I hope something comes of it. It’s not the only Ning community I’m a member of but like many such places they have a tendency to become talking shops with little practical resulting. It’s OK if you wish to spend your time looking into a computer rather than delivering practical change or if the suggestions made actually are implemented in some fashion, but how many times does that happen?

The operators, implementors or whatever need to consider the suggestions that were made following the discussions earlier about participating in a democracy i.e. for a start, how will the outcomes be measured, implemented or reported?

According to Heather Niven who is one of those behind it, the “main criteria are sustainable, scale able to other places, good for everyone involved, viable with resources we’ve got. Pilot length can be as long as it needs to be but a range of short-long term solutions would be good. We are flexible and open to all ideas and our forum section has a section on all things innovative. For other suggestions if people want to raise other ideas. Outcomes we want are 1. A culture change in the way the city solves its problems and develops/evolves through introducing a channel to communicate and develop relationships with the motivated creative problem solvers in our world who want to make a difference. 2. To use a series of challenges to focus our efforts and show ourselves how much better we can change things through working together and to try the process out. 3. To record and share the whole project including what didn’t work for others to learn from. All of that will be shared here too.”

My personal challenge to them is to rationalise the dark magic that is government bean-counting – if we could do away with all this cross-charging, recharging, offcharging and focus on customers, particularly where they aren’t able to deal with such bureaucracy the better! Avaunt thee CIPFA and all thy complications…

In their own words “CHAMPS2 is a vision led, benefits driven business change method which is broad in scope and encompasses the whole business change journey. It helps you define your organisation’s strategic needs, and then provides a tailored route to ensure that the desired outcomes are achieved”.

Even better, it’s free!

If that wasn’t enough, although the consultation is over for the moment, the guidelines for open data publication are available from the Socitm, CIPFA, LeGSB, LGA, CLG group that has been working on them. So if you are in the UK, or even if you are not, you may find the LG Group Transparency Programme of interest?

Even better, we had a brief but beneficial discussion with Andrea di Maio about Clouds, G-Clouds and related matters. Nice  to finally see him in the flesh!

Surprise, surprise that two of the bullet-pointed ‘strategic responses’ identified both by the survey and Civica were “extending outsourcing as part of a pragmatic service delivery mix, and using managed IT and related business services”, along with “re-engineering entire frontline to back-office processes at the corporate departmental level”.

No argument with the second one but advise doing it BEFORE outsourcing, otherwise you are giving away ALL the profit, however the first one should be a dead duck in the water from experiences of ten years of e-government! Strategically having ones IT managed, if one has a suitable contract in place is one thing, but you can just look back at the cases where it has been brought back in-house, or would have been if the financial penalties hadn’t been so large.

With G-Cloud looming the possibilities for managed IT are formidable, but does this require outsourcing, I don’t think so.

 I did a quick survey of some of the figures being quoted:

 The methodology used by NWEGG in association with CIPFA was documented and published by the CLG in March 2008 and entitled –

Delivering Efficiency: Understanding the Cost of Local Government Services

 and can be found here:

 http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/localgovernment/pdf/730431.pdf

 Socitm employ CIPFA Accounting Code for Best Value as the basis for collecting costs, which should mean that the NWEGG and Socitm figures are on a par. CIPFA charge £850 for a copy – http://secure.cipfa.org.uk/cgi-bin/CIPFA.storefront/EN/product/AC073_

- must be a best seller at that price!

 I do have a slide with the Lambeth calculation and I would say that looks like common sense, too.

 So, why the differences? As was discussed at a meeting I attended with Socitm a while ago, an authority who had done their own sums found vast differences between services. This does make sense. Not all services are equal, displaying planning information on the web is easier than displaying benefits information and is likely to be accessed more often, too. So it probably depends which services one chooses to account for.

 My conclusion – get everyone to pay by direct debit wherever possible!

For me it has an awful lot of sense, as can be found in earlier posts, I was never quite happy with the ‘deep truth’  that central government wanted us to seek, I never treated it as personal imformation, just a lot of mumbo-jumbo that would never help anybody. It also identifies the limited use being made of electronic government ‘services’.

In fact in terms of evaluating IT projects, one of the issues raised, Cabinet Office has already got its own rottweiler investigating – Stephen Jenner – who I met at ECEG2009, and whose book I bought, which is largely common sense and to save you the fifteen  quid here’s an interview from the CIPFA PinPoint magazine – CipfapinpointJune09 - he’s also looking for people to do a survey for him -ABRMsurveyv1.0eceg

Importantly for this researcher Maxwell does state that “Putting the citizen, and not the government, at the centre of IT design can have startling results.” (P.14)

One place I would argue with the report is on P.16, where it states that ” information acquired for one purpose in the public sector may be used for another entirely different purpose”, if that had been the case the delivery of electronic government would have been much easier and I’d argued with a senior civil servant about that being a barrier some years ago, and nothing eased.

The same applies to Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing, both praised in the book and both being promoted at Cabinet Office, unfortunately the governmental monolith moves slowly and acceptance of these concepts will take time.

Having said that, I welcome a fresh political take on the frequently ignored (by politicos) area of government IT and don’t disagree with any of the conclusions, however implementing them through Whitehall may be a different matter…