following, but there are others:

· The CESG Information Assurance Maturity Model
· The LeGSB Information Governance Toolkit.
· The Adult Social Care Information Governance Toolkit.
· The DWP MoU for access to CIS.
· The CoCo for GCSx.
· The Data Handling Guidelines.

We couldn’t see why we should need more than one across all of the public sector. Applicability would depend upon a User’s role in Government. This, of course, is linked to the requirement for an overarching vision for pan-Government security. At the present, our silo’d Government departments each reinvent its own requirements in ignorance of others’, and Local Government is expected to struggle to cope with them all. Not acceptable! We therefore determined to organise ourselves to campaign for a more rational approach that starts with the pan-Government security vision. This will include requirements for accreditation of secure network access right across Government.

Some other issues fell-out of this discussion – including articulation of requirements for organisational Information Asset Registers, which also facilitate requirements such as Rights Management and the several other related data management requirements (such as spatial data) which currently seem to have their own management bodies acting independently of one another.

An issue for Socitm was how can we ensure our member representatives to Government Quangos are effectively supported by paid officers who will ensure that actions and decisions made in meetings are taken-forward?

We agreed to plan a day in which the morning will be dedicated to developing earlier work on engaging wider public sector stakeholders in building and lobbying for sign-up to the required pan-Government vision, and a workshop, in the afternoon, will determine Information Asset Register, linked to Information Reuse, requirements. Recruitment of volunteers for a “Psikey” pilot will also be covered.

In the evening I joined Adrian and Rose for dinner with four of the short-listed applicants for the Socitm Head of Policy position. They are being interviewed, tomorrow, by a panel comprising Steve Palmer (incoming President) Rose Crozier (HR Director) and Adrian Hancock I(Managing Director). The fifth candidate is on holiday, and will be interviewed during the course of next week’s Socitm Spring National Conference.

On getting our own houses in order...

2009-04-15T23:49:00.000+01:00

Most of my day was spent at Russell Square House. Adrian and I met with Stuart Roberts and Richard Paugh of the Corporate Executive Board, in the morning, to consider options for partnership with its CIO Practice Area. In the afternoon, we met Spencer Green and Richard Owen from GDS International, considering possibilities for working with its MeettheBoss networking channel. Both meetings were follow-ups to earlier meetings I had with representatives of those organisations, with a view to potentially setting-up an executive stream within Socitm to facilitate ICT leadership and executive engagement, and ensure that we do not compromise the Society’s IT management legacy as we grow our support for the wider profession.

There were attractions in working with both organisations. The CIO Executive Board was particularly strong in executive insight, networking and analysis, whilst the MeettheBoss format uses Web 2.0 technologies effectively to support networking in a disparate environment. Adrian and Steve Jones have also had discussions with Learning Pool, in a wider Society context.

The next, critical, stage is to develop the financial and business models for consideration by Socitm’s Board and NAC.

Then, Mark Brett joined Adrian and me to discuss his role in conjunction with our forthcoming appointment of a Socitm Head of Policy. Mark’s work on Information Assurance has been invaluable for Socitm and, frankly, has been largely self-directed, and its worth has not been truly appreciated. (So far as we’re aware, Mark is currently our only CLAS Consultant.) Some of the activity Mark has undertaken for us will become part of the new appointee’s role, but Adrian and I were keen to take the opportunity to use Mark’s expertise to formalise effective resourcing of Information Assurance and Security policy and requirements through a Head of Information Assurance role - through which to further build our capabilities in this area. We therefore used the session to develop a better understanding of the IA/ Security scene, with a view to further developing proposals.

I’m not an avid follower of Sitemorse, but couldn’t help noticing the reference, in its recent newsletter, to the frequency with which some of the LGA’s recently proscribed words can be found on its own website! “A number of the banned words were found when looking at some of their website pages, worse offender being worklessness, which occurred nearly 100 times, other culprits included; spatial, framework, initiative.”

A Hectic Three Weeks...

2009-04-14T18:18:00.000+01:00

Today’s Socitm Board Meeting, at Camden Town Hall, was my last as President and Chair.
As always, the minutes will be published in due course, but some noteworthy items were:

· A revised base budget for 2009 was agreed, which provides for some investment from reserves to fully cover financial implications of expenditure agreed in resourcing policy and commercial development requirements.
· Adrian, David and I will be attending a Socitm Consulting Conference, at the beginning of next week, to get to know the Team, discuss further development of the business and share our plans, hopes and aspirations for the Society.
· Adrian presented a paper proposing organisational changes to support commercial and business development. This involved utilising Socitm Services Limited (SSL) which Socitm still owns but has been inactive, for all trading activities. SSL, as a company limited by shares, is the appropriate body for commercial developments, whilst membership services should continue to reside in Socitm Limited, which is limited by guarantee. We agreed that the Commercial Board should further develop the proposition.
· We also discussed the status of discussions on business partnerships. We agreed that we now have a good understanding of the ways in which we should work with business partners and that there is strong interest from a number of businesses in entering partnerships. The main concern, ‘though, was in ensuring that we are able to resource effective account management and ensure that we fully deliver the outcomes we commit to - a “chicken and egg” situation. We agreed to finance some additional work to develop that capability and generate the confidence to enter partnership opportunities as soon as possible.
· We also discussed our structure and branding to facilitate the different sectoral focuses that are evolving within Socitm, and the suggestion that there should be a “parent company” with sector-specific subsidiaries covering CITRA, web management etc. It was agreed that Adrian and I would develop the proposition, consulting Vicky on branding considerations (one of which is our transition to the .net domain).
· Sadly, the CMS development has further slipped, and I definitely won’t be able to present the “look and feel” at next week’s AGM, as I had hoped to! We agreed action to ensure the development is fully completed ahead of the annual conference, when we also aim to have completed structural proposals to support membership and professional development, which the CMS will be needed to support.
· There were a number of actions to be taken forward through a number of key meetings that are scheduled in the next three weeks – meeting of the National Advisory Council, the Membership and Commercial Boards and, of course, next week’s conference and AGM.

Aide Memoire

2009-04-10T11:01:00.000+01:00

You may remember that I’m an admirer of New York Times columnist, David Pogue. (In fact, now I thought of it, I’ve added a link to his Blog – “Pogue’s Posts”.) His most recent video is about a “memory tool” called “reQall”. I’ve got the world’s worst memory – especially when it comes to remembering things to do with my personal life that I need to do in the working day – make a Doctor/ Dentist appointment, book a car service, buy a present etc – so I’m giving ReQall a try.

Yesterday I met Richard Quarrell at the IOD Hub in New Broad Street, and discussed progress with the Psikey development. A new version of Psider (the tool to produce Pskey) is being produced by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at Southampton University, and will be available in a couple of weeks. The plan, then, is to test through the summer with a view to producing a production version in September. I’ll be meeting Paul Davidson and Ian Cooper, next week, and hope, with them, to identify prospective pilot sites. Richard will be at the Socitm National Spring Conference on 23rd April, which is where Richard Allan will be presenting on Government policy on reuse of information, and available to talk with interested parties about the project.

After lunch I went to 59 ½ Southwark Street for a Socitm/ Capital Ambition planning meeting, with Steve Pennant, Roland Waterhouse, David Tidey and Ray Whitehouse, for this year’s London Local Authority IT Benchmarking Survey. Many of the standard Socitm benchmark questions already align with the Authority-wide benchmark survey being developed by Capital Ambition (London’s RIEP), which is also developing a set of “Leading Practice Principles”. I suggested to Steve that CA looks at Socitm’s recent “What’s in a name?” report regarding suggested IT principles.

IT benchmarking is becoming more challenging in our converged and flexible world, and we recognised, also, the need to focus increasingly on benchmarking outcomes, rather than inputs. It was apparent that we can’t move very far in that direction this year, but agreed much of the work to be done for future years, and are looking at potential quick wins, this year, including whether we can include a Data Quality Survey based on the work led by Brent Council.

Since I’m very much concerned both with digital convergence and broadband wireless developments, this story, of Westminster City Council’s use of CCTV for traffic management, caught my interest, and will be interested to follow the outcome.

If you build it, they will come!

2009-04-08T18:23:00.000+01:00

There were still Tamil protesters on the green as I crossed Parliament Square for the third day running, this week, to attend another meeting chaired by Tim Allen at the LGA. We were to discuss marketing and communications, business processes, roles and responsibilities related to the role-out of the proposed public sector licensing agreement. Details are still embargoed, but Andrew Gibson of “Buying Solutions” (as the former OGC Buying Solutions is now to be known), who was there along with Nathan Morgan, promised to call me as soon as Nigel Smith (OGC Chief Executive) has signed the contract, when I’m free to Blog it!

Then to Steria’s offices at Holborn for a final Caboodle Board meeting - to agree the filing of the Company’s accounts, and to recommend to shareholders the winding-up of the Company.

In this week’s “Local Government IT in Use”, Michael Cross wonders why public sector organisations find it so hard to learn from each other - especially when it comes to the implementation of new technology. To quite a large extent I agree with him, although I do think the scene is changing fast - q.v. many of the developments that I’ve been blogging about this year, which are genuinely innovative, market moving and will finally give substance to all the hype around shared services. I’d like to think that Socitm can take some credit for encouraging and supporting these developments as a “critical friend” to Government, as we set-out to do a year ago. However, of greater significance, I believe is the new focus on public sector infrastructure that facilitates the deployment of new technology, such as flexible and mobile working (which is the example discussed in the article).

Building Accessible & Secure Local Applications

2009-04-07T23:26:00.000+01:00

James Lee and I met at Newham Dockside for a PSMP progress review. It’s planned to launch at the other four Olympic boroughs in July, and for the portal to simultaneously be made available in all other London boroughs, although local Council content will be dependent upon individual Authorities commissioning the requisite development work, if they want it. This can be procured from any developer, but if SNT Media Networks do the work, the cost will be capped at £38K. As well as TfL’s Local Journey Planner, new content will include “Report it” and Cinema Listings.
It’s also planned to provide localised data from DirectGov and the Job Centre Plus service.
A Stakeholder event has been arranged for 29th April, ahead of which James and I agreed to set-up a further strategy session to bring all three partners (SNT Media Networks, TfL and LB Newham) and their advisers up-to-speed with developments.

An EAS Board meeting was held today at the DfES offices in Great Smith Street. It was reported that the funding model for the wider service delivery model will be available within 6 weeks. Progress remains good with 62 MOUs for use in Contact Point now signed. Other “pipeline” applications/Service Providers include the DWP’s Customer Information System, the e-Common Assessment Framework, the Youth Justice Board, the Learning & Skills Council, the Qualification & Curriculum Authority, the DCMS (Olympic Boroughs) and DCLG Data Integration Hub.

Afterwards, I met with Anders Henrikson and a colleague from Verisec, who were visiting the UK from Sweden to promote the company’s “Authentication Appliance” which is one of the local authentication applications (others are from Microsoft and Thales) that can complement EAS, and is being implemented in Salford – the first EAS pilot site. Having negotiated the Tamil demonstration in Parliament Square, I met Anders in the St. Stephens Tavern, and we discussed how Socitm can help in promoting the Verisec solution.

ID cards and enhanced passports have moved a step closer with the announcement of supplier contracts. The CESG has today written to stakeholders suggesting an Identity Management Collaborative Working Group on 23rd April – the day of Socitm’s Spring National Conference. As the notice is rather short, I’m hoping that others will also be unable to attend, and an alternate date has to be found.

BT's Italian Job

2009-04-06T23:24:00.000+01:00

Richard Carde and I met with Sean Harney and colleagues from Orange to discuss collaboration linked to Newham’s Telecommunications programme, and 2012. We agreed to work together strategically, and will develop a Memorandum of Understanding, and Non-Disclosure Agreement, under which we’ll share information, our business case and seek to agree a common roadmap.

Tim Allen hosted a meeting at the LGA’s offices in Smith Square to discuss the Collaborative Government ICT Procurement Strategy being worked-on by the OGC at the behest of the Central CIO Council. Pippa Bass, Director of Procurement Efficiency at the OGC, and Chris Kynaston, who is managing the project, also attended. Chris circulated the paper developed for the CIOC ahead of our meeting, which was agreed as being, on the whole, a reasonable approach to tackling obvious efficiency requirements. Tim called the meeting to ensure that the wider Local Government community were appropriately consulted, and in order that organisations like the LGA and Socitm can lend appropriate support to the initiative. We agreed to set-up a time-limited team with representation from the LGA, Socitm, Local Government Delivery Council and IDeA to facilitate these requirements.

Concerning the paper, my main concern was that it doesn’t seem adequately to reflect the fact that efficient procurement isn’t just about the least cost, but must facilitate market moving developments – rather than encourage stifling of innovation by encouraging suppliers to bid old technology, sweating their sunk investment, but delaying deployment of technology to benefit the wider public sector and communities it supports.

The fibre outage in Stratford, which resulted from 2012 contractors cutting through BT’s main fibre in the area, didn’t affect Newham’s main network, but feeder services to some small / outlying sites were lost.

Consolidation in Government IT

2009-04-04T12:51:00.000+01:00

Somehow I missed this Guardian story on 1st April, but it still amused.

I’d be grateful for your support by completing this short survey on digital inclusion from David Clayden on behalf of Socitm & the CCitDG.

At Thursday’s Local CIO Council, a representative of OGC Buying Solutions was present to support my update on the proposed Public Sector Microsoft Licensing deal. The proposals were fully endorsed (and by the Central CIO Council, on Friday) and its hoped to make a public announcement soon, subject to finalisation of a few legal details and completion of the sign-off process.

Simon Norbury attended to agree proposals for benchmarking, by Gartner, of Government Connect infrastructure at four sites nominated by the LCIO Council versus previous intra-Government communications arrangements.

We broke into four groups to discuss the four business driver themes developed by Jos, Glyn, Mick and I – Public Service Efficiency and the Role of IT, Information Assurance and Information Management, Partnerships & Public Service Join-up, and Government Infrastructure Programmes – and were asked to decide if these were the right drivers, what were the underlying work stream requirements, and desired outcomes. You’ll see the results in the published minutes from the meeting but one required outcome was a CoCoCo – Common Code of Connection – which elicited suggestions of how this might become a CoCoCoCoCo – Comprehensively Co-ordinated Common Code of Connection etc, but most of the time we were very businesslike!

Roy Marshall gave an update from the DCLG, which he said has been ranked in the top quartile for IT, versus its peer group. Much of this concerned database rationalisation – not, it was stressed, for data sharing purposes, but for organisational efficiency. A Data Interchange Hub is at the heart of planned developments. There was some discussion, also, of the Operational Efficiency Programme, and expected radical IT cost savings requirements.

Kate Silver, Cabinet Office Transformational Government Lead on the Government IT Profession, attended to discuss how we should work together. The Government IT Profession is mandated for the Civil Service. Although the mandate doesn’t apply to the Local Public Sector, Socitm has joined “Partners in Professionalism” – the partnership of organisations involved in developing the profession, and Bernard Gudgin and Adrian Hancock have led for Socitm, to date. Rose and Kate arranged to meet to discuss how we should boost our engagement.

Andrew Stott spoke about plans to consolidate Government Data Centres, which together account for about a quarter of the Government’s £4 billion IT expenditure. Cost savings of 25-50% are thought to be realisable through consolidation, while delivering a better service.

The Group also agreed to review the recently published Government strategy on Open Source, for endorsement at our next meeting.

On Friday morning I teleconferenced with John Skinner and Chris Blenkhorn, from Cisco. Chris has produced an excellent “Connected Community Blueprint”, which Socitm would like to endorse. I had a few suggestions for a Section on building trust and describing security requirements, which Chris agreed to incorporate.

In the afternoon I attended Socitm South’s Committee Meeting, at Mole Valley DC offices in Dorking, to discuss support from the Centre, regional development, business partnerships and Socitm’s “USP”. Perhaps the key requirement to emerge was for centrally managed liaison with the regions - particularly with a view to effective events co-ordination.

We also discussed and agreed a stimulating agenda for the branch’s next meeting on 12th June but, unfortunately, I cannot attend as they’ve gone and booked it for 12th June, when I shall be in Le Mans!

April Fool's Apology

2009-04-01T23:44:00.000+01:00

I thought this article about the Conficker Worm quite interesting. "This is very professionally architected design and development."

There are now over 300 members of the Socitm Web Improvement & Usage Community of Practice. (Registration required.)

The FAQs I referred to yesterday have been published.

After working at home, today, I enjoyed a leisurely drive to Sunningdale Park for this evening’s CIO Council dinner, and tomorrow’s meeting.

I owe PC World an apology. They ‘phoned first thing this morning to say I had booked a delivery time-slot on Thursday morning – 2nd April. I checked my order acknowledgement and receipt before ‘phoning, last night, but they didn’t include the booked delivery time. However, on checking my PC World account after this morning’s call, it did indeed say I booked for tomorrow. Why I did this, I cannot say, but have had a lot on my mind lately! Luckily, my daughter Kim will be home to take delivery as, thanks to the G20 Summit, the University of East London building where she studies, will be closed tomorrow.

On Civil Service & Zero Service

2009-03-31T20:20:00.000+01:00

On Friday I was e-mailed a number of questions about Socitm’s constitution and operations, which necessitated my checking with colleagues on a few details that I wasn’t sure of myself. Jos Creese suggested we adopt a “FAQ approach” when responding to such queries, which other board colleagues readily agreed. We’ll therefore use those questions to start a new Section in the Governance & Management Section of the Society’s website (which should be there tomorrow) and build it up as new questions are received.

I recorded two interviews (on Broadband Britain and Green IT) at GBTV’s studio in Chiswick, this morning...

…and took part in a Whitehall & Westminster World Civil Service Roundtable on “how can online interest groups and social media be utilised to deliver better government services”. “Whitehall and Westminster World” is a fortnightly newspaper for civil servants and parliamentarians, linked to the “Civil Service Network”. An article on our deliberations will be published in the 19th May edition. I was pleased to have the opportunity of representing the local public sector in this important debate, held over lunch in the Atrium at 4 Millbank, and hope for many more such opportunities for our sector. Other attendees represented:

· The Power of Information Taskforce Secretariat, Cabinet Office.
· The Security Industry Authority.
· The Employment Tribunal.
· Transformational Government Communications, Central Office of Information.
· The Ministry of Justice.
· The Policy & Strategy Directorate, Department of Health.
· The Food Standards Agency.
· EzGov Europe (sponsored, I think).

This was an enjoyable discussion, with no epiphanies, but progress towards consensus on the key issues. I was concerned to establish the context, which includes Broadband Britain requirements, Unified Computing/ Network Convergence, creating trust in Government through an effective security infrastructure, and public understanding and management of the risks.

I understand that a list of links to useful resources is to be circulated but, in the meantime, here are one or two that I noted down.

· COI Guidance on Engaging through Social Media
· http://www.recovery.gov/
· Tom Watson’s Twittering.

At the weekend our family PC broke-down (again) needing a new Graphics Card (I think). I ordered one online from PC World on Sunday evening. It was in-stock and, at extra cost, I could arrange a delivery time-slot on Tuesday morning, when Chris would be home. So, I rushed home early this afternoon but, guess what? No Graphics Card. On ‘phoning Customer Services, I was told that the product hadn’t even been despatched to the Courier, yet, but they’d gladly refund the extra I’d paid for special delivery! Grrrrr – and people complain about public service! I’ve written requesting that PC World kindly expedites delivery – but I won’t have an opportunity, now, to fit the new card until the weekend. Sorry, family!

Broadband Britain & the Flight to Quality

2009-03-30T22:57:00.000+01:00

Today was my first working at Newham Dockside (formerly Building 1000) since the fit-out was completed, and I was mightily impressed!

I met with David Wright, a Newham-based Telecoms specialist, to discuss the “Integrated deal for broadband stimulus” that he has created, and garnered a lot of high level support for. The proposals aim to facilitate the achievement of Lord Carter’s Digital Britain Vision, with financing through “Broadband Bonds” supported by banks and government, with the public sector as the network aggregate anchor tenant. Socitm could play an important part in the proposed programme. We exchanged contacts and agreed to stay in-touch while continuing exploration of the opportunities.

Richard Carde, Geoff and I met to review progress in the Newham Telecoms Convergence programme. Sadly, our ambition for the development of a Data Centre for 2012 and other regional opportunities at Newham’s Bridge Road Depot no longer seems viable, and we cannot justify further work towards it, but the programme is otherwise shaping-up well, and Richard has really “got the bit between his teeth”!

Microsoft’s Helen Gilroy and Mike Haigh came to meet with me to discuss prospective business partnership with Socitm.

Harvard Management has published a list of common mistakes businesses make during a recession. They include cutting IT projects so, naturally, I thought it worth a mention here. The other side of the coin, however, is a report of IT professionals lacking ambition. I agree with both, to some extent, and believe they are consistent with the mantra Socitm has developed around focussing on effective business utilisation of IT infrastructure, rather than benchmarking in isolation, and in working closely with the executive to develop business efficiency through ICT.

Prioritising the Priorities

2009-03-27T18:11:00.000Z

My latest report to Socitm members was published today.

From Llandrindod Wells, I drove to Birmingham for a meeting in Glyn Evans’ office at Birmingham City Council’s impressive edifice in Victoria Square, and felt really important being let-in to park in the Council House’s courtyard!

Glyn, Mick Phythian (“The Great E-mancipator”), myself and Local CIO Council Chair, Jos Creese, had arranged today’s discussion in advance of next week’s Local CIO Council meeting to prioritise and structure the agenda for that and future meetings.

We agreed the CIO Council should (and can afford to) only focus on areas where we can make a real difference, and we pruned the proposed work programme accordingly. Our efforts will be grouped under the following broad areas (including mandatory projects where they do not readily fall under these themes):

· Efficiency
· Partnership
· Government infrastructure
· Information Assurance

In a number of areas, such as Green IT, we agreed to maintain a “watching brief”, although some aspects will certainly be addressed directly by work in the core themes. We agreed, also, to ensure effective linkage to key activities already being progressed elsewhere, such as the Data Quality work being led by Brent.

We recognised the need to align with the 35 Government projects that we understand have been identified by the DCLG, and with the Central CIO Council.

The other main point of discussion was resourcing, and CIO Council members’ roles as sponsors of the activities it instigates or are brought under its remit.

…And then home to work on that pesky backlog, although there is still several days’ worth as I knock-off to start my weekend.

Finally, this week, heart-felt thanks, and farewell, to Joye, who has been a brilliant Personal Assistant to Geoff and I, but, having taken voluntary redundancy, her last day working for Newham was today. Joye – I don’t know how I’m going to manage without you, but all the best for the future!

Have a good weekend.

Welsh Reminder

2009-03-26T20:52:00.000Z

Five years ago my TVR, of the time, broke-down during a weekend away in the Brecon Beacons, and Chris and I had to travel home with our car on the back of a trailer. This involved several hours’ wait for a truck to come from Cardiff, as the only locally available truck had already been hired for an earlier TVR break-down; so we arrived home in the wee small hours, with a considerably lightened wallet and, with an embarrassing clanking of chains to let the neighbours know we’d arrived, offloaded the car to our drive.

I was reminded of this as I drove, today, past the break-down spot on my way to the Socitm Wales meeting in Llandrindod Wells - Powys’ County Town.

The meeting was well-attended, with 19 of Wales’ 22 Local Authorities, and other public sector bodies, represented, and I was very impressed at the level of engagement and focus in a busy agenda.

I arrived during Mark Brett’s presentation on Information Assurance and Security, in which members agreed to set-up a Welsh Regional WARP (Warning, Advice & Reporting Point – see http://www.warp.gov.uk/ ) facilitated by Socitm.

In discussion following my Society “Sitrep” Wales was supportive of the direction of travel and agreed representation to the early summer workshop to formalise a federal structure and associated protocol and procedures.

I remained to the end of the meeting, and local agenda issues, and was particularly interested in the feedback from Socitm Wales Chair, Phil Evans, and Dave Hylands on PSBA (Public Sector Broadband Aggregation) in Wales, and subsequent discussion. Much of the discussion would have been confidential to the Group, but I’m sure they won’t mind my mentioning planned lobbying for Government maintenance of, and adherence to, the Universal Service Obligation.

And the Winner is....

2009-03-25T23:15:00.000Z

I attended the Employee Authentication Services Community of Interest Working Group at PA Consulting’s offices in Buckingham Palace Road.

Full details of the service have now been updated in the Web Authentication space at GovX, but an EAS site is being created as part of a new DCSF site for Local Government.

Cornwall, Leeds and Hants are involved in a Marketing and Communications Sub-Group. In his update, John Skipper reported encouraging engagement by Local Authorities, and the programme is generally ahead of plan. However, experience has shown that we cannot start too early on the process of accreditation. Alignment of processes from IT, HR and the business is a major factor.

In discussion, we agreed that an important part of the Communications plan is to highlight that EAS is a key part of the solution to issues raised in the Joseph Rowntree Trust report. (Not the problem!)

The DCSF will share its Project Plan for Registration Authorities, which are expected to number about 140.

The DWP is looking-at the opening-up of databases not already accessible by Local Government, such as fraud & debt management, based on use of EAS for access, and there is growing interest from other departments. Whilst William Barker, from the DCLG, rightly cautioned against over-promising and raising expectations that may not be filled in the short-term, I, as always, wanted to stress the opportunity of presenting pan-Government vision on security and Information Assurance, supported by key components like EAS.

Otherwise, there was much discussion of the economic business case. For larger authorities, say 500+ Users, they are clear, but aggregation, reuse and cost sharing will build-on the business case for smaller Authorities.

I went on to the London CIO Board meeting chaired by Phil Pavitt at TfL’s offices in Buckingham Palace Road. The main focus was on gaining buy-in to a London broadband vision (without complicating the message with too much technical detail!)

There were brief updates on all the work-streams, the most significant of which appeared to be an agreement for the Metropolitan Police and TfL to merge their networks creating a fully converged broadband infrastructure linking every borough.

In the evening, Paul Hackett (who assisted me with LGC Awards judging whilst I was on my New Zealand sojourn) attended the LGC Awards dinner, as guests of Northgate, at the Grosvenor Hotel in London’s Park Lane. Dara O’Brien compèred brilliantly. Got home late.

The Power of Regulation?

2009-03-24T23:04:00.000Z

Whilst Monday’s Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust’s report, “Database State”, has led to the suspension of the DfES’s Contact Point project, EURIM’s Philip Virgo has published an interesting and informative article on Governance Frameworks for Identity Management.

Whilst I can certainly appreciate the concerns about excessive intrusion into citizens’ lives, and am against both “control freakery” and the “Nanny State”, I believe that, in modern Society, the regulated collection of some personal data to enable public service improvement and combat fraud is necessary. There is already too much indiscriminate, and unregulated data collection in all sectors, so effective regulation is the key.

Socitm has consistently lobbied for pan-Government Vision shaping cohesive strategy on Security and Information Assurance that will enable appropriate role-based access to information, with identity management and authentication services at its heart. Perhaps the missing regulatory component is the licensing of public sector databases through the Information Commissioner’s office?

Direct House Swan Song

2009-03-24T07:41:00.000Z

The Socitm Events Group met, on Friday, at Bucks County Council’s offices in Aylesbury. David Membury, of CFDG (Charity Finance Directors’ Group) attended representing the Third Sector. We attended to final details for the Spring National Conference (23rd April) and started planning for the Edinburgh event in earnest.

On Monday I was at France Telecom’s UK Research Laboratories, at Chiswick, to find out about their GPRS Wrist Bands and Healthcare proposition in particular, and Orange’s approach to fixed-mobile convergence in general. Mark Johnson, Chief Executive of Medical Mobile, was in our meeting, as well as a number of Orange personnel.

I was impressed by Medical Mobile’s Vega Wrist Band for supporting people with cognitive disorders. It uses both GPS and GSM for positioning, has a wireless battery recharge facility and customisable screen, which can therefore include clock functions or display photos of carers, for example, is waterproof and has very good audio communications performance. It seamlessly switches between RF communications and GPRS to provide least cost/ optimal communications and power management. It’s clear that other applications, such as monitoring lone visitors/ cautionary contacts, could benefit from the technology.

There was also a demonstration of fixed/ mobile integration via Wi-Fi, and in presentations and discussion a broad range of opportunities for further discussion and follow-up were apparent.

Steve Jones and I met Wan Lik Lee, Managing Director of Azeus, at Intellect’s offices to discuss potential partnership.

I returned to Direct House for, probably, my last meeting there – Newham ICT is moving to “Newham Dockside” (the new name for Building 1000) this week. I met Steven Rumble and Peter Smithson from PriceWaterhouseCoopers Assurance Division to discuss the local public sector’s approach to Information Assurance. PWC delivered the Poynter Report into the Data Loss at HMRC and has developed an approach to assessing and managing Information Assurance that it’s keen to extend to the local public sector, and we discussed the potential for working together.

Idle Thoughts...

2009-03-19T17:44:00.000Z

When driving to the office, yesterday, listening to The DirectGov ads, and looking at the posters while in traffic jams, it occurred to me that the only time I’m conscious of ever having used DirectGov is when I’ve renewed car tax or TV licences, in which cases I’ve followed links directly, and it really hasn’t mattered where the services were located.

Invariably, if I want to find something I know isn’t in my bookmarks or browser cache, I Google it – and can never remember having landed-up on a DirectGov site (although I sometimes land on Council sites). The same applies to Council sites. I would never go to them directly. Although I may be looking for local Council information, I’d invariably search for the place-name and subject I’m interested in; I don’t care where I get the answer from.

I’m sure I can’t be alone in this?

Socitm Insight’s website take-up service says that 26.85% of hits come from Google (1.75% from DirectGov) and 45.91% from previous visits, inferring that, already, only about a quarter of the usage comes from people who go directly to a site to search for information.

As a member of the Government domain names board, it’s started me wondering whether there’s really any raison d’être for our work. It really doesn’t matter how many websites there are, or what they are called, if citizens can find and access the services they are looking for?

With the number of trade stories predicting that services will increasingly be delivered from the Cloud growing steadily, it behoves us to consider the secure, joined-up Government journey on which we’ve embarked. The development of Government Connect with identity and authentication services on a Public Sector Network across Government logically means that the Cloud services we use will also be on the PSN – the “G-Cloud”, which must have significant implications for most suppliers’ planned market approach. Hopefully, too, this will provide a key session at the planned Government Connect/ Ocean/PSN Conference.

Good to be Alive

2009-03-18T23:02:00.000Z

Having abandoned my coat, for the first time this year, on Monday, the weather today, in London, made for a “great to be alive” day, so I took every opportunity to walk in the sunshine between meetings!

Last week, Graham Kennedy, of Alexoria, caught the tail-end of my presentation at the Socitm/ Intellect Supplier Forum, and subsequently asked to interview me for research he’s undertaking on the role of ICT in a downturn. As Graham agreed to present the results to Socitm Futures, I gladly agreed and we met, this morning, back at the Intellect offices.

I went on to the Church House Conference Centre, in Westminster, for a Microsoft Agreement Project Board meeting. Subject to resolution of final negotiating points, details of the proposals should be made available to members of the CIO Councils, which next meet at the beginning of April, for approval and the commencement of the sign-off process.

Then on to the CIPFA IT Panel, near Charing Cross. I joined the meeting during an OGC Presentation of the Gateway Review process. The Panel agreed to promote the approach, and the service for Local Government run by 4ps, and invited Socitm to join with it in this endeavour. I agreed, subject to board approval, and thought that it would be good to bolster resources available through the involvement of Local Government ICT colleagues as peer reviewers.

Through the rest of the meeting there were a number of areas of prospective collaboration. The IT panel agreed to endorse Socitm Insight’s report - What’s in a name? The practicalities of being a public sector CIO – and also to join with us in the initiative we’re developing with SOLACE. There was an overview of CIPFA’s online information resource, which includes guidance on ICT Management, which I expressed interest in reviewing with a view to endorsement.

There was some discussion of future areas of work, which revolved around performance management, procurement and contract management, especially in the light of the economic situation and the possibility of increased out-sourcing. It appeared we should seriously consider establishing something akin to the highly successful Socitm/ CIPFA Competition Advisory Service that existed in the days of Compulsory Competitive Tendering.

My final meeting was with Adrian at the Charing Cross Hotel. We finalised the short-list for the Head of Policy role, and agreed to organise an interview panel for a day of interviews – hopefully Friday 17th April. We plan to invite short-listed candidates for a social dinner on the evening before to get to know one another. Provided these arrangements can be confirmed, we’ll be writing to all candidates with decisions/ arrangements by Friday.

Evolution of the Internet

2009-03-17T21:46:00.000Z

Here is an interesting article on an EU funded research project into the evolution of the Internet. “The first problem will be scale…” So – all the more reason to ensure universal coverage, now, by proper (fibre) broadband network, then. Whilst some Telecoms companies are achieving some impressive results in squeezing more and more capacity out of copper, once fibre’s universally available the wonders of photonics will enable us to ramp-up the capacity by many orders of magnitude for years to come.

The report provides, in my view, a compelling vision of how the Internet will develop – and, I expect, more quickly than most of us might think - and builds-on a theme in ICT development that’s becoming ever more embedded – one that anticipates technology evolution that mimics nature.

I met with David Clayden, Chair of the CCitDG, and a Socitm Director, at his office in the Elephant & Castle HQ of the Salvation Army. We discussed LOLA, its meeting in Glasgow on 28th/ 29th June, and third sector support for an international campaign on social justice facilitated by ICT. Unsurprisingly, a number of our Third Sector colleagues have their own first-hand experience of tackling social inequity and running charitable projects in third-world regions. We hope, finally to launch a programme through the LOLA meeting, and also to use it to help develop an international stream for Socitm’s conference in Edinburgh (11th to 13th October) which, this year, is designated among LOLA members as its members’ international conference for the year.

We also discussed the need to develop our understanding of the different challenges faced by the different (government and third) sectors that we represent, and agreed it would be worth investing some time in sharing our agendas with a view to agreeing common policy and an initial action plan. It seemed that this might best be achieved in a small workshop linked to a Socitm National Advisory Council meeting.

Missed the Excitement!

2009-03-16T23:05:00.000Z

Apparently, I missed Posh & Becks, and accompanying paparazzi pandemonium, who showed-up at Claridges sometime after I had left the IRRV President’s lunch, on Friday.

We’ve got 10 excellent candidates for the Socitm Head of Policy role. The Board is reviewing submissions, and Adrian and I will finalise the shortlist and the approach to interviewing on Wednesday.

This morning I attended the Information Assurance Events Advisory Board. This is held “in camera” but it’s planned to agree outcomes that can be announced, and possible publication of minutes, from future meetings.

In the afternoon, I met with Jenny Newton, UK & Ireland CEO for Bull Information System, and Paul McDonald, who heads-up Public Sector engagement, to discuss Socitm and potential business partnership.

Pushing the Limits

2009-03-13T17:58:00.000Z

Peter Ryder, Steve Palmer and I teleconferenced about LOLA. The next LOLA meeting is in Glasgow on the 28th & 29th June. Additionally, each year a LOLA Member Conference is designated an international event, and this year it will be Socitm’s annual conference to be held in Edinburgh on 11th to 13th October. Steve will be attending the LOLA Conference as Socitm President (subject to AGM confirmation, of course) and we hope to have a UK third-sector speaker, on social equity. I’m meeting David Clayden on Tuesday, next week, and this will be on my agenda. We are also aiming to create an international stream in the Edinburgh Conference – to be discussed at our Events Group meeting, next Friday.

Later in the morning I was involved in another Teleconference, organised by Philip Littleavon. This involved maybe 20 people – from Local Authorities, the DWP, OGC, Cabinet Office and Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Personally, I think it was stretching the capabilities of audio-conferencing a little, but it was nevertheless an excellent and positive discussion, which moves the prospect of pan-Government Information Assurance and Security Vision on considerably.

Philip is proposing a two-day conference on Ocean/ PSN (Public Sector Network) and common security infrastructure – extending the coverage of the Government Connect brand, which I wholeheartedly endorse, and was broadly supported by other participants in the discussion.

I had to duck-out of the discussion early, but I believe agreement will have been reached to develop the conference format and agenda electronically, and for a workshop then to agree upon objectives and detailed organisation. I’m glad to say that Local Government was well represented in the discussion, through Steve Palmer, Jos Creese, Dylan Roberts and Vic Freir, as well as me, and we all expressed willingness to play active parts in the planning and organisation.

I was invited to an IRRV (Institute of Revenues, Rating & Valuation) President’s Luncheon, along with about 20 other Society’s Presidents at Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s. Very nice – and no agenda other than to network and enjoy ourselves! In fact, I underestimated the time required for this activity, and had booked a 3.00 appointment back at Direct House, so had to leave early. Julie Holden, the IRRV President, also keeps a Blog, and will be publishing photos from the lunch - of us wearing our red noses! Needless to say, I’ll link them here.

My appointment was with a representative of OGC Buying Solutions, to discuss the latest pricing proposals from Microsoft but, of course, I’m not allowed to talk about them. Sorry!

I’m now off to a Morgan Grenfell IT staff reunion at “The Windmill” in Tabernacle Street, where we used to hang-out quite a lot, for a drink in memory of Alan Constable.

Have a good weekend.

Hold-on to your Boarding Pass!

2009-03-12T21:07:00.000Z

A significant part of today’s Socitm Board Meeting, held at Hillingdon Council offices in Uxbridge, was given over to the presentation of our Auditor’s annual report. 2008 saw a considerable reduction in Socitm’s cost of sales and administrative expenses; the outturn position now looks like a surplus of around £12,000; (following a deficit of around £325,000 in 2007) after writing off bad debt. Unsurprisingly, interest earned on our bank balance was lower than the previous year – down from around £50,000 to £32,000 – and we were advised that we need to manage our treasury better. In the current environment, we should be looking to maximise returns by long-term investment (of our cash reserves) in the money market. We noted that the Society again made an operating loss if we exclude interest received.

Christine presented, and we discussed, a good deal of other advice on diverse matters, such as redundancy policy, cash reserves policy, risk analysis procedures, the register of interests and fraud policy. Much of this was related to her update on the 2009 Companies Act, from which it’s clear that we must review our articles of association.

We learned that Socitm is due monies for work it undertook on an EU funded iSCAN project. Unfortunately, some expenditure cannot be reclaimed. As we had not kept the boarding pass for a flight made in connection with the project, although we had the invoice and receipt for the airfare, the EU refused payment – even ‘though the official refusing payment had met our representative at the airport, and could therefore personally vouch for the fact that the flight was undertaken!

Some other noteworthy items were:

We received, and agreed, a paper proposing the formation of a web professionals’ community within Socitm, developed following a workshop with Web Managers from across Government and the third sector and commended by the Membership Board.
We agreed that the expressions of interest for the London-based Policy role will be reviewed online and that Adrian and I will complete the recruitment process in accordance with the Board’s guidance. It was also clarified that this will initially be a 12 month contract.
We reviewed progress on the Business Partnership proposals. Following the issuance of a draft opportunity / value matrix, some very strong interest has been registered, and the Commercial Board was authorised to complete some initial partnerships.
Following the implementation of our new CRM, Socitm officers have been raving about the new facilities and functionality that’s now available. The CMS is now being prioritised.
Around 70 bookings for the Spring National Conference have now been received (excluding those involved in running the conference). We are aiming for at least double that number of delegates, and about to commence marketing proper, using the CRM functionality that’s now available to send an electronic “flyer” to members.
We are rescheduling all board meetings to improve the timing and business process flow. With a few exceptions, this year, the Membership Board will be on the second Wednesday of each month, the Commercial Board will be on the third Wednesday and main board meetings will be on last Wednesdays.

Further information will be in this month’s President’s Report, due by the end of next week.

Public Sector IT in a Downturn

2009-03-11T23:49:00.000Z

This morning I attended the Intellect-Socitm Supplier Forum, held at Intellect’s offices on Russell Square. The session examined the main issues facing local government and how the current economic climate will impact the the local public sector market market in 2009.

What role/potential is there for IT to have a positive impact for local authorities in 2009 and how do we identify and promote these potential areas?
How are the current and proposed plans for 2009 affected by the tough financial situation facing local authorities? I.e. given the current financial constraints will local authorities continue to focus on implementing personalised/citizen centric services and joined-up networks such as EAS and PSN etc

Steve Palmer and I presented our views. Between us, I think we covered a lot of ground in sessions that complemented one another. I emphasised shared infrastructure, whereas Steve majored on new service models and issues such as licensing. The Forum is run under Chatham House rules, but if there’s a version of the minutes that can be published outside the Forum’s membership, I’ll signpost it here.

Steve, Adrian, who also attended the Supplier Forum, and I hurried on to a Socitm Membership Board meeting at Camden Town Hall.

We reviewed progress in the development of core membership principles. Some are becoming well-embedded, such as “one member, one vote”. Others are “work in progress”. An interim measure was to reserve eligibility for election to the Presidential Team to serving IT Heads in Local Government. We discussed how to introduce more egalitarian eligibility criteria. A suggestion was for one based on having achieved a minimum number of years’ continuous membership of the Society – five, say. If such a criterion were agreed, it could be announced for implementation (say) five years hence. We aim to finalise core principles by October (Conference time) and will be further consulting members in the meantime.

I think I may previously have mentioned my intention to consult all regional chairs on their requirements for support of regional activities from corporate Socitm? Following a steer from today’s meeting, I’ll also be discussing the Society’s value proposition, and content of a proposed corporate membership package.

At our next meeting it’s planned to discuss work completed on these issues, and feedback, with a view to how to prioritise and deliver the agreed objectives – what’s realistic and practical, and by when.

We also agreed work to be undertaken on a Communications Plan – What, How, To Whom, When etc, and agreed feedback on a Government consultation on “fair access to professions” and a PARN (Professional Associations Research Network) consultation on Societies’ developmental and membership requirements in the next 10 years!

Two Steps Back?

2009-03-10T23:29:00.000Z

On Monday I missed the Socitm Futures meeting, as I took leave for my Father-in-Law’s funeral. However, Adrian told me that the meeting was excellent, and Martin Ferguson played a crucial role in facilitating a very productive session. I’ll aim to feature this in the next President’s report.

I spent Tuesday on a return trip to Barnsley, where I met with the Council’s European and Regional Strategy Officer, and the Head of Information Strategy, to discuss the Digital South Yorkshire Partnership (covering Barnsley, Sheffield, Rotherham and Doncaster) and potential synergies with Newham’s Telecommunications Convergence programme. Last October a Sporting and Cultural Development Partnership was launched between Barnsley Metropolitan Council and the London Borough of Newham, which provided the context for our productive meeting. We agreed outline proposals for the establishment of a formal liaison mechanism for sharing information and experiences, potential joint development/ technology transfer/ asset reuse, and strategy development, which would be in both our interests.

Among the positive initiatives supporting greater joining up and co-operation between the Central and Local public sectors, last year, was the appointment of Kevin Hayes to lead Central-Local Government liaison on Information Assurance matters, so I was surprised and disappointed to hear from Kevin, yesterday, that early termination of this role had been decided. I’ve replied to Kevin, protesting the decision, which is short-sighted and comes at a time when we are just starting to see the fruits of Kevin’s work in a dawning realisation of the importance of pan-Government Security and Information Assurance policy and infrastructure. I fear that the early discontinuance of this role – at a time when there’s intense pressure on everyone to deliver efficiency savings, will be seized on as a further opportunity to pare back activities to a minimum - setting us right back where we started.

Inaction is not an option.

2009-03-06T22:19:00.000Z

In continuing consideration of ICT and the recession, two further articles caught my eye. Alcatel-Lucent CEO, Ben Verwaayen, spoke of the unique opportunity we have to reshape companies and processes and build a new digitally enabled future. A shift towards all-IP networks and software as a service lies at the heart of this new world order, he said. At the same (Alcatel-Lucent 2009 Enterprise) event Gartner's senior VP of research, Peter Sondergaard, said inaction is not an option in the current economic climate - and any business putting its head in the sand waiting for the storm to blow over will simply "suffocate". Meantime, Computing’s Martin Courtney worries, as I do, about what’s holding up IPv6. I really do think now’s the time to focus on really exploiting ICT for efficiency, to ensure we don’t lose ground on transformational government (just as we’re moving beyond hype and lip-service to actual joining-up) and to facilitate and sustain community cohesion through to the recovery.

Shane and I, together with Steria’s Legal Director, consulted a Barrister at his Lincoln’s Inn Chambers on matters related to Caboodle’s winding-up.

The Socitm London Committee met in the afternoon. I attended a pre-meeting with Geoff and a few other Members to consider how the region should develop to encompass the Society’s new remit, including aspects such as organisation, agenda and recruitment.

2e2 will be sponsoring the next regional meeting, at the House of Lords, as they did a year ago. Then, they presented on “Generation Y”; this time they aim to update and develop that theme to what they are calling “Enterprise 2.0”. Technology supporting the modern Councillor will also be on the agenda, along with “Connected London”. There will also be third sector input on senior citizen engagement.

We also discussed Capital Ambition plans for benchmarking using the Socitm service, but with a workshop to further develop an outcome based specification of requirements. i.e. Benchmarking business utilisation of ICT.

Steve Pennant advised us that the London 101 project has been cancelled, but the out-of-hours service has now gone live in a number of boroughs.

What's in a name?

2009-03-05T23:03:00.000Z

A new Socitm Insight report - What’s in a name? The practicalities of being a public sector CIO – is published today. I’m pleased to commend the report, which further develops our push for a more confident, assertive ICT profession that challenges our businesses to use ICT services and infrastructure effectively.

It’s increasingly apparent that some of our regions are struggling to resource the organisation and management of their local events. The Socitm Board will be discussing this, next week, with a view to agreeing what support can be offered from the centre. In the remaining weeks of my Presidency I’m also aiming to meet with regional chairs to gain direct feedback on ways in which the Society can better support them.

Glyn Moody accepted my invitation, last Friday, to meet. He actually accepted it on Monday, but I didn’t realise because his invitation went into my junk e-mail. Unintended, I promise! Glyn says that’s OK because, as a journalist, he is used to being filed under “junk”! We’re arranging to meet and will keep you briefed.

Taking a long, hard look at ourselves!

2009-03-04T23:26:00.000Z

Shey Cobley hosted a Socitm workshop, at Oxford Town Hall, to consider how the Society can more effectively support the broader objectives it set itself in the remit agreed at October’s EGM – “to be the professional association for all people working in ICT and related disciplines in the public and third sectors…” - particularly young professionals. Adrian Hancock, David Houston, Bernard Gudgin, Steve Jones, David Clayden and I, were assisted by Shey (Oxford City Council) Frances Kettleday (Cambridgeshire) Alex Birtwell (Hyndburn BC) and also Vicky Sargent and Elaine Davis.

Our failure to engage effectively, to date, was exemplified, this week when, following the publication of the latest “Better Connected” report, for the most part, the newly changed username and password for the Socitm Insight pages were not passed on by Socitm Lead Members to the very people who needed them – the web professionals.

We covered quite a lot of ground, in a very productive meeting, but two clear priorities were in establishing mentoring facilities for members – both peer mentoring and mentoring by more experienced people – and supporting professional development. The latter is being worked-on through our Membership Board but, today’s discussion served to reinforce the urgency of this work. Other issues, such as the way we welcome and support new members, were linked to these requirements.

A lot of the discussion was of facilitating the involvement of younger and less senior professionals who, generally, don’t have the same access to budget or time to attend formal meetings. Also, why is it that their managers always get to don dinner-suits to attend formal events to receive the awards their staff have earned?! This also chimed with senior management/ executive perceptions (misperceptions) and assumptions of what’s involved in roles (such as web development), which also embraced some apparently sexist attitudes.

We need to look again at some of the data Socitm has about its own events and services. Is the attendance at our events as representative of the people we want to attract as we think it is, and are the conclusions we draw from surveys well-founded, or are outcomes skewed because of undue influence of the “Old Guard”?

We also covered communications – viral marketing, topics/ workshops – time-limited panels to brainstorm and move-on rather than arrangements “set in stone”, personal responsibility/ motivation for career development and other issues including, of course, the need to make better use of the web/ technology.

Full notes of the meeting will be circulated among meeting participants, with suggested actions arising, and we are aiming to develop a detailed action plan for agreement at the next National Advisory Council, which is on 29th April. A “quick win” should be in establishing member mentoring facilities.

As always, I’ll be glad to receive any suggestions and comments.

Cull or Cure

2009-03-03T18:20:00.000Z

At next week’s Intellect-Socitm Local Government Supplier Form, I’m presenting a session on public sector use of ICT in the current economic climate. Patrick Smith, from IBM, is presenting the view from the private sector. So I’ve done a fair bit of reading of others’ views in preparation. It’s becoming ever clearer that the recession in the UK is going to be deep and prolonged, as Steve Bundred’s article in Friday’s Times made clear. All the same, I’m not at all convinced that Gartner’s suggested response is the right one. Reliability, now, is everything; minor disruption and outages cause disproportionate loss of productivity and, worse still, adversely impact confidence at a time when ICT should be relied upon to enable greater business efficiency. I think Socitm’s recently published Technology Trends report stands-up very well, although it was completed before the “Credit Crunch” had really taken hold. Anyhow, I’ll look forward to reporting the conclusions of next week’s meeting.

Apart from a few hours out to attend the funeral of a not long retired former Newham ICT colleague, I’ve had my head down, mostly in preparing for upcoming meetings, for the last two days. It doesn’t sound like much, I admit, but still my head’s spinning – so I’m off to get some fresh air!

Courting Controversy...

2009-02-27T16:54:00.000Z

Oh dear. I’m getting myself into all sorts of bother following my Blog entry on “Open Sauce”!

Before I go further, I should make clear, perhaps belatedly, that I am stating my personal opinion, which does not in any way represent Socitm policy.

A lot of the comments I receive are semi-literate, anonymous insults, which are easily dismissed and likely to do their authors more harm than they do me - although I do try to find the time to provide reasoned responses. However, when someone who is clearly intelligent, is prepared to be identified and stands behind well-reasoned arguments, I really have to take notice.

…And if someone as intelligent as Glyn Moody doesn’t understand that I’m trying to poke fun at myself in a blog entry entitled “Open Sauce”, as in having the cheek to challenge some of the assertions around so called Open Source, then I accept that’s down to me trying to be too clever by half. I am, ‘though, disappointed that he should think I “have such distaste for the concept that (I) can’t bring (myself) even to write the words without sanitising them between quotation marks”. Actually, I think some of Glyn’s respondents have caught the sense of what I was trying to say by suggesting other terms, such as “free software”, or “software freedom”.

I do stand by my comment that what many people mean is “anything but Microsoft” and I’m sure that Glyn, in his heart of hearts, knows that there are a lot of people who see Microsoft as the devil incarnate, and “Open Source” as a catch-all to describe the battle for redemption! Yes – I know that the term “Open Source” is clearly defined, but it’s constantly misused, and that’s the point. I also think Glyn makes my point for me when talking about “you license it, just like you license proprietary software”. (I know your, packaged, licensed Open Source-derived software includes a spell-checker, Glyn, but you missed the typo - propretary!!) As he points-out, Microsoft itself uses Open Source, but my view is that once you’ve turned-it into a commercial product, the term is no longer appropriate.

However, when it comes to my assertion that “Open Source software development… lags proprietary development”, I have to put my hands-up; fair cop! I did kind of pre-qualify my remarks by implying I was cream-crackered as I made them, ‘though. Those who know me know that I push myself very hard – perhaps too hard - and I probably should have taken more time for a better considered response.

I can’t argue with Glyn’s examples of innovation based-upon Open Source, so my statement was clearly wrong (as I also admitted to ZDNet, today) but I do know that there’ve been occasions when I’ve wanted products that Open Source software products did not support. The Tablet PC is one that comes to mind, although I’m sure it’s now supported; (I haven’t checked lately.) This tele-presence thing is quite important, in my view. It makes so much difference for teams or groups of people working in disparate locations and work-styles. It’s really great for real-time collaboration.

Anyway, we could argue over this for ever more. What I propose is that Glyn and I meet-up and I’ll take Glyn through the requirements I have, as a CIO, for ICT infrastructure to support an organisation like Newham Council. I’ll be completely open about the products we use, the costs and the benefits achieved, which he’ll be able to see for himself. Glyn, then, can take me through how I could achieve as much at the same or a lesser cost using “Open Source” products, and we’ll both publish the results.

I’ll freely admit that I’m no technician, so I will need a technical expert to support me, and of course agree that Glyn can be similarly supported. If you are up for it, Glyn, give me a call on Monday, and we’ll agree a date for our first meeting.

I worked from home, today, and, when I wasn’t responding to Blog comments, spent several hours in ‘phone calls on Socitm affairs, using ICT as an efficiency-enabler in the depression and executive partnership, and of course in dealing with correspondence.

Have a great weekend.

Getting more joined-up

2009-02-26T23:22:00.000Z

This morning’s Socitm London branch meeting was held at the Mermaid Conference Centre, at Blackfriars. I was pleased to see great support from central Government colleagues - with updates from OGC Buying Solutions on the Microsoft UK Public Sector Licensing project, the DWP on Government Connect and DCSF on Employee Authentication Services. Geoff Connell (now Chair of the London branch – keep it in the “family”!) gave a short update on the Public Sector Mobile Portal http://mynewham.mobi (designed for viewing on your ‘phone) and I gave my Socitm update. The meeting finished with a great presentation from Ian Brooks of HP, today’s sponsor, “Innovation - from chip to chiller and beyond”, followed by lunch. Presentations will be on the Socitm website.

After lunch, I attended an EAS Board Meeting at the Sanctuary Buildings in Westminster. The main discussion was of the implementation strategy, different options for establishing the Registration Authority and the Operating Model. The fact that it’s accepted that EAS will now support multiple applications - initially Contact Point, then access to the DWP Customer Information System for benefits processing, then others - undoubtedly complicates the programme, not least from financial and delivery perspectives, but it’s great that we are now confronting these issues; discussion of pan-Government security is gaining traction.

Although John Skipper, in his update to the London Socitm meeting, said that remote access through the GC infrastructure will not initially be supported by EAS, we were told that remote access trials are being undertaken.

It appears that this year’s T-Government report will be delayed, which brings additional opportunities to ensure that the pan-Government security vision is developed for that report.

Open Sauce...

2009-02-25T22:44:00.000Z

I’d planned to spend yesterday and today at the CMA Conference, held at The Congress Centre in Great Russell Street but, for a variety of reasons, didn’t get there until today’s morning coffee break.

There was some work to do on weightings and tolerances for the Microsoft software procurement and in reviewing bids for the GC Benefits Realisation fund, besides which my correspondence backlog had gone over a week again.

Geoff, Richard and I met with Newham’s Head of Procurement to discuss and agree our procurement approach for the NTC network commercialisation. We decided upon a negotiated competition, in preparation for which we’ll develop our market analysis, finalise technical options and advertise for proposals to meet desired outcomes based on sale of lease of network.

At one point yesterday, I found myself talking on the ‘phone to Adrian, who was in a storage room at Socitm’s Northampton offices, surrounded by mounds of reports, minutes and other documentation dating back, probably, to the formation of the Society. Clearly, another project looms; we’ll need to sort-out retention policies and Electronic Document Records management for the Society, but it also occurred to us that we need an Archivist to document Socitm’s history, before disposing of everything.

After having popped-in to a Newham colleague’s Farewell drinks do in Stratford, I went on to The Chemistry Club, at Sartoria. Francis Maude was the speaker.

Today (Wednesday) morning, the oft-postponed GC Benefits Realisation Fund Assessment Teleconference was held. The IDeA did an excellent job in reviewing and documenting the bids, of which there were 193, for our consideration. Six were agreed, unaltered, for funding, and a further four were agreed, but at less than was applied for. It was agreed that a further twelve required further information & evaluation. Forty-six of the bids were for the Libra project (for youth offending – “topped and tailed” for different YOTs). It was also agreed the IDeA should discuss some funding, probably of a pilot.

The Wednesday morning CMA Conference networking break was followed by a session entitled “Real Strategies for “Hyper Connectivity”. I felt like I’d entered a time-warp. It seemed to me that speakers wanted to hold back the tide; there was a reluctance to recognise that convergence is here; the words said “sweat your assets”, but I was pretty sure they meant “help us to continue to milk our sunk investments, rather than deploying the infrastructure you really need”; technical solutions to managing limited bandwidth to stop users gobbling it for Internet radio were advised, rather than recognising the fundamental cultural and management shift required for anytime, anywhere working enabled by Unified Communications.

Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, spoke a good deal of sense, and clearly knew his subject. I liked his analogy of the Internet as the digital equivalent of previous trade routes. He did, however, cause some consternation by saying, as part of the answer to a question, that “Nortel had withdrawn as a first tier 2012 sponsor”. After lunch and, I imagine, some feverish checking, it was clarified that this most certainly was not the case!

The session following lunch – “The future… moves changes and opportunities” – was as refreshing as the one before lunch was depressing. Mark Blowers, from Butler Group, did a commendably succinct introduction to the session, comparing our development of network infrastructure to the Winchester Building.

Bob Falconer, CEO of Gamma Telecom, talked about systemic problems in the industry – over-promising, under-delivering, costs of change, back-loaded costs etc, and suggested an alternative approach to procurement, and his company’s white label service.

Stuart Hill, Vice President and Director of BT’s London 2012 delivery programme, gave a truly inspiring presentation about BT’s approach, as the Tier One Telecoms Sponsor. “Reliability ahead of heroes”, “Treat every amber as red”.

Kevin Russell, CEO of “3” Mobile highlighted some of the absurdities in mobile data regulation and pricing, and illustrated the major daily evening peak in mobile data traffic that’s apparently down to home use.

You may have seen today’s announcement of new Government Policy on Open Source software. A number of journalists have been enquiring after my views!

Well, I’ve had a couple of long days so these aren’t fully thought-through, but my more-or-less “off the cuff” reactions are:

Open Standards are definitely required.

I don’t like the term “Open Source”. It’s misleading; what many people mean is “anything but Microsoft”; few businesses actually use open source directly – they buy software derived from open source that has been commercially packaged and sold with support, which, in practice, is little different to licensed software.

Nevertheless, competition is great for keeping suppliers focussed on delivering customer value, and “Open Source” has certainly played its part.

All the same, software is only one part of the Total Cost of Ownership equation; don’t consider it in isolation, but as part of the full TCO and lifecycle costs.

“Open Source” software development, in my experience, lags proprietary development by several years. I don’t think we could achieve the anytime, anywhere fixed and mobile infrastructure with tele-presence we require, now, for flexible and new ways of working using only Open Source.

I agree with reuse, and it’s a very significant factor in the Microsoft Public Sector software licensing project I’m involved in (and not allowed to talk about).

If it works for you – fine. I wouldn’t rule-out so-called “Open Source”; Newham has used it for some applications since the time it did its deal with Microsoft (probably the first UK public sector procurement of Microsoft as a supplier) and continues to do so.

Of Commerce & the Credit Crunch

2009-02-23T22:55:00.000Z

Socitm’s Commercial Board met today. Its terms of reference will be published, this week, in the Members’ area of the website, but we agreed that minutes of meetings will not be published. Although we are absolutely committed to the greatest possible transparency in the conduct of the Society’s business, I’m sure you can appreciate that, by its very nature, much of the Commercial Board’s business is bound to be commercially sensitive. Nevertheless, I’ll continue to provide high level reports here.

We discussed a number of aspects of the Socitm Insight Service. Negotiation of the contractual relationship and a performance management regime are at an advanced stage. Martin tabled a short paper concerning the need to review the strategic direction of the service over the next few years, and we’ve agreed to work on this ahead of the next meeting.

A particular discussion point concerned the development of the Supplier Index, and we saw opportunities to link to Government procurement initiatives and build closer links with the RIEPs. There’ll be a workshop to develop this particular development.

Socitm Insight is arranging forums in London (8th April) and Manchester (19th April) to consider IT’s role and response to the credit crunch. The morning will be for suppliers and the afternoon for public sector members.

We also considered a proposal from Elaine, which resulted from the recent meeting with Adrian and I. As I mentioned, last week, this focuses on “quick fixes”. The meeting was supportive, and agreed the proposal subject to a couple of issues of detail, which Adrian was empowered to conclude.

The Weekend Beckons

2009-02-20T17:09:00.000Z

Adrian and I met yesterday (Thursday) with Elaine at Intellect’s Russell Square offices to discuss Socitm commercial development, marketing, branding and our image/ proposition. She took us through a range of “quick fix” issues, such as management of the core brand, marketing and membership collateral, sales training, weekly bulletins, corporate service bundles and web updating, tidy-up and clarity. Our discussion was hugely enjoyable, and I felt not a little encouraged. We agreed that Elaine will write-up the agreed proposals to take to Monday’s Commercial Board.

Today (Friday) I’ve finished the latest President’s Report, drafted an article for a feature in www.parliamentarybrief.com , skimmed through a draft of Better Connected 2009 and done a bit of work on potential business partnerships in preparation for Monday’s Commercial Board. I’m also more or less up-to-date with correspondence.

Have a good weekend.

Not a Laughing Matter

2009-02-18T18:15:00.000Z

I can’t talk about today’s Microsoft Project Board Workshop on weightings and tolerances, so I’ll mention the announcement of agreement between Red Hat and Microsoft to build better interoperability and to provide co-ordinated technical support for customers, instead. This sounds-like good news, to me. It doesn’t mention Open Source, although, open source software that’s packaged and supported by a vendor is frequently referred to us such. It will be interesting to see the response.

The other story to catch my eye, today, was this one about “application anarchy that eats bandwidth”. My personal view has always been that such stories have much to do with general management; wasting time with ICT is no different from wasting time gazing out of the window, reading your horoscope, or chatting at the water fountain. However, now it’s also about fundamental advances in our use of ICT, which has become pervasive, is core business for everyone and reliant on an appropriate culture of shared understanding and responsibility. Although the author of this survey has a vested interest in raising awareness of potential problems that his organisation can help to address – “the technology is available from us and….” – he is quite right to point-out that the world has moved on, and that’s something we all need to recognise.

I asked a management colleague for his view, and concur with his assertion that “whilst many (requirements) relate to specific security technology, a great deal of the organisation’s information security is dependent on clear Human Resources policy and processes, and their effective implementation and enforcement. ICT is an integral part of almost everyone’s ‘day-job’ and everyone must take responsibility, and be accountable for their part in securing the organisation’s information. It’s essential that policies and processes are clear, well communicated, and understood by all”.

“No CoCo. No housing benefit data. No joke.” says the headline, “especially if you are a citizen dependent on a housing benefit service”, it might have added - and, whilst Authorities prevented from accessing the DWP’s CIS system, won’t be able to process benefits, neither will the DWP be able to collect their benefit data and do its job, so they’ll both look silly. It’s better by far that we recognise our shared responsibility to make Government Connect a success. Most Local Authorities have done a magnificent job in working to achieve CoCo compliance in the last six months, despite a poorly planned initial programme that followed years of repeated false starts and fruitless activity.

Socitm is following-up the communications it has received about problems experienced, but we urge any Authorities that have not yet reported their status to do so – to anna.smith3@dwp.gsi.gov.uk (even if already advised to the Account Manager) - without delay. Codes of Connection should be submitted to GCtech.team@dwp.gsi.gov.uk, (even if already given to the Account Manager).

Information is Power... (Francis Bacon)

2009-02-17T18:48:00.000Z

Richard Quarrell and I met, as planned, to discuss “Psiphon”. I think this project could be very important, but we need to do some testing and assessment to establish that’s the case. The idea is to automate the creation of organisations’ Information Asset Registers, facilitating reuse of information and supporting the creation of a market for public information. If this can be got off the ground now, it will be very timely since, as previously reported, the “Power of Information” Taskforce report is being published in the spring, and Richard Allan will be speaking on this at the Socitm National Conference on 23rd April.

I agreed that Socitm would help to recruit volunteers to form a Reference Group, which Newham is prepared to Chair, to help refine the design and testing requirements.

On Tuesday, I spoke in the “Transformation & the Role of Technology” stream, chaired by Steve Palmer, at Osney Media’s Public Sector Transformation Summit at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, Hyde Park. Glyn Evans followed me, and we both joined a panel with other speakers to round off the morning programme.

Unfortunately, the three of us missed the Plenary sessions because we were meeting, in the Hotel Lobby, with Adrian Hancock and John Serle, to ensure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet concerning the ways in which the National Advisory Council (chaired by John) and Socitm Futures (chaired by Glyn) work together, and their respective remits. I’ll say a little more about this in the President’s Report that I’m currently working on. However, it has been agreed that the March 9th Socitm Futures meeting will be a Workshop to review the top two Policy Priorities – Information Management / Assurance/ Resilience, and pan-Government Security Vision – with the aim of agreeing objectives, methodology, outputs/ products and the delivery plan for each. Martin Ferguson has agreed to facilitate.

Mike Simons, the Editor of ComputerWorldUK, sent me a note containing this link, which he thought I’d be interested in. I have to confess that this story about the proposed “Coroners and Justice Bill” had passed me by, but I am now not only interested, but quite alarmed at what seems to be being proposed. The BCS seems to have done a good job in producing an emphatic response, which I believe Socitm would want to support.

There is a commentary on the bill, which proposes major amendments to the Data Protection Act, and may override any other existing legislation that impedes its intention, at http://www.amberhawk.com/uploads/datasharing%20explain_website.pdf Of course, there will be other views and perspectives that I’ll gladly reflect here, but this does seem a subject that deserves our attention.

One Small Step...

2009-02-13T18:10:00.000Z

The PSF’s Ian Cuddy told me he’s had a letter from the Cabinet Office saying that the Central CIO and CTO Council meetings are going, henceforth, to publish the minutes of their meetings. Great stuff and cheering news following experience reported earlier this week! PSF started a bit of a campaign for transparency, last month, citing Socitm’s stewardship of the Local CIO Council as an exemplar.

Today’s scheduled Government Connect Benefits Realisation Awards Ratification Committee was again postponed.

Philip Littleavon wrote, today, to GC Board members acknowledging that “there has been a fair amount of discussion and concern about the recent batch of letters to local authorities”. As he and Paul Howarth (Head of the DWP Housing Strategy Division) now see it, key issues going forward are:

“Paul & I to agree and communicate a clear documented message with respect to the DWP data access policy defining what authorities should do if they feel they will not achieve compliance by 31 March. Also to describe the position if compliance is achieved by 31 March, but the live configuration process extends beyond this date.
“It is now unlikely further bulk communications will be necessary, but GC will look to work closely with the LGA / Socitm / IDeA to help with authorities we perceive to be at risk or not engaging sufficiently well. It is important that all discussions are closely coordinated with Anna Smith to ensure clarity and coordination.”

The main theme in response to Socitm’s broadcast asking for evidence of inappropriate support from GC was of contradictions between advice provided by the Account Managers and the content of the letters. Authorities have considered the Account Managers their main points of contact, and assumed any information provided to them was shared with the team and that, on the other hand, the Account Managers spoke for the Team, and their advice could be relied upon. This doesn’t seem unreasonable; otherwise why set-up accounts management arrangements? I hope, therefore, that Philip is communicating these messages to his Account Support people.

Have a good weekend.

Investing in our future...

2009-02-12T23:21:00.000Z

Key discussion at today’s Socitm Board meeting, held at Camden Town Hall, concerned our need to invest in additional resources. This was prefaced by consideration of an interim report on the level of financial reserves that the Society should retain. The reserves provide a buffer to ensure the Society can remain solvent and affect an orderly winding-up in case of adversity. This is a bit of a simplification but a very cautious approach would be to retain sufficient cash to enable service delivery for a year with no income, and an orderly winding-up of business. We took the view that a sensible risk posture would be to provide for 6 months’ operation, recognising that a sudden and complete cessation of income would be quite unlikely.

The main investment proposals are in appointing a Commercial & Business Development Director (working title) and a London-based Head of Policy. The former role is to manage business partnerships and oversight of commercial operations, generating revenue for member services and, therefore, more than self-funding. Directors approved, in principle. The final decision will be made by the Commercial Board on 23rd February. The Policy role is required to maintain and develop dialogue with key stakeholders (especially in Government) and to facilitate appropriate policy development through Socitm Futures. This will cover some of the role that I’ve been undertaking, as I return to my “day job”. Directors approved the policy role initially on a contract basis, with a review after six months, and accepted that this could be funded by reserves, with an expectation that funding would be provided by commercial income in the longer term. Although the Board recognises that much of the Society’s work will be undertaken by paid resources, it re-emphasised its need for active support from serving ICT professionals, whose experience cannot be substituted.

Other financial considerations, today, were in reviewing and formalising current public relations, marketing and sales support – remaining areas where we don’t have up-to-date contracts.

Other noteworthy items of discussion were:

The problems with our financial management system (Iris) have been overcome. It’s now integrated with the new CRM, and is just going fully “live”.
The focus, now, is in getting the new CMS operational. In order to secure early benefits the initial process, now, will be “migration, rather than transformation”.
We are implementing a recommendation from our recent Director Training course – a register of hospitality/ gifts received.
For the first time, our annual accounts will include a detailed annual report, which is nearing completion.
The National Spring Conference is shaping-up well. The AGM report will feature developments in Member Services.
The Member Services Board would like the NAC to form a Reference Group of volunteers to consider membership applications, appeals etc.

I hope to publish the next President’s Report by the end of next week.

Planning IA09

2009-02-11T22:04:00.000Z

I've removed the notes of my attendance at an IAEAB (Information Assurance Events Advisory Board) meeting, at the request of the Chair. He advised that the content is privileged information. I am very sorry for any embarrassment caused, but was not advised of its confidentiality, and none of the documentation discussed was marked as confidential.

I'm bemused at this development, which I hope to meet with the Chair to discuss. I believe I have a duty as a Socitm representative to report my activities on its behalf (and that as a CIO I have similar responsibilities as a public servant). Whilst there will always be occasions when we cannot divulge information that may compromise requirements such as commercial discussions or security, I did not think that any of these applied. On the other hand, it was clear that there is a real need to engender appreciation of and active support for effective Government Information Assurance.

2009-02-11T08:12:00.000Z

A few updates from me. Last week I spoke on behalf of the Society at the Transformational Government event in Westminster. It was very well attended considering the weather and I used the opportunity to talk about avoidable contact as well as a number of "CIO role" issues. Plugs for Socitm's Channel Value Benchmarking and Professionalism work duly achieved!

On Tuesday of this week I met Philip Littleavon and Simon Norbury and, although I haven't yet discussed how/who/when with Richard, I want to make sure that we don't lose focus or momentum on this. I know that locally where I work we were a bit upset by the tone of some contact from GC but we see the worth of finally getting everyone linked as a start to building the linkages across the public sector that can help enable the transformation agenda. The Society will, amongst other roles, continue to be a "critical friend" to the programme but it is in all of our longer term interests to make this happen. There is no doubt that Philip and Simon want Socitm to succeed and our discussions were both positive and constructive.

The GC work also raises an important issue for us as a Society however. In every area where we want to have influence it is important to show to others the Society's worth in being involved at the earliest stages of policy and initiatives development. For too long we have been on the back foot and commenting on other people's (particularly central government) ideas and proposals rather than being in there help shaping them in ways that we can work with and that make sense locally. Your Board will be considering how we make sure this happens. I know that GC doesn't apply to many of our members but early engagement regardless of where we are geographically located and who our local, regional or national government is has to be worth pursuing vigorously.

Work is also progressing on the detail and logistics of the 1 day national event on 23rd April. It will be a good day and we have secured Tony Travers and former MP Richard Allan as two of our headline "acts". With a mix of case studies and major strategic issues it will be both informative and participative and I urge members to support it. On the day we will also be holding the Society's AGM including any necessary elections. Be there, have your say and use your vote.

Socitm Board is tomorrow as I write this but next Tuesday gives me my opportunity to "get my own back". I'm chairing a worksstream at an event that features its first 2 speakers as our own Richard Steel and Glyn Evans.

Steve P

Connections

2009-02-10T21:16:00.000Z

On Monday I chaired a sickness absence Hearing at Newham Town Hall, following which I returned home to work.

Three news articles interested me because of the different perceptions of ICT they reflect. Whilst there’s a view that flexible working enabled by ICT proved its worth in last week’s winter storms and resultant transport disruption, and a majority of public sector employees believe that ICT can help drive down costs, CIOs believe that businesses are ignoring the potential benefits of high-performance networks, and (because?) they have only a middling influence on business strategy. Together, these represent a fair summary of the state of our art, in my view, and draw attention to the key areas in which we need to develop our skills.

Socitm has now received a number of responses to its broadcast about the Government Connect letters that were recently sent to many Authorities concerning CoCo compliance progress. Thanks to all respondents. Some have expressed anger and frustration - which we will be discussing with the team - and one plaudit, was received. Additionally, Philip Littleavon (Programme Director) has replied to a note of mine as follows. (Reproduced with Philip’s permission.)

“We have had a mixed response to the last (Jan 30) letter, but not all (or majority) bad. Roughly 130 responses received out of about 180 requested. Of those that responded about 15 could be categorised as "very disappointed.." and we've said sorry where appropriate, but all of these authorities are doing quite well. The majority were OK and we have had a few plaudits as well. Within the 130 there are a handful that are clearly at risk of not achieving compliance on time.

“Whilst accepting that a few feathers have been ruffled and that we clearly got some facts wrong (eg., some lost responses to the 21 November mailing) the process has moved us on enormously. The acceleration in progress we have experienced is incredible. Currently receiving c. 40 CoCo updates per day!

“We are still collating and analysing, but I have concerns in a couple of areas.

1. Those that did not respond (c.50)
2. Those that did not respond to the previous mailing (c.11). These (on paper) have made least progress.

“We will need to keep working on these Councils until a clear statement emerges. Of course we risk more annoyance.”

We will respond to all the Authorities that contacted us letting them know what action is taken.

On Tuesday, with James Lee and Ian Tomson-Smith of SNT Consulting, Richard Carde and I had back-to-back meetings with Orange and TfL.

We met Bob Pisolkar, Orange’s Public Sector Divisional Business Manager, and Sean Harney, Business Development Manager, to discuss engagement in related areas that include a technology roadmap workshop, commercialisation and market intelligence.

Vince Tooke, from TfL joined us to discuss PSMP project progress and how we address issues such as Programme Governance, Marketing and PR, development priorities and exemplification of a standard business case. We also reviewed related work on the network infrastructure and Data Centre.

A Daytrip to Belfast

2009-02-08T10:39:00.000Z

It seemed strange, on a wintry Friday morning, parking at Gatwick’s “Summer Special Parking” for my flight to Belfast to attend the Socitm Northern Ireland Regional Meeting, but, at £5.50 for the day, it offered the cheapest deal.

I arrived at the Park Avenue Hotel, the event venue, in time for the morning coffee break. There was a good turn-out in spite of the inclement weather.

The agenda mostly concerned utilising Web 2.0 technologies. Dave Newman, from Queen’s University, presented on its e-consultation research project. I can’t quite remember how he got to it, but the presentation included this YouTube video of a busy junction, probably in India, which excited a lot of interest!

Caron Alexander, the N. Ireland Chair, had already circulated the Socitm Position Statement, which I again plugged in a short update.

After lunch, I stayed for the Committee’s meeting, and we discussed the proposal for a federal society. There were some concerns about the ability to maintain local relevance whilst supporting Socitm UK core themes, but colleagues supported the proposal and agreed to participate in a UK workshop to develop the detail.

Directgov Innovation

2009-02-05T20:08:00.000Z

As part of her latest MBA assignment, my colleague, Priya, is conducting a survey, which aims to evaluate and compare the online shopping experiences of Ocado, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. If you can help-out, please click here to participate. Thanks from us both in anticipation of your support!

I met Ben Rowland of Tribal (formerly RSe) for a catch-up at his office near Tottenham Court Road. There are some potential areas of collaboration, and we’ll be meeting again in May to consider further – by when I hope we’ll be in a better position to resource any agreed action.

Technology and telecare could transform dementia services. A trial is planned in NeAT.

There is a “Directgov Innovate” site with a “School Closures Alpha Demonstrator” at http://schoolclosures.org.uk/ to help answer quickly and simply which schools are open - in times of inclement weather, for example. (It’s closed for maintenance, as I write, ‘though.) I've added feeds from the site in the right column of this Blog.

Better late than never?

2009-02-04T21:15:00.000Z

We have finally published the Socitm Position Statement. I’m sorry it’s 10 days later than I said it would be. Memo to self – under promise, over deliver! I’ve written directly to Regional Chairs with the Statement, asking that it be communicated to all members, and it will also be featured in the upcoming monthly Socitm Newsletter. This just underlines the fact that we think it’s an important communication, and we are very keen to receive your feedback – good or bad.

Today was a scheduled home-working day, which has turned-out to be a very long one. External e-mail was delayed in the day, giving me the chance to get on with some other work – mainly planning for upcoming meetings – but then correspondence, some urgent, started arriving through the evening. Some concerned Government Connect, and further letters being sent by the Programme Office, which I knew were planned, as I explained in this Blog on Friday. Given the latest correspondence, ‘though, we will be writing to members in a Socitm broadcast, tomorrow, along the following lines.

Socitm accepts that the history of GC has not been ideal from a local government perspective and that had earlier advice from our members been taken we could have progressed far more efficiently. However we also acknowledge that, recently, many significant steps have been taken to ensure that GC is the best sustainable solution to meet the needs of local and central government and we are therefore supporting the GC team in implementing the solution as swiftly as possible. A number of our members have contacted us and commented on the tone of some recent correspondence from Government Connect. Our understanding is that GC has acted responsibly and that authorities, who have responded to requests for information, requested assistance and/or given legitimate reasons for missing deadlines have been offered appropriate levels of support. If this is not the case and any of our members can effectively demonstrate that it has not been we will happily, upon receipt of evidence, take this up as a matter of urgency with the GC Director.

Unlocking the Power of Local Information

2009-02-03T23:50:00.000Z

Once I’d freed my car from the snow and ice, my journey into the office, today, was wonderfully quick. Most of the outside of the A2 was still unusable, but the traffic was light. I can’t remember ever before driving into London without encountering a single queue!

Adrian Hancock and Elaine Davis met me at Direct House for a session on Business Partnership planning, and Steve Jones joined by audio-conference. Elaine and her husband flew-into Gatwick, yesterday, and will be in the UK for the next six weeks, during which time she will be working with the Events Team on the Spring Conference. We had a good meeting covering the partnership menu, revenue management, marketing and account management, sales, remuneration and data management.

We’ll continue to work on the proposition in the next two weeks, developing thinking on issues like the requirement for a commercial management role, and will meet again on 19th February, with a view to agreeing proposals to take to the Commercial Board on the 23rd.

The Government-sponsored “Power of Information Taskforce”, chaired by Richard Allan, former MP for Sheffield Hallam, has released a “beta version” of a report on liberalising non-personal government information. Richard will be speaking on “Unlocking the Power of Local Information” at the Socitm Spring Conference.

Coincidentally, I had a ‘phone conversation, today, with Richard Quarrell, about the PSIPHON project (to create tools to automate the creation of registers of public sector organisations’ Information Assets) that he and Adrian Norman presented to a Socitm Futures meeting, last November. To my great disappointment we (Socitm) have so far failed to progress the Working Party we committed to at that meeting. I arranged to meet with Richard on 16th to plan how to take this forward.

Snow-go

2009-02-02T23:05:00.000Z

This morning I was due to attend a “Green IT” event at the House of Lords. I drove in from Kent as far as Greenwich, and didn’t think conditions were too bad, but after hearing on the radio that all London buses were cancelled, most Tube lines were suspended, or part-suspended, no south-eastern trains were running, the Blackwall Tunnel was closed south-bound, more snow was expected later, and people were being urged not to travel unless they absolutely had to, decided to return home.

So, now am up-straight with correspondence again!

The Long Suffering Mrs S.

2009-01-30T23:07:00.000Z

Today’s Government Connect Awards Ratification Committee was postponed – to 13th February – because of the volume of entries received - now over 180 - and time needed to prepare.

I met, at Direct House, with Andy Lees, of CommVault. Andy was previously one of Newham’s HP account team. The CommVault proposition seems attractive; we discussed possible partnership with Socitm to assist in promotion.

I also discussed the potential for Socitm business partnership with Mike Rollings and Manfred Hartel, of Burton Group.

On Tuesday, next week, Adrian, Stephen Jones, Elaine Davis and I are meeting to discuss business development, and how we take these potential partnerships forward. Elaine, who currently lives in Florida, and is flying-in for our meeting, has for some years worked with the Socitm Events Team, selling Conference Sponsorship and Exhibition space.

In the afternoon, the LGA hosted a meeting at its offices in Smith Square to discuss the further Government Connect support programme that it and the DWP are funding. The emphasis is on promotion of the Local Government Data Handling Guidelines and how GC will support fulfilment of their aims. A two-year programme is envisaged. I was concerned that this should enshrine the development of pan-Government security vision and strategy. The meeting, which included the LGA’s Tim Allen, Siobhan Coughlan from the IDeA, Philip Littleavon and Simon Norbury from Government Connect, and Paul Charkiw from the Welsh LGA, debated the objectives at length, but we eventually agreed an initial list that’s likely to develop as the programme proceeds. Mike Short, from the IDeA will be the Policy Lead for the programme, and Mark Brett, of Silverthorne Associates, the Technical Lead; both were also present. Those present will form an Advisory Board, which will meet soon to agree its Terms of Reference.

Afterwards, Philip, Simon and I met to discuss the recent letters to Local Authorities that hadn’t yet submitted “a sufficiently mature Code of Connection”. We had to agree to differ on some of the language and context, but I had to concede that, if Authorities don’t achieve the check-points they’ve committed to, and haven’t got in-touch with the GC Team to explain, request help or negotiate variation of their agreements, then it’s reasonable to write to Chief Executives and Section 151 Officers requesting explanation and updates. Philip agreed to keep me informed of progress, and I pledged to do anything I, and Socitm, can do to assist GC and Local Authorities achieve CoCo compliance.

I think the CMA’s response to the interim “Digital Britain” report is excellent.

Today was Chris’s birthday. Yesterday, I was chasing around trying to find an anniversary card that she’d like, eventually buying one at our local 24 hour Asda. It only dawned on me that it was, in fact, her birthday, when I was making our early morning cuppa. She took it quite well when I tried to explain, but gave me one of her “long suffering” looks!

Ageing Britain

2009-01-29T21:43:00.000Z

The drive for broadband is building with the publication of Lord Carter’s interim report “Digital Britain”. I spoke, a little, about this requirement in a short presentation concerning Newham’s NeAT programme at the “Ageing Population 2009” conference at the QE II Conference Centre. I got there by mid-afternoon, having attended Alan’s funeral, in time for the afternoon keynote by Rosie Winterton, MP, Minister of State for Pensions. My session, following presentations from the RNID’s Jackie Ballard, and Councillor the Honourable Joan Taylor from the LGA, became the last before a panel Q&A session, which I joined. By now, the event had slipped behind schedule and the audience was dwindling, but it had been a sell-out, with coverage broadcast to an overflow audience in an adjacent room earlier in the day.

The event subject clearly struck a nerve; hardly surprising, given projections that men retiring at 65 will be able to look forward to another 24 years of life, on average, and women 27 years, as Rosie Winterton told us. Further conferences are planned, and I trust that digital Britain and Assistive Technology and TeleHealth will play a full part.

A Day of TechnoVision

2009-01-28T21:31:00.000Z

Andrew Stott, Deputy Government CIO, and Pierre Hessler, one of the Capgemini Executive, introduced today’s TechnoVision event at Capgemini’s offices in Woking. I thought the day enormously productive, was impressed by Andrew’s leadership, and enjoyed Pierre’s frequent articulate and amusing interventions. There is a short video of him talking about TechnoVision on the webpage I signposted yesterday, but which does not do him justice, in my view. (Today was his 42nd wedding anniversary, by the way!)

You’ll need to read the overview on the above webpage to appreciate the TechnoVision approach. In Teams, we considered what were the “must have” technologies versus the main business driver groups that had been selected – Professionalism, Efficiency, Citizen Centricity, Information Management & Security and Sustainability. I was in the Team considering the “You Experience” cluster. Results will be reported to the CIO Councils and, if I’m able to, I will provide a link from this Blog.

Later, separate Teams were formed to consider recommendations linked to the business driver groups. A late decision to set-up an “Overall” Team was taken, and I was co-opted into a Team that also included Andrew Stott and Pierre Hessler.

In terms of the Technology vision, the “Overall” Team decided that pan-Government network (unlike other corporate businesses, this doesn’t yet exist in Government) should support three key strategic pillars of security, collaboration and data management, enabling trust and the delivery of business vision.

Among the messages to the business are “we do understand the challenge – customer centricity – and we have the solutions provided we can address the above through strategic finance, enabling an effective delivery model backed by culture change”. As part of the Action Plan, we have a very specific and, I believe, pragmatic recommendation to make to the CIO Council as part of the Action Plan, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be knee-capped, or worse, if I report it here before the recommendations have been presented to the CIO Councils!

In the “Invisible Infostructure” technology cluster, it was noticeable that nearly all technologies listed under “Jericho (de-perimeterised) security” were identified as “must-haves”, but I was not particularly surprised to hear that what’s actually happening is pressure to “build the walls higher, and fill the moat with more crocodiles”. That, of course, is one of the major contradictions we have to reconcile if we are to make effective progress.

Other insights, for me, were emergent talk of a “G-Cloud” and “Civil Pages”.

Days like this can really help build consensus on the content of genuine public sector-wide vision and strategy (provided we can report them openly) and I certainly hope to be involved in more of them.

Apologies – publication of the Socitm Position Statement has been a little delayed. Vicky was unimpressed with the diagram I produced to try and exemplify the relationships between its constituent parts, and thought it may confuse more than it informed! She and Adrian have been working on an improved version, today, and I now hope the statement will be ready by the weekend. Vicky has already done a great job on editing the text, so I’m looking forward to seeing what magic she’s worked on the schematic.

Don't Overreact!

2009-01-26T23:35:00.000Z

Socitm's just-published IT Trends Report, which was completed before the recession hit, has geneerated headlines like "Local Authority IT Spend in 2008/9 reaches an all time high" and "Council IT spend to grow this year" that may seem optimistic given the financial environment in which we now find ourselves. However, the report highlighted that there needs to be a growing focus on using ICT to monitor and manage the business, and that's even more the case in a down-turn.

Security and privacy has rightly hit the top of the agenda, which brings additional challenges - of ensuring that solutions are pragmatic and that we don't overreact and disable the functionality that we have come to rely upon- especially as we look to flexible work-styles to to generate efficiency savings and facilitate more harmonious work-life balances.

After chatting with the BCS's Steve Coaker, this morning, I wrote to introduce him to colleagues in GMIS. The BCS is expanding its professional development business internationally, and Steve has account management responsibility for the US.

I was introduced, by Ian Dunmore, to Nico Macdonald (see www.spy.co.uk/ ) who came to chat with Richard Carde and myself about our Telecoms Convergence programme, and 2012 aspirations. Nico is working on the production of a Progress Summit in July, which will "focus on the short- and medium-term future of the city with an emphasis on re-establishing ambitious visions for the future, innovation and productivity, designerly thinking and humanism".

We explained our plans and objectives as best we could in return for which, hopefully, Nico has a wealth of connections he can share with us to help build support and sustain momentum in our programme!

Following a Caboodle Board meeting in the afternoon, and a meeting with HR on a staff matter, I made a point of getting home early so I could attend a TVR Car Club meeting to plan this year's Le Mans trip!

On Tuesday, I'm working at home, during the day, then off to a "CTO Community TechnoVision Event" pre dinner at Weybridge. Tomorrow's event, organised by Capgemini and the Cabinet Office, looks interesting. Information about the concept behind it is at http://www.capgemini.com/services/technology-services/technovision/

Seize the Day

2009-01-23T17:31:00.000Z

The Scottish Regional meeting was held at Stirling Council Chambers in Old Viewforth. Following Alan’s welcome comments, I was first up with my Socitm situation report and some thoughts about formalising a federal organisation. There were a number of comments about potential dilution of focus under the new remit; my view is there’s ample scope for the organisation of special interest groups within the new structure. There were also views about engagement with other professional bodies, like the BCS, and avoidance of duplication, but overall the meeting seemed supportive of the changes. Given that devolution has driven an increasingly separate agenda for country, it’s hardly surprising that no-one spoke against formalising a federal structure. At the conclusion of the meeting Alan confirmed that he would like the region to participate in a workshop (with England, Wales & Northern Ireland) to agree the detailed arrangements.

That there will continue to be a great deal of commonality across the UK was well demonstrated in the rest of the meeting agenda, which largely dealt with similar issues to those I’ve encountered in all the meetings I attend. There were speakers from Scotland’s Improvement Service (IDeA equivalent) on Customer First and shared services, covering things like the NLPG, e-Planning and flexible working, and case studies on service improvement.

During the coffee break I opened an e-mail informing me that Alan Constable, my boss when I worked in the City, has died suddenly. I’d like to think that Alan and I were close friends; we had some great times together, but did not part on the best of terms. I’ve been meaning to contact him for years – but now, of course it’s too late, and I’m full of remorse. It goes to show that life, as they say, is not a rehearsal and you have to seize your chances. My heart goes out to Eileen, and Alan's family.

I’m now on the train back to London, and again catching-up on correspondence. I see that my comments about Government Connect have been misreported in some of the media. I have expressed concerns about the delays in assembling the Support Team, but have never said there’ve been delays in providing funding.

Have a good weekend.

Towards a Federal Socitm...

2009-01-22T23:19:00.000Z

Gary McQuade, Managing Director of Spearmint Business Consulting, who is working for the NCC on the promotion and take-up of Accredit UK, met with me at Direct House. We discussed potential partnership and identified four areas in which we thought we may be able to work together – a Socitm UK theme around professional development for SMEs (Small & Medium Enterprises) linked to promotion of support for a public sector “Purchasers’ Charter”, working through our CIPFA relationship to link the BiP Solutions Accredit approach to financial management, working through the CIO Council with OGC Buying Solutions, and co-operation on Consultancy services. We’ll set-up a small workshop with key stakeholders to progress the proposals.

I then caught the noon “Highland Chieftain” from Kings Cross to Stirling for my dinner with some members of the Socitm Scotland Committee, and attendance at tomorrow’s regional meeting.

On the way I dealt with some correspondence and calls, including a catch-up on the Government Connect position. I called Philip about letters that went, last week, to Authorities who had not applied for exemption from the April deadline, but had not yet submitted “a sufficiently mature Code of Connection”. Philip told me 75% of the recipients of these letters have already replied “overwhelmingly positively”. That’s great, but I still have some concerns about the process, which we agreed to discuss early next week. Discussion at the recent CIO Council was of a far more strategic engagement than we’ve seen hitherto, linking EAS and the Ocean project, and raising hopes that we can actually adopt a joined-up approach rather than perpetuate the government silos with which the Local Public Sector is required to engage. I’d like the dialogue to reflect that more joined-up, partnership approach. Meantime, sincere thanks to public sector colleagues, including the Government Connect Team, for the commitment and resolve that’s being demonstrated in this project!

David Houston and I had dinner with Alan Kirkwood, Socitm Scotland Chair, and five of his committee colleagues at the Dunblane Hydro Hotel, where we were staying. I learned much about the who’s who, and who’s doing what where in Scottish Government, but discussion also turned to Socitm matters, and how a federal Socitm might work.

The day the London Evening Standard was sold for £1

2009-01-21T22:45:00.000Z

Last night’s e-Gov Awards winners are listed here, and there are loads of photos of the night here.

I attended the Microsoft Licensing Agreement Project Board at Church House, today. ‘Nuff said!

Afterwards, I caught the tail-end of Socitm’s Commercial Board, held at Intellect’s offices. It was agreed that Steve Jones, Adrian and I would pursue pilot business partnerships and associated contract and client management issues.

Pomp & Circumstance

2009-01-21T08:09:00.000Z

After working at home in the morning, I went in to Oracle’s offices, in Moorgate, to meet with Rachael Hartley and Juan Rada, Senior Vice President, Public Sector, and Munir Ismet, Vice President EMEA Public Sector, who I know from “way back when”, to discuss public sector developments in general, and Oracle’s relationship with Socitm.

Following which, I had a meeting on 2012 Data Centre requirements at LOCOG’s offices in Canary Wharf, with Nortel’s Fraser Dawkins and Roger Baugh, Senior Project Manager, Venue Technology Services.

In the evening I attended the e-Government National Awards, which were held at the City’s Guildhall. I’ve been to the Guildhall “campus” on many occasions before for meetings, but this was the first time I’ve actually been in the Guildhall, which is spectacular! How I wish I remembered to take a camera, but you can get a glimpse of the place at the Awards Site. It was built between 1411 and 1440 to reflect the importance of London’s ruling elite, and is the only stone building not belonging to the Church to have survived the Great Fire of London. The evening was accompanied by appropriate pomp, with the Company of Pikemen and Musketeers of the Honourable Artillery Company providing the guard of honour. It was nice to see such a large turnout, of around 500, in these austere times! (Apparently, the Dorchester, last year’s venue, wouldn’t have been big enough.)

Anyway, Tom Watson MP, the Cabinet Minister for Transformational Government was in attendance, and the Prime Minister again recorded a video message with congratulations to the winners, who will be listed on the Awards Site.

Tom’s colleague, the Communications Minister, Lord Carter, has pledged rapid broadband expansion. I am disappointed to see that Newham is not listed as among the Local Government pioneers (whose efforts, the EU has warned, could be uncompetitive) and interested to see 50Mb described as “ultrafast”. Pretty good for copper, ‘though.

The new PSMP interface, to be launched by the month-end, will look like this…

Rebranding on the Agenda

2009-01-19T23:09:00.000Z

There are a lot of organisations called “CMA”, I’ve found – such as the Complementary Medicine Association, The Christian Motorcyclists’ Association and the Community Media Association. Anyway, I met, this morning, with Glenn Powell, Chief Executive of The Communications Management Association, which was formed in 1958 but became part of the BCS Group 18 months ago. Having brought one another up-to-date on our organisations’ developments, we discussed the potential for collaboration, and concluded that it will be worth a further meeting to formalise a relationship. The CMA currently has no “vertical sectors” within its organisation, but I believe a shared expert panel focussing on public sector network and security would benefit us both.

Following the FOI request lodged, last week, by PSF the Socitm Board of Directors brought-forward branding considerations that have been on the “back-burner”. We agreed not to seek renewal of the .gov domain name, due in August this year, but to adopt a new domain to reflect recent developments in the Society. The following broadcast was sent to the Socitm membership:-

“Members may be aware that one or two commentators have raised questions about the appropriateness of Socitm’s .gov.uk designation.

“The gov.uk was granted to Socitm after a formal application to the relevant authority in the mid-1990s. Socitm applied for this designation on the basis that it was a membership organisation representing individuals in the public sector who themselves had .gov.uk addresses.
“Since that time Socitm has opened up its membership, and in October 2008 took this a significant stage further when it voted to allow members in the private sector to have equal status to that of public sector members. Late last year Socitm completed a merger with the charity IT organisation CITRA, which brought into Socitm membership a significant additional group of members also not working directly in the public sector.

