Category Archives: SME

Praise for departing Deputy government CIO

Posted on 10/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Bill McCluggage, the departing Deputy government CIO, has been praised by friends and colleagues for his strength of purpose as a change advocate, and for steering through the government ICT Strategy.

He is also admired by friends for “telling it like it is” despite the Cabinet Office’s restrictive communications policy.

Said one friend: “To get the ICT strategy out and into delivery underlines Bill’s credentials as a deliverer not just a strategist; and he regularly held his ground with those who sought to maintain the status quo.”

McCluggage announced this week he is leaving government to join storage supplier EMC. He said on Twitter that it’s “sad to leave excellent team that have delivered real change but time to move on and address new challenge”.  He said he counted himself “lucky to have been part of the vanguard of new GovtIT”.

Mike Bracken, Executive Director of Digital, Efficiency and Reform Group, Cabinet Office, said that Whitehall will be poorer in McCluggage’s absence.

McCluggage joined the Cabinet Office as Deputy Government CIO in September 2009. He has been Director of ICT Strategy & Policy and Senior Information Risk Owner with overall responsibility for the formulation, development and communication of cross-Government ICT strategies and policies.

He was IT Director at Harland & Wolff Heavy Industries in Belfast and was an engineering officer in the RAF. He is a chartered engineer and member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

As Deputy government CIO McCluggage has been a firm advocate of agile techniques, cloud computing, open source, cutting out waste and duplication, and bringing many more SMEs into GovIT.

Deputy Government CIO to join EMC.

Deputy government quits.

Cabinet Office loses another top ICT man.

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Posted in Agile, change, change management, Cloud Computing, collaboration, compliance with spending review, Government IT, innovation, managing change, procurement, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically, SME, Uncategorized

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The unavoidable truths about GovIT – by Cabinet Office official

Posted on 31/10/2011 | 14 comments

The vast majority of GovIT is “outrageously expensive” says Chris Chant. “Things have changed and we haven’t.”

By Tony Collins

Chris Chant is one of the most experienced IT officials in central government. He was CIO at Defra where he led IT service improvement programmes with strategic outsourcing partners  including IBM. His reforms helped to change the way people worked.

He was also CIO at the Government Olympic Executive, part of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Now he is an Executive Director in the Cabinet Office working as Programme Director for the G-Cloud initiative.

In a cloud computing event hosted by the Institute for Government in London, Chant told it like it is. The points he make indicate that major change is less of a risk to public finances than keeping the machinery of government as it is.

He began his talk by thanking those in government IT who have been“working their socks off”. He had been talking positively to his teams in the last week and now “it is time to recognise some of the less positive aspects about what we do”.

He added: “We need to face some unavoidable truths head on about government IT as it has been done.”

These were his main points:

“The vast majority of government IT in my view is outrageously expensive, is ridiculously slow, or agile-less, is poor quality in the main and, most unforgivably I think, is rarely user-centric in any meaningful way at all.”

He said it is unacceptable:

–  That “80% of Government IT is controlled by five corporations”.

–  That “some organisations outsource their IT strategy in Government”.

–  That “to change one line of code in one application can cost up to £50,000”.

–  To wait 12 weeks to get a server commissioned for use.  He said: “That’s pretty commonplace. When you think in terms of using a service like Amazon the most problematic thing on the critical path is the time it takes you to get your
credit card out of your wallet and enter the details on screen”.

–  That the civil service does not know the true cost of a service and the real exit costs from those services – the costs commercially, technically and from a business de-integration standpoint. “So  how do we untangle our way out of a particular product or service. I cannot tell you how many times I have had the discussion that says: we need to get away from that but we cannot because of the complexity of getting out from where we are: all the things hanging on to that particular service that we cannot disentangle ourself from.”

– To enter into any contracts for more than 12  months. “I cannot see how we can sit in a world of IT and acknowledge the arrival of the iPad in the last two years and yet somehow imagine we can predict what we are going to need to be doing in two or three, or five or seven or ten years time.”

–  Not to know in government “how many staff we have on the client side of IT”. He said: “I have not yet met anybody who knows what that figure is. People know about small areas but overall we don’t know what that figure is.

– Not to know what IT people do. “So we don’t have any idea of the breakdown of that number that we don’t know either, surprisingly. I think that is outrageous in this climate, and in any climate.”

–  Not to know “what systems we own how much they cost; and how much or even if they’re used”. He said: “I know there are organisations that have turned off tens of thousands of desktop services merely to discover if they are used anymore; and when they do that they discover maybe one per cent are still being used. That’s completely unacceptable.”

– Not to know when users give up on an online service; “and it’s unacceptable not to know why they give up”. He said: “Of course it is unacceptable that they have to give up because the service does not fulfil their needs.”

– to have a successful online service that sends out reminders to use that service through the post.

–  Not to be able to communicate with customers securely and electronically when technology clearly allows that to happen.

– Not to be able to “do our work from any device we choose”. He said: “That is possible and has been for some time. It’s outrageous we cannot do that.”

– To pay up to £3,500 per person per year for a desktop service.

–  That “your corporate desktop to take 10 minutes to boot and the same amount of time to close down”. He said: “But that is the truth of what goes on everyday in Government IT and I suspect the public sector too.”

–  For staff to be unable to access Twitter or YouTube, when they use those services for what they do.

– For call centre staff not to be able to access the very service they are supporting at the call centre. “It sounds funny but  when you think of the consequences of that it is truly dreadful.”

–  To ensure people are working by restricting their access to the Internet. “If we cannot measure people by outputs where on  earth are we?”

Above all, said Chant, “it is unacceptable not to engage  directly with the most agile forward-thinking suppliers that are in the SME  market today and are not among the suppliers we have been using”.

Chris Chant’s talk

This is much of what Chris Chant said:

“A bunch of people have worked their socks off [but], through no  fault of their own, on the wrong thing for some time too… And it’s quite tough being in IT because, a bit like  electricity, it’s one of the rare things people seem to use almost all of the time…but we need to face some unavoidable truths head on about government IT as it has been done.

The vast majority of government IT in my view is outrageously expensive, is ridiculously slow, or agile-less, is poor quality in  the main and, most unforgivably I think, is rarely user centric in any  meaningful way at all…

I’ll give you my personal view of the unacceptable. I have spent a lot of time with teams in the last week talking positively about things and I think it is time to recognise some of the less positive aspects of what we do.

I think it is unacceptable at this point in time to not know the true cost of a service and the real exit costs from those services; the costs commercially, technically and from a business de-integration standpoint – so how do we untangle our way out of a particular product or service? I cannot tell you how many times I have had the discussion that says: we need to get away from that but we cannot because of the complexity of getting out from where we are: all the things hanging on to that particular service that we cannot disentangle ourself from.

I think it is completely unacceptable at this point in time to enter into any contracts for more than 12 months. I cannot see how we can sit in a world of IT and acknowledge the arrival of the iPad in the last two years and yet somehow imagine we can predict what we are going to need to be doing in two to three, or five or seven or 10 years time. It is a complete nonsense.

And to those who say ‘what about a supplier upfront infrastructure: surely you have to fund that somehow?’ I would say: ‘why do we have to treat IT and particularly commodity IT any differently from any other commodity
around?’

Marks and Spencer does not come knocking on the door asking me to guarantee to buy three suits and two shirts a year for the next five years and then they will put a store at the bottom of the road… if you look at a small local garage that has to fund its hydraulic ramps and the computer equipment they now need. They do not ask people to fund that upfront. They go into the market confident of their products and confident of their pricing so they will get people back again and arrange for how that gets funding…

I think it is unacceptable not to know in government how many staff we have on the client side of IT. I have not yet met anybody who knows what that figure is. People know about small areas but overall we don’t know what that figure is. It is also unacceptable that we don’t know what those people do. So we don’t have any idea of the breakdown of that number that we don’t know either,  surprisingly. I think that is outrageous in this climate, and in any climate.

It is completely unacceptable we don’t know what systems we own and how much they cost; and how much or even if they’re used. I know there are organisations that have turned off tens of thousands of desktop services merely to discover if they are used anymore; and when they do that they discover maybe one per cent are still being used…

It is unacceptable not to know when users give up on an online service; and it’s unacceptable not to know why they give up. Of course it is unacceptable that they have to give up because the service does not fulfil their needs.

It unacceptable to have a successful online service that sends out reminders to use that service through the post…. Linked to that, it’s completely unacceptable not to be able to communicate with customers securely electronically when technology clearly allows that to happen.

It is unacceptable not to be able to do our work from any device we choose. That is possible and has been for some time.  It’s outrageous we cannot do that.

It is unacceptable to pay – and these figures are Public Accounts Committee figