Category Archives: public services

Somerset’s dispute with IBM is “escalating”.

Posted on 22/10/2012 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Somerset County Council says in a paper due to be discussed next week that its dispute with the IBM-led Southwest One joint venture is “escalating” and that there is a need to “restore a deteriorating relationship with a supplier”.

The poor relationship is in contrast to the mutually content position in 2008, one year after Somerset signed its unique, ground-breaking deal with IBM. At that time Somerset refused a request by Unison for a copy of the business case for Southwest One saying, “We can record, however, that all our cost and performance criteria within the business case were met or exceeded”.

Now Southwest One and the council are in a legal dispute on several fronts. The council’s paper for its cabinet meeting next week says:

“The history of Southwest One [SWo] poor performance is continuing; during 2012 the Client Team have been holding SWo to account; resulting in the serving of 8 contractual notices to SWo.

“Over the past 3 weeks SWo have commenced disputes on several other matters, issuing further financial claims and disputing Somerset County Council’s warning notices.

“With a number of escalating disputes, we need to take action to:

• Conduct proceedings

• Respond to these disputes and restore a deteriorating relationship with a strategic supplier.

• Seek to improve value for money and service performance and ensure it is fit for purpose.

• Continue to assertively manage Southwest One to ensure it meets its contractual obligations.

• Maintain Partner relationships

Somerset’s officers recommend to the cabinet that:

“The Leader of the Council authorises the Chief Executive, Deputy County Solicitor, Director of Finance & Performance and other relevant SCC officers to serve and proceed with the defence and any counterclaim, to carry out all subsequent steps in the litigation process and any engagement in connection with the disputes.”

The paper  adds:

“It is also recommended that the Leader of the Council and the Chairman of Scrutiny Committee agree urgency in respect of the above recommendation…

“The Deputy County Solicitor is authorised to institute defend or settle any legal proceedings and to lodge an appeal. This report seeks authorisation to be given to SCC officers to serve and proceed with the Defence and any Counterclaim, to carry out all subsequent steps in the litigation process and any engagement and commit to financial considerations (such as legal costs) in connection with the disputes…

“Due to the contractually binding timetable for resolving disputes SCC officers need a mandate. Risks will be reported and managed through SCC’s governance arrangements.”

A budget exists to support the council’s approach.

The report says that the council is in disagreement with Southwest One over the quality of the procurement service and what payments it is entitled to as a result of savings made by getting better deals through the joint venture. “We had hoped we would be able to settle this through negotiations, but unfortunately that has not been the case.”

Comment:

In mid-2007, about two months before Somerset signed its deal to set up Southwest One with IBM, an external consultancy report on the proposals by consultants “Maana” praised the “immense amount of research and thinking” that went into the IBM bid.

It said that the “whole of the procurement process, from market investigation to preferred bidder selection has been well planned and executed”. Maana added:

“The evaluation process has been more extensive, well thought through and executed than any we have seen before.”

And look what happened to the best laid plans. Many saw at the time that the joint venture was too complicated and put too much responsibility IBM’s way, but the council pushed aside their concerns.

Who now is responsible for the failure of Southwest One? Nobody.

Thank you to Dave Orr whose information made this article possible.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, IBM, IT projects, IT-related failures, legal disputes, local government, managing change, outsourcing, oversight, Politics, procurement, public services, risk, shared services

CSC withdraws from Cornwall bid

Posted on 17/10/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Updated

CSC has withdrawn from an outsourcing/joint venture bid at Cornwall council after the leader of the authority was ousted yesterday in a vote of no confidence.

The vote of the full council removed Conservative leader Alec Robertson who was a strong advocate of outsourcing a range of council services including IT to BT or CSC.

Originally the council’s cabinet – without recourse to the full council – planned to sign a contract worth between £210m and £800m in November. After a public petition of more than 5,000 signatures against the deal, the matter will now be put to the full council next week for a decision.

Conservative Jim Currie, who resigned from the cabinet in opposition to the deal, has taken Robertson’s place as leader of the council. But in an interview with regional BBC TV he did not rule out outsourcing and said he would be looking at the facts.

Indeed he told thisiscornwall.co.uk that the bid was not dead in the water.  “Never say never,” he said. “It might be an option of last resort.” He added: “We are not galloping forward with it at any great haste.”

It’s expensive for BT and CSC to maintain bid teams if they think no deal will be signed. But it is highly unlikely they would have any claim on the council for their legal and other costs should the tender be withdrawn.

Speaking on BBC Radio Cornwall, Neil Burden, Currie’s deputy, said: “One of the bidders no longer wants to engage with Cornwall Council because of what happened yesterday.”

To that Currie, said: “I can’t tell you anything at all about that. That is part of negotiations that are going on. I am sure things will emerge today, and all will be revealed later.”

Councillor Andrew Wallis has now reported on his website that at a briefing on the outsourcing bids he learned that CSC has withdrawn following the ousting of the leader Alec Robertson yesterday.

BT,  it appears, is putting a renewed effort into the bid, as if nothing had happened at the full council meeting yesterday.

Cornwall says in a statement on its website:

“The Council is disappointed that CSC has made the decision to withdraw from the procurement for a Strategic Partnership for Support Services. The Council would like to thank CSC for their involvement in the programme over the last year and their interest in working with Cornwall Council.

“The Council is continuing discussions with BT and the debate on the Strategic Partnership is still due to go ahead as part of the Full Council meeting on the 23 October 2012.”

 Outsourcing costs in Cornwall escalate – and no deal signed yet

A mega-outsourcing plan beset by naive fanaticism?

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Posted in BT, CSC, local government, procurement, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, supplier relationships

Campaign for electronic patient information centre

Posted on 12/10/2012 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Shane Tickell, CEO of health IT supplier IMS Maxims, is leading a campaign for a national electronic patient information centre.

It would enable NHS staff, healthcare organisations and government suppliers to share details of, or learn about, innovative practices that work.

In a guest blog, Tickell argues that there are many examples of innovation in the NHS but information on the successes is scarce or not available in one place.

He advocates a physical and a virtual centre. Information, case studies, best practice and ideas from the NHS would be shared online. There are some websites that do this, but in isolation. The virtual site he proposes would be interactive and a way of collating information that exists in silos.

The physical centre, Tickell says, could be anywhere on the UK, potentially using some of the 2,000 acres of unused NHS estate. It would be a forum for education and sharing, where suppliers could showcase their systems, and NHS staff could speak openly about what they need from suppliers.

It would also be a place for policy to be explained by government officials, where quangos define their requirements, and NHS trusts share what they are doing and the lessons they have learned.

Shane Tickell writes:

“As an acceptance grows across the NHS that there is a crucial need for integration across health and social care, the extent to which our National Health Service is disjointed is becoming increasingly clear.

In many areas, although of course not all, there are so many examples of different approaches, poor collaboration and lack of joined thinking between organisations despite their attempts to achieve the same goals. On many occasions, I’ve seen examples where an NHS organisation has shared the results of a successful pilot with another organisation hundreds of miles away and yet the trust just a few miles down the road has no idea the initiative even exists.

In recent years, healthcare IT events such as EHI Live have helped suppliers of all sizes showcase their solutions, albeit just once a year.

However, despite best efforts, most often suppliers with the biggest marketing budgets often take the centre stage, while the smaller, more innovative companies huddle around the edges trying to grab the attention of the odd delegate who is less wowed by the exciting gizmos and freebies on the bigger stands.

Equally, these events have been valuable in enabling the NHS to share their experiences by allowing them to participate in best practice showcases. But while these shows are valuable in providing those once-a-year opportunities to network and see what is available, ideas and information gathered can soon be forgotten once back in the busy NHS setting, until the next time an event comes around.

There are more than 400 pilots across the NHS and 300 ‘examples of innovation’ alone, according to the BCS. On top of all of that, my team recently mapped more than 40 NHS organisations and bodies, who work virtually disparately to attempt to provide the NHS with direction, standards and protocols.

So where does this leave the NHS – confused? Disjointed? Not a clue where to start when they are told that they need to collaborate and innovate to improve patient safety and care while saving vast sums of money?

The NHS needs a place that provides an educational and innovation forum covering everything related to electronic health and wellbeing that is available all year round – an electronic patient information centre.

At present there are pockets of innovation across the country. Initiatives set up by the National Innovation Centre and its associated ‘innovation hubs’ are providing a useful mechanism to support and adopt healthcare technology across the regions.

But an all year round centre would provide a central location for healthcare organisations, bodies, government and suppliers to meet, discuss and understand policy. Equally important, the centre would provide a valuable place to educate on future challenges and where they are being driven from and an opportunity to work together to help to address them as soon as they start to emerge.

Although it would require investment, such a centre would provide trusts, CCGs, private and independent organisations and just about anyone with an interest in health and social care regardless of their budget, size, location or IT savviness with the opportunity to attend at a time that is convenient for them.

Meanwhile, suppliers of any shape or size would have a level playing field from which to be represented and educate their current and potential customers, rather than trawling up and down the country trying to find inroads to speak to those on the frontline. In addition, it would ensure that all is not lost from the National Programme for IT and that lessons learned are shared.

For too long the NHS has had to rely on word of mouth and second-guessing how surrounding organisations are achieving success. Now is the time to really work together to ensure true innovation is shared and for everyone to have a chance to be part of it.”

LinkedIn group – Electronic Patient Information Centre 

shane.tickell@imsmaxims.com.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, health, health records, improving communications, innovation, procurement, public sector, public services, SME, technology

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Cornwall council’s deputy leader resigns over “inevitable” outsourcing plans

Posted on 10/10/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Jim Currie, the Conservative deputy leader of Conservative-controlled Cornwall County Council, has resigned in objection to the authority’s outsourcing plans.

“It’s an inevitability at this stage. I have done everything I can to try to influence the process and exhausted that,” he said in an email to the County Council’s leader Alec Robertson.

“The sensible thing is to step back if you’re out of step with the rest of the Cabinet.”

Parts of Currie’s email were published by Thisiscornwall.co.uk.

Some in the media suggest that Cornwall may make a u-turn over its plan to outsource support services to either BT or CSC. But Currie’s email suggests the opposite. He told Robertson “I know you will never let go.”

A small group of Cabinet councillors had expected to take the final decision to sign a deal with BT or CSC in November – a deal worth hundreds of millions of pounds – but they must now put the decision to a vote of the full council, which is expected to happen later this month.

The full council will be able to vote on the deal because independent councillor Andrew Wallis organised a petition which has collected 5,800 signatures. Any petition that collects a minimum of 5,000 signatures must go to the full council for debate and a vote.

The petition said: “We the undersigned call on Cornwall Council to reverse its decision to proceed with a Strategic Partnership for Shared Services until such time the majority of the elected members of Cornwall Council have voted to support the proposals.”

The petition is expected to be debated at a full council meeting on 23 October. Robertson has said he will abide by the decision of the full vote.

Extracts from Currie’s email to Robertson:

“I feel I have pushed the cause of retaining council control over the joint ventures as far as I can with the Cabinet.

“The financial risks involved with the rush into the new joint venture proposals are unacceptable. The JV [joint venture] is basically too large to control.

“We have wasted £42m+ on the unitary [authority], £42m+ on the incinerator and we are now proposing to risk a great deal more on the joint venture.

“I welcome your somewhat ambiguous offer to respect full council decisions on the 23rd October but I know you will never let go.

“I could not leave local government with billions of pounds of Cornish taxpayers’ money at risk and on my conscience… Alec, this matter has never been personal.”

Currie told Thisiscornwall  “Honestly, I have done everything I can do. I have been out on a limb for a very long time and will just have to let the thing take its course and it’s down to the membership and that’s what the council is supposed to be about.

“It’s absolutely the courage of my convictions and nothing else. The amazing thing is how many other people on the council think the same way across all parties. It’s tremendously non-political.”

Jeremy Rowe, leader of Cornwall’s Liberal Democrat group, told the BBC,

“We’re in a situation where Cornwall Council is becoming a laughing stock. There’s an administration there now which has this bunker mentality. It’s completely out of touch.”

Comment:

Will the inner circle of pro-outsourcing Cabinet members win a vote of the full council on 23 October, which would enable them to go ahead and sign a deal with BT or CSC?

The pro-outsourcing group may hope that most Conservative councillors and a few from the other groups will vote for a deal, perhaps knowing or caring little about it.

When the outsourcing was last debated by the full council, in September, many of Cornwall’s 123 councillors were either away or abstained. A majority of those who were there voted against the deal – but the Cabinet has ignored that vote.

The next time the deal is debated the pro-outsourcing Cabinet councillors may win the vote if most councillors turn up and vote to support the Cabinet whether or not they know much of the proposals.

The council comprises 47 Conservative councillors, 37 liberal democrats, 31 independents, six Mebyon Kernow, one Labour and one vacant seat.

Campaign4Change has argued that the pro-outsourcing Cabinet has, in defending the deal, quoted the arguments of the bidders, which shows signs of naivity.

Currie is right to say that the deal, as  proposed, is extraordinarily risky – and he is right to resign, if only to make a point to those councillors who are undecided on whether the council should outsource.

A mega-outsourcing plan beset by naive fanaticism?

Council deputy leader resigns over £300m outsourcing deal

Cornwall Council – our [shared services] journey

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, CSC, local government, outsourcing, public services, public-private partnerships, shared services

DWP starts media campaign on Universal Credit IT tomorrow

Posted on 19/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has told MPs his department is launching a “major exercise” tomorrow to inform the media about Universal Credit, including progress with the IT project.

The public relations push will include a demonstration to journalists of the Univeral Credit front-end, and an explanation of the ability of “agile” to rectify problems as you go along. Duncan Smith said there is a lot of ignorance in the media, and suppositions, that need tackling head on.

His full statement on the PR campaign is at the foot of this article.

Comment

Iain Duncan Smith’s remarks to MPs sound remarkably like the statements that were made in the early part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS, when DH ministers and senior officials were anxious to correct ignorance and suppositions in the media – and to show journalists the front end of new electronic patient record systems.

Several times journalists were invited to Richmond house in Whitehall, the HQ of the DH, to hear how well the NPfIT was going. So anxious were the minister and leading officials to give a good impression of the programme that, on one occasion, trade journalists who had an insight into the NPfIT’s progress and could ask some awkward questions in front of the general media were barred from attending.

I would like Universal Credit to succeed. In concept it simplifies the excessively complex and costly benefit system. The worrying thing about the scheme, apart from the DWP’s overly sensitive reactions to scepticism in the media, is the way UC seems to be following the path which led to NPfIT’s downfall.

The Secretary of State attacks the media while trying to show UC in a glowing light and at the same time keeps secret all the DWP’s interview reviews and reports on actual progress. Duncan Smith says that the DWP wants to be open on UC but his department is turning down FOI requests.

There is no doubt that Duncan Smith has a conviction that the programme is on course, on budget, and will deliver successfully. But there still a morass of uncertainty for the DWP to contend with, and lessons to be learnt from pilots, some of which could be important enough to require a fundamental re-think. That’s to say nothing of HMRC’s Real-Time Information project which is part of UC.

Duncan Smith says the UC project is not due to be complete until 2017 which gives the DWP ample time to get it right. But ministers and officials in the last administration gave the NPfIT 10 years to complete; and today, nine years later, the scheme is being officially dismantled.

Did NPfIT ministers really know or understand the extent of the project’s true complexities and uncertainties?  Did they fully grasp the limited ability of suppliers to deliver, or the willingness of the NHS to change?  But they were impressed with the patient record front-end system and they organised several Parliamentary events to demonstrate it to MPs.

The NPfIT public relations exercises – which included DH-sponsored DVDs and a board game to market the NPfIT – were all in the end pointless.

Should Duncan Smith be running Universal Credit?

This is another concern. Duncan Smith is much respected and admired in Parliament but he appears too close to UC to be an objective leader. At a hearing of the Work and Pensions this week Duncan Smith took mild criticism of UC as if it were a verbal attack on his child.

It is doubtful anyone working for Duncan Smith would dare give him bad news on UC , though he attends lots of departmental meetings. Doubtless he listens to all those who agree with him, those who are walking press releases on the progress of the UC programme. He’d be a good marketing/PR man on UC. But surely not its leader. Not the one making the most important decisions. For that you would need somebody who’s free from the politics, who is independently minded, and who welcomes informed criticism.

Is there any point in a demo of front-end systems?

Seeing a front-end system means little or nothing. The question is will it work in practice when it is scaled up, when exceptions come to light, and when large numbers of people try to contact the helpdesks because they cannot get to grips with the technology and the interfaces,  or have particular difficulties with their claim.

What will a media campaign achieve?

If the NPfIT experiences are anything to go by, journalists who criticise the UC project will be made to feel stupid or uninformed.

In a totalitarian regime the media could be forced to publish what the government wants people to believe. Will the DWP’s PR campaign be designed to achieve the same end without the slightest attempt at coercion?

Duncan Smith’s comments to MPs

Below is some of what Iain Duncan Smith told Work and Pensions Committee MPs this week. He had been asked by a Committee MP to have a dialogue with the media to ensure that people believe that Universal Credit is a good thing.

Duncan Smith:

“On Thursday we are carrying out a major exercise in informing the median about what we are doing, looking at the system front-end, about budgets and all the elements the committee has been inquiring into.

“We will take them through that, show them that. We are going to open up much more. It is such an important system that I want people to learn what it is all about.  There is a lot of ignorance in the media and suppositions made; things that are important to tackle head on. Everyone says you mustn’t have a big bang; you are not going to be ready in time. The time we deliver this is 2017 when it is complete.  That is over four years…”

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change, change management, culture, DWP, e-health, excessive secrecy, FOI, Government IT, IT projects, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, Politics, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Government Digital Service sets an example on cloud

Posted on 18/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Government Digital Service is putting its money where its mouth is. A leading public sector advocate of the cloud, GDS says that the first cloud hosting provider it is working with is Skyscape.

Mark O’Neill, Head of Service Delivery and Innovation at GDS, which is a team of innovators based at the Cabinet Office, writes that GDS is building GOV.UK, currently in beta at http://www.gov.uk.

“In the past, we might have looked at dedicated servers or possibly even our own rack in a datacentre somewhere. We would then have had to decide if we wanted to own the servers or if we should rent them some time to break out amortisation tables and spreadsheets.

“We would have to make sure that we were not locked in if we needed to move servers, so it would be necessary to negotiate break clauses in contracts; we would need to arrange access to server rooms for security accreditation; we would need to… well, the list goes on and on.

“The cloud has transformed all of this. Through the G-Cloud framework we are able to simply and rapidly buy highly reliable, highly cost-effective hosting services.

“Colleagues in GDS put together a statement of our requirements based on the experience we had gained during the alpha and the ongoing beta releases of GOV.UK and experience from the delivery of other major online services, both public and private sector.

“We then tested that statement of requirements against the list of suppliers on the G-Cloud framework. This allowed us to sift the number of potential providers down to four who met the statement of requirements.

“We then invited each of the suppliers in and used a consistent set of questions to explore their ability to meet our needs, their approach to operational service delivery and how they could provide flexible, scalable services through the cloud.

“To meet the needs of GOV.UK, we are planning to work with a number of different Infrastructure as a Service providers. We are happy to announce that the first cloud hosting provider we are working with is Skyscape.

“We have used G-Cloud previously for a number of small projects covering services like hosting and operations. We were very happy to discover that letting a major service contract for our flagship platform, GOV.UK, was equally straightforward and quick.

“Whilst the GOV.UK contract is the largest we have let so far, it is one of an increasing number we are letting through G-Cloud, which is now our standard way of procuring infrastructure services… If you have not used G-Cloud before then take a look, you will be pleasantly surprised. In the words of a song of my youth, ‘It was easy. It was cheap. Go and do it!'”

Introducing a new supplier – Skyscape

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Cloud, cost reduction, efficiency savings, Government IT, IT projects, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically

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Universal Credit – a chance to do things differently.

Posted on 13/09/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Comment

In his comment on the article “Is Univeral Credit really on track – the DWP hides the facts”  Nik Silver asks in essence: why shouldn’t progress reports by IBM and McKinsey on Universal Credit be kept between the parties and not made public?

He says that criticism is usually helpful if the two parties can speak frankly without external interference.

It’s a reasonable point – if you are judging the public sector by the private sector’s standards. A private company would not make public consultancy reports it has commissioned on the progress or otherwise of a particularly costly project. Why should it?

Private v public sector approaches on big projects

But if the project goes wrong the private sector board will be accountable for the loss of money, or opportunity, or both. A private company’s board cares about a failed project because it cares about the bottom line.  If there is cogent criticism in a consultancy report, it will ignore that criticism at its peril.

Those standards don’t always apply in the public sector. There is no bottom line to worry about, no individual responsibility. What matters is reputation. We have seen too many public sector failed projects where the desire to maintain face, politically and internally, distorts the truth on projects.

Several ministers were proclaiming the £11bn NHS IT plan, the NPfIT, to be a success while it was going disastrously wrong. On the Rural Payment Agency’s IT-based Single Payment Scheme Parliament discovered that bad news was covered up. Ministers Lord Bach and Lord Whitty said they were misled by their officials.

When the truth financially came out it was too late to turn around the project cheaply and easily. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee said that if such a failure had happened at a major plc, the board would have faced dismissal.

Cover up when a project goes wrong also happens in the private sector. But case studies indicate that when a private sector board finds out it has been lied to, it does its utmost to put things right. The bottom line is the motivation.

In the public sector it sometimes happens that nothing is done to put serious problems right because there is no acceptance there are any serious problems. Nobody is allowed to accept internally that things are going wrong. A state of unreality exists. Some know the project is doomed.  Some at the top think it’s on track. The truth in the consultancy reports remains hidden, even internally. [The DWP couldn’t find the IBM and McKinsey reports when we first asked for them.]

Like Nik Silver, we would like Universal Credit to succeed. We are not sure it will, because the truth is not coming out. Unless serious problems are admitted they cannot be tackled.

Public sector

In the public sector a disaster does not usually become apparent until things are so bad the seriousness of the problems cannot be denied. It may be that Universal Credit will be a success if it is delayed or changed substantially in scope. That won’t be possible without reports such as IBM’s and McKinsey’s being published.  In the meantime Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will  continue to be given papers showing that all is well.  If the IBM and McKinsey reports are published now, and they contain some serious high-level criticisms, perhaps impinging on policy and excessive complexity, the ills may be cured or at least tackled. If these and other progress reports are made public now the corrigible criticisms could create a political climate to address those ills.

At present Universal Credit looks like so many IT-based change programmes of the past.  One side says the project is becoming a disaster and the other side says all is well.  The truth I am sure is that some things look good and some things bad. The bad probably won’t be addressed unless Parliament, together with all those who have a professional interest in the project – and the public – know about it.

The way of the past is to keep everything hushed up until it’s too late. Now there’s a chance to do things differently.

Is Universal Credit really on track? – The DWP hides the facts.

Nik Silver’s website

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, Government IT, IBM, IT projects, npfit, openness and transparency, operational issues, private sector lessons for the public sector, project management, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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Well done Eric Pickles – more open government to engulf councils

Posted on 29/08/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Few people have noticed but changes to the law next month could force councils to be much more open about big spending decisions including those that involve contracting out IT and other services.

It is a pity though that similar changes will not apply to the NHS.

The Local Government Association says that councils are already more open than Whitehall which is true.

Even so some councils are innately secretive about IT-related spending decisions, and discussions about projects that go wrong. Somerset County Council was notoriously secretive about its Southwest One joint venture with IBM in 2007. The deal has not made the expected savings and has consistently made losses. IBM claims the deal is a success.

Haringey Council’s “Tech refresh” project which went way over budget is another example. Evasive answers to opposition questions and meetings in secret were the norm.

Liverpool City Council was extraordinarily defensive and secretive about progress or otherwise on its Liverpool Direct Ltd joint venture with BT. The deal included giving BT control of IT.

Better public scrutiny

Now Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has announced that changes to the law will mean that all decisions including those affecting budgets and local services will have to be taken in an open and public forum.

Ministers have put new regulations before Parliament that would come into force next month to extend the rights of people to attend all meetings of a council’s executive, its committees and subcommittees.

Pickles says the changes will result in greater public scrutiny. “The existing media definition will be broadened to cover organisations that provide internet news thereby opening up councils to local online news outlets. Individual councillors will also have stronger rights to scrutinise the actions of their council.

“Any executive decision that would result in the council incurring new spending or savings significantly affecting its budget or where it would affect the communities of two or more council wards will have to be taken in a more transparent way as a result.”

Councils will no longer be able to cite political advice as justification for closing a meeting to the public and press. Any intentional obstruction or refusal to supply certain documents could result in a fine for the individual concerned.

The changes clarify the limited circumstances where meetings can be closed, for example, where it is likely that a public meeting would result in the disclosure of confidential information. Where a meeting is due to be closed to the public, the council must now justify why that meeting is to be closed and give 28 days notice of such decision.

Chris Taggart, of OpenlyLocal.com, which has long championed the need to open council business up to public scrutiny, said

“In a world where hi-definition video cameras are under £100 and hyperlocal bloggers are doing some of the best council reporting in the country, it is crazy that councils are prohibiting members of the public from videoing, tweeting and live-blogging their meetings.”

These are the changes to be made by the  The Local Authorities (Executive Arrangements) (Meetings and Access to Information) (England) Regulations 2012 (the 2012 Regulations) which will come into force on 10 September 2012.

– Local authorities will have to provide reasonable facilities for members of the public to report council proceedings (regulation 4). This will make it easier for new ‘social media’ reporting of council executive meetings, opening proceedings to blogging, tweeting and hyper-local news/forum reporting.

– In the past council executives could hold meetings in private without giving public notice. From 10 September 2010 councils must give 28 days notice where a meeting is to be held in private, during which time people may make representations on why the meeting should be held in public. When the council wants to over-ride the notice period, it must publish a notice as soon as reasonably practicable explaining why the meeting is urgent and cannot be deferred (regulation 5).

– A document explaining the key decision to be made, the matter in respect of which a decision would be made, the documents to be considered before the decision is made, and the procedures for requesting details of those documents, has to be published (regulations 9).

– The new regulations create a presumption that all meetings of the executive, its committees and subcommittees are to be held in public (regulation 3) unless a narrowly-defined legal exception applies.

– Where the council has a document that contains materials relating to a business to be discussed at a public meeting, members of the local authority have additional rights to inspect such a document at least five days before the meeting (regulation 16). Previously no timescale existed.

– Where the council decides not to release the whole or part of a document to a member of an overview and scrutiny committee as requested by a councillor, it must provide a written statement to explain the reasons for not releasing such document (regulation 17).

– Documents relating to a key decision including background papers must be on the relevant local authority’s website (regulations 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, and 21).

Comment

Well done to Eric Pickles and the coalition. These are important and welcome changes. If council decision-makers know their discussions will be open to scrutiny they may give proper consideration to risks as well as the potential benefits of big IT-related investments. With inadequate scrutiny the potential benefits often drive decisions, which was the case with the flawed setting up of Southwest One. The press office at Liverpool City Council was so used to controlling information that its spokesman was outraged at questions we asked about its outsourcing venture with BT.

But what about the NHS?

It’s a pity the NHS is not subject to the new legal changes. Few trusts are open about their big IT-related investments; and when things go wrong, as has happened with some Cerner implementations, NHS trusts tend to lock all the doors, talk in whispers and instruct their press offices to issue statements that claim “teething troubles” have been largely addressed. The trust and everyone reading the statement know it is disingenuous but the facts to prove it are kept under wraps.

Organisations such as Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust are taking decisions about major IT upgrades that could affect the safety, health and lives of patients without proper scrutiny. Pickles may want to mention his legal innovations to Andrew Lansley.

Eric Pickles announcement on opening up council discussions and decisions 

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Posted in BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, decision-making, e-health, excessive secrecy, health, health records, improving communications, IT-related failures, local government, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, openness and transparency, operational issues, outsourcing, Politics, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, shared services

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Ex Government CIO Joe Harley rejoins private sector

Posted on 13/08/2012 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Former Government CIO Joe Harley has taken a position as non-executive adviser to Amor Group, an IT and business technology provider to the transport, energy and public sectors.

Amor says is taking the place of large systems integrators whose “monopolies are ending”.

It is Harley’s first official role since retiring from the civil service earlier this year.

Amor Group says it has “succeeded in recruiting the man credited with reforming the UK Government’s information communication and technology strategy to act as a strategic adviser”.

Harley was UK Government CIO between 2011 and 2012 and CIO at the Department of Work and Pensions from 2004 to 2012.

Amor has a turnover of about £45m and nearly 600 staff at offices in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry, London, Dubai and Houston.

Harley said,

“Amor Group is a new breed of companies that is helping organisations to improve their business performance and to manage their ICT budgets to deliver maximum value in the current economic climate and I am delighted to be helping a company which has grown year on year in a tough market, and that has such great ambitions for growth.

“Businesses are looking to more agile, flexible firms who can act quickly and save costs whilst not lowering service levels. I am looking forward to helping Amor continue that trend.”

John Innes, CEO at Amor, said,  “The days of the large systems integrators and monopolies are ending and we are taking their place. We signed a £18.5m contract last year with the Scottish Government to run its eProcurement service and we’ve seen real traction in International markets with our passenger tracking technology being installed at Dubai Airport and a number of wins for our Energy team in the US.

“What sets us apart is our culture as a company. We understand that technology only has a value when it delivers benefits to an organisation and we focus on delivering those benefits rather than selling heavyweight solutions.”

Harley’s background:

1993 – 1996: BP Alaska, IT director
1996 – 1998: BP Exploration and Downstream Europe, CIO
1998 – 2000: BP, global IT vice president
2000 – 2004: ICI Paints, CIO
2004 – 2012 Director General of Corporate IT and CIO, Department for Work and Pensions. Government CIO from 2011-2012.
Harley led the Universal Credit IT scheme which is due to go live from next October.

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Posted in CIO, DWP, public sector, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Some lessons from a major outage

Posted on 31/07/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

One of the main reasons for remote hosting is that you don’t have to worry about security and up-time is guaranteed. Support is 24x7x365. State-of-the-art data centres offer predictable, affordable, monthly charges.

In the UK more hospitals are opting for remote hosting of business-critical systems. Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust are among those taking remote hosting from Cerner, their main systems supplier.

More trusts are expected to do the same, for good reasons: remote hosting from Cerner will give Royal Berkshire a single point of contact to deal with on technical problems without the risks and delay of ascertaining whether the cause is hardware, third party software or application related.

But what when the network goes down – across the country and possibly internationally?

With remote hosting of business-critical systems becoming more widespread it’s worth looking at some of the implications of a major outage.

A failure at CSC’s Maidstone data centre in 2006 was compounded by problems with its recovery data centre in Royal Tunbridge Wells. Knock-on effects extended to information services in the North and West Midlands. The outage affected 80 trusts that were moving to CSC’s implementation of Lorenzo under the NPfIT.

An investigation later found that CSC had been over-optimistic when it informed NHS Connecting for Health that the situation was under control. Chris Johnson, a professor of computing science at Glasgow University, has written an excellent case study on what happened and how the failure knocked out primary and secondary levels of protection. What occured was a sequence of events nobody had predicted.

Cerner outage

Last week Cerner had a major outage across the US. Its international customers might also have been affected.

InformationWeek Healthcare reported that Cerner’s remote hosting service went down for about six hours on Monday, 23 July. It hit “hospital and physician practice clients all over the country”. Information Week said the unusual outage “reportedly took down the vendor’s entire network” and raised “new questions about the reliability of cloud-based hosting services”.

A Cerner spokesperson Kelli Christman told Information Week,

“Cerner’s remote-hosted clients experienced unscheduled downtime this week. Our clients all have downtime procedures in place to ensure patient safety. The issue has been resolved and clients are back up and running. A human error caused the outage. As a result, we are reviewing our training protocol and documented work instructions for any improvements that can be made.”

Christman did not respond to a question about how many Cerner clients were affected. HIStalk, a popular health IT blog, reported that hospital staff resorted to paper but it is unclear whether they would have had access to the most recent information on patients.

One Tweet by @UhVeeNesh said “Thank you Cerner for being down all day. Just how I like to start my week…with the computer system crashing for all of NorCal.”

Another by @wsnewcomb said “We have not charted any pts [patients] today. Not acceptable from a health care leader.”

Cerner Corp tweeted “Our apologies for the inconvenience today. The downtime should be resolved at this point.”

One HIStalk reader praised Cerner communications. Another didn’t:

“Communication was an issue during the downtime as Cerner’s support sites was down as well. Cerner unable to give an ETA on when systems would be back up. Some sites were given word of possible times, but other sites were left in the dark with no direction. Some sites only knew they were back up when staff started logging back into systems.

“Issue appears to have something to do with DNS entries being deleted across RHO network and possible Active Directory corruption. Outage was across all North America clients as well as some international clients.”

Colleen Becket, chairman and co-CEO of Vurbia Technologies, a cloud computing consultancy, told InformationWeek Healthcare that NCH Healthcare System, which includes two Tampa hospitals, had no access to its Cerner system for six hours. The outage affected the facilities and NCH’s ambulatory-care sites.

Lessons?

A HIStalk reader said Cerner has two electronic back-up options for remote hosted clients. Read-only access would have required the user to be able to log into Cerner’s systems, which wouldn’t have been possible with the DNS servers out of action last week.

Another downtime service downloads patient information to local computers, perhaps at least one on each floor, at regularly scheduled intervals, updated say every five minutes. “That way, even if all connection with [Cerner’s data centre] is lost, staff have information (including meds, labs and more) locally on each floor which is accurate up to the time of the last update”.

Finally, says the HIStalk commentator, “since this outage was due to a DNS problem, anyone logged into the system at the time it went down was able to stay logged in. This allowed many floors to continue to access the production system even while most of the terminals couldn’t connect.”

But could the NHS afford a remote hosted service, and a host of on-site back-up systems?

Common factors in health IT implementation failures

In its discussion on the Cerner outage, HIStalk put its finger on the common causes of hospital IT implementation failures. It says the main problems are usually:

– a lack of customer technical and implementation resources;
– poorly developed, self-deceiving project budgets that don’t support enough headcount, training, and hardware to get the job done right;
– letting IT run the project without getting users properly involved
– unreasonable and inflexible timelines as everybody wants to see something light quickly up after spending millions; and
– expecting that just implementing new software means clearing away all the bad decisions (and indecisions) of the past and forcing a fresh corporate agenda on users and physicians, with the suppplier being the convenient whipping boy for any complaints about ambitious and sometimes oppressive changes that the culture just can’t support.

Cerner hosting outage raises concerns

HIStalk on Cerner outage

Case study on CSC data centre crash in 2006

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Posted in Cerner, Disaster recovery, e-health, health, health records, IT-related failures, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services, Remote Hosting, software quality, supplier relationships