“Given these developments, as well as the decision to open Socitm membership to ICT and related professionals at all career stages, Socitm has started to consider a range of issues around its name and branding – including the .gov.uk designation.

“Stimulated by a FoI request lodged with the CoI in the early January, Socitm brought forward the discussion about the .gov.uk designation and considered it at its board meeting on January 15.

“The board agreed that it will not seek renewal of the .gov.uk designation when this comes up in the Summer, because a .org or .net designation will better describe the current and future scope and purpose of the organisation. Changeover to the new designation is likely to coincide with the launch of a new website for Socitm scheduled for the summer.”

I had hoped that our new CMS, and website, would be ready to launch by April, which was the original plan… and yes, I suppose that was for partly egotistical reasons! However, it became evident that with the amount of work required, and the limited resources available to us that would be extremely ambitious and we agreed on a more realistic schedule. All the same, I’m hoping that my final act, as President, will be to preview the new website at our AGM in April.

The CRM implementation has also slipped a little, as a result of the takeover of the supplier of our financial management system, requiring work that impacts upon the required integration, but the new CRM should still be live by the month-end.

Odds & Sods

2009-01-16T23:43:00.000Z

Today was an “Odds & Sods” day!

I met Bob Heaton at his office in East Ham to discuss my return full-time to my “day job” from April, and for a general catch-up.

I wrote to Kathryn Rossiter, at SOLACE, with the suggested CEOs’ 10 questions, for discussion.

Circulated the final draft Socitm Position Statement to National Advisory Council and Board members. Any last comments are required by next Friday 23rd, after which it will be published.

Wrote a short briefing on the current Caboodle situation to Newham’s Deputy Mayor (a Caboodle Director) in preparation for a forthcoming board meeting.

I arranged with Elaine Davis, who undertakes marketing of sponsorship and exhibition space for Socitm Conferences, to meet, later this month, to discuss this and related activity, such as our planned business partnerships.

Lee Grafton, from the DWP GC Team, wrote to say that they are now assembling the new Support Team!! I spent some time in ‘phone calls and contacting colleagues to assist in this connection. (Philip Littleavon copied me, among others, into a reply to the Society of London Treasurers regarding their disquiet about Government Connect. A missed opportunity, I thought, to refer to EAS, and ease concerns about flexible working and non Council-owned equipment.)

Geoff, Richard Carde and I met for an update on the Newham Telecoms Convergence programme and Data Centres.

I totally failed, ‘though, to get to grips with this week’s correspondence!

First Board Meeting in a New Financial Year

2009-01-15T21:56:00.000Z

David Clayden was welcomed to his first Socitm Board meeting today. David has accepted portfolio responsibility for “the Third Sector & Social Responsibility”. The updated portfolio list follows although, in practice, there is a lot of overlap. Much of the actual work is undertaken in the Commercial and Membership Boards. Board meetings are also attended by Melanie Smith, the Finance Manager, and Pam Larsen, the Company Secretary.

This was a productive meeting, the minutes of which will be published to members in due course. In the meantime, items that you may consider noteworthy are:

We are working on sharing board members’, main activists’ and staff calendars to facilitate planning. We also intend to publish the calendar of our activities on behalf of the Society via the website. This will say what meetings we are attending, and when, but not provide details of location or people involved for obvious reasons. My own calendar is already included at the end of the Blogspot copy of my Blog, although it needs some tidying-up, and I’m currently only updating it at weekends.

We expect to publish the Position Statement by the 26th January. This will also be sent to Regional Chairs for the information of all Members.

The Socitm Membership Board is making good progress in developing the membership category proposals for next year. It is also working on Corporate Membership scheme proposals to be piloted this year, and a detailed professional development framework. There is a lot of work to get through, but it’s expected that a roadmap will be outlined at the April AGM, and details presented for consultation at the next NAC (in May).

The Board approved the budget for this year. This, we believe, provides a prudent level of contingency, whilst maintaining progress in the development of the Society and maintaining reserves at around the current level. We are reassessing what the minimum level of reserves should be, and expect that it can be set at a lower level following the work undertaken to reduce financial risks. Clearly, ‘though, these are “interesting” times and we’ll closely monitor against the baseline with variance and predicted outturn being considered at each Board meeting.

We have been struggling to arrange a meeting that everyone can attend, to be hosted by Shey Cobley at Oxford, to consider the proposition for different professional disciplines and, particularly, young people. This now looks like happening on 4th March.

After the Board meeting, Mark Barber, from KPMG, joined Adrian, David Bryant, David Houston and myself at Camden Town Hall to discuss potential collaboration or partnership in performance management. We agreed further discussion, of which more anon.

Some Progress, and Some Concerns

2009-01-14T23:31:00.000Z

I’m feeling really buoyed-up after today’s Socitm National Advisory Council! There was ample challenge, but the discussion and debate was extremely constructive throughout. John Serle, the NAC Chair, and I met one-to-one for an hour, or so, ahead of the meeting, which was invaluable. John helped me to clarify my own thoughts on some of the questions of how to build membership value now that we have turned our attention from reorganisation and sustainability to effectively engaging our membership.

The first substantive agenda item was the President’s report, which I used the draft Position Statement to frame, introducing proposals on the way forward that John’s advice helped to formulate. The essential points were to channel communications through the regions and, particularly, the regional Chairs, and that the Executive should develop propositions to the NAC on the ways in which issues, such as membership segmentation and special interest groups, should be organised, rather than the other way around. Sometimes, you can’t see the woods for the trees!

Some other key areas of guidance from the NAC were in agreeing regional themes, involving members in effective influence and lobbying through Expert Panels and in less communications “noise” and more discriminating use and moderation of discussion forums.

I’m not going to play-out the whole meeting, here; the minutes, as always, will be published to the membership as soon as they are ready. I do expect, however, the board, tomorrow, will endorse a number of initiatives based on NAC members’ advice. The timing of this month’s board to immediately follow the NAC looks-like being the right approach, and we’re planning futures meetings to follow the same arrangement. John, Glyn Evans – the Chair of Socitm Futures – and I previously agreed to meet to ensure the working relationship is clear and effective, and we’re now arranging this as soon as possible. Steve Palmer will join as to ensure continuity as we approach his Presidency.

After the NAC I went to meet with Natalie Smith, of PAConsulting, at their offices in Buckingham Palace Road. PA was recruited, by the DCSF, to provide programme management and support for the EAS (Employee Authentication Services) roll-out. The DCSF aims to recruit 50 Councils to “onboard”, as they call-it, EAS by April. Socitm is generally supportive of the development and we were pleased to be consulted about the proposals early on, as I have previously reported. However, I’m now concerned that the project that’s developed is hugely ambitious; it appears to be making the same mistake as Government Connect in requiring Local Authorities to commit to activity that they’ve had no opportunity to budget for. Councils are meeting, “as we speak” to agree 2009/10 budgets and set Council Tax rates, and it’s now too late for them to provide for the cost implications of implementing EAS.

EAS makes tremendous sense – provided it is integrated with Government Connect. Some of the biggest problems in the CoCo requirements are in supporting flexible working using mobile devices and personally owned equipment using technology such as terminal services. EAS should be able to provide an appropriate authentication solution to these problems.

I committed Socitm to help in the Communications programme by asking regions to provide presentation slots in their events programme early in the year, in including publicity material in our broadcasts, and in helping to recruit volunteers to be early adopters. That doesn’t mean, however, that we are not attuned to the real concerns that are bound to materialise. The rollout of Contact Point, already long delayed, will be reliant on EAS. Again, this is clearly the right solution, but engagement plans must be practical.

There is an EAS Board meeting, next week, which I’m unable to attend, but hope to arrange Socitm representation at. There are also a number of Community of Interest Working Groups coming-up, which we’ll be represented in. Do, please, let me have your views on how we should proceed.

Hey-Ho

2009-01-13T23:33:00.000Z

Today was one of those that didn’t go as planned.

A planned meeting at Newham Town Hall fell-through because of sickness, so I worked there on correspondence, before driving to Stratford for a network infrastructure update meeting, over lunch, with Richard Carde and Greenwich’s Henri Reinbolt.

After lunch I met with James Lee for an update on PSMP and associated network issues. We are up to 10,000 unique users on the Newham PSMP, which will include the TfL Journey Planner from next Monday.

A planned Teleconference with a BCS colleague did not materialise, and dinner with a Microsoft colleague was cancelled because of sickness. However, I stayed in town, and met-up with Adrian Hancock, David Houston and John Serle. We had dinner at Busaba Eathai, and discussed Socitm and continuing challenges before us.

Ian Dunmore, from Public Sector Forums, called me yesterday to let me know he had lodged a Freedom of Information query with the Central Office of Information, asking questions such as the grounds for granting Socitm its .gov domain name and, sure enough, we heard, today, from the COI that the request was received. That’s an irritation that we could well do without at this time, but hey-ho.

The OGC has now launched tools that are aimed at improving the chances of ICT procurement success. Its “pre-qualification” tool is for internal use – the sort of thing you would expect to see in a business case before getting the go-ahead to start procurement.

Also, the Information Commissioner’s Office launched a model publication scheme. This is the link for the scheme applying to “principal” Local Authorities.

Government CTOs visit MS Research Labs.

2009-01-12T22:20:00.000Z

Today I had a longstanding commitment to visit, with the CTO Council and a few CIO Council members, the Microsoft Research Laboratories at Cambridge. Although two other important SOCITM meetings – Socitm Futures and the Membership Board - had subsequently been arranged, I decided to keep the Microsoft appointment as such opportunities to engage “en masse” with other senior government colleagues are few and far between.

Nicola Hodson, Microsoft’s Public Sector General Manager (who replaced Terry Smith) and Andrew Stott, the Cabinet Office Head of Service Transformation, and Deputy Government CIO, introduced the meeting.

Then Bob Hayes explained that he is currently the only UK member of the seven-member Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments, which was established in the States after 9/11, and extended to the UK in November 2007.

Early on the question of the ponderous development of Windows Mobile, and inadequate security, came-up. This, we are promised, is being addressed in Windows 7; “significant work is ongoing and security will be addressed whilst maintaining rich functionality”.

Otherwise, some of the points I thought more noteworthy from quite a packed day were:

In his research overview, Andrew Herbert, the Managing Director of Microsoft Research, Cambridge, told us that the Labs recruit 80 Ph.D interns per year. (From a population of a billion, India had only 64 graduates last year, which I thought interesting given the preponderance of “Shift Happens” presentations, last year, reflecting graduates’ inability to pay to continue studies; so Microsoft Research in India has become a degree-awarding body.)
Among projects that have developed from one research partnership programme is one to preserve electronic archives by virtualising all previous operating systems to enable the archives to be viewed using old and new technologies supporting questions like “what was life like” as well as maximising the utility of material through exploitation of contemporary technology.
A lot of the presentations involved developments in photography/ video – using parallax to determine positioning and depth enabling addition and/or subtraction of content, for example. Incidentally, “Geosynth” an offline version of Photosynth, is now available for Government. A suggested application was enabling effective scene-of-crime presentations to Juries, which is something I remember being discussed as a problem when I was involved, some time ago, in a project with the Met. Police.
Other presentations included “Deep Zoom”, “HD View” and SenseCam.
Computer mediated applications are becoming more humanistic, adaptive immersive etc…
You can now install Virtual Earth behind your Firewall, but if you want data for the whole world, it’s 17 petabytes!
Windows Azure (now being tested by some partners in pre-beta form, otherwise known as “Community Technology Preview”) was positioned as the Windows operating system for the Cloud.
Azure and Microsoft Online Services presentations clearly signalled the company’s intentions to move into direct services offerings. There would, we were told, be no bespoke contracts – i.e. technology refresh and new software versions, will be automatic – and the current position is that hosting will be offered only from Microsoft’s own Data Centres!
This fed neatly into a truly impressive presentation of Microsoft Data Centre developments, driving down costs and energy efficiency.

I thought the day worthwhile, and there was a lot I’d like to follow-up, not least from a Socitm Futures perspective. I hope to participate in other cross-government supplier engagements to help inform the prospective government technology roadmap.

The Tough Get Going...

2009-01-10T11:45:00.000Z

The Socitm Events Team met at Bucks County’s HQ in Aylesbury.

It’s confirmed that we will be running a spring event at Stoneleigh Park on 23rd April, which will incorporate the Society’s Annual General Meeting. Put it in your diaries!

The event title is, as I write, work in progress, but may be prefaced “UK”, since a federal organisation is among the considerations that I’m now leading consultation upon, and this could be among the matters for decision at the AGM.

Prices for both this, and the annual conference in Edinburgh (11th to 13 the October) will be held at previous levels. However, we’re also considering “bundles” to incorporate membership (for those not already members) and discounting for multiple attendees from the same organisation. This matter has been referred to the Membership Board (which meets next week) for guidance.

The conference will incorporate a small exhibition of, probably, around 20 stands, and a new initiative, this year, will be a programme of 15 minute supplier presentations/ demonstrations as optional alternatives to the main plenary theme.

The outline programme will be included in a press release within the next 2-3 weeks, but will include third sector and contemporary content, including how to gain advantage using ICT in a financial crisis!

The Credit Crunch will be uppermost in our minds, next week, when a number of key meetings for Socitm take place. These include the National Advisory Council, and the membership, commercial and main boards. There can be few who benefit from the financial crisis and its timing for Socitm – just as it was switching from “survival mode” to building the business – certainly is not great. Decisions we make in the next few weeks will be critical not only to our ability to deliver upon the new responsibilities that we’ve taken-on, but also to our long-term existence.

I remain confident that we will survive and prosper as an organisation through whose membership ICT will cement its preeminent role in business effectiveness, but it would be foolhardy and irresponsible to downplay the challenges and risks that we face!