Beatcounters

October 22, 2009

I haven’t before reported upon discussions at the Local CIO Council and since we try and operate within Chatham House rules, I won’t often, but in this instance I don’t believe I’m breaking them!

On the 20th October 2009 the packed agenda for the day included a presentation on the Socitm benchmarking scheme and its status in the current climate of the Operational Efficiency Programme etc…

Since part of the impetus for this blog is metrics, I have a vested interest in anything that considers channel shift and channel service comparison, which the benchmarks can, so I’m interested!

Unsurprisingly, one of my colleagues, Glyn Evans, commented upon Birmingham’s employment of ‘business value’, an approach that was generally found acceptable given that much of the value of I.T. initiatives is sometimes lost in the tradition of ‘bean counting’, hence I’ve labelled the soft alternative ‘beat counting’!

My own researches have included side investigations into ‘public value’ and ‘social capital’ as possible metrics, which whilst of no assistance on their own, may be able to be employed as parallel accounting contibutions, given sufficient focus upon what the citizen wants and needs.

Any thoughts out there?

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Change and channels – what government isn’t good at!

June 2, 2008

According to a new study marketers were asked:

Which of the following sectors do you rate as effective or very effective at combining different marketing media/channels to achieve significantly higher response rates?

Government & NHS were at the bottom!

Glyn Evans of Birmingham City Council is reported as stating at a conference in Berlin that:

“Most senior managers in the public sector are still of the generation that grew up without IT,” he said. This led to a limited understanding of IT, which is the reason why the public sector has not been successful in using IT as tool for change in the past.

“We have got to move away from the central government view that it is all about efficiency savings and shared services. It has got to be more than that,” Evans said.

“IT is the enabler, but transformational change has to be systemic. It has to address organisational structures, job roles, processes and cultures.”

Thanks Glyn, we’ll eventually get that message through…

 

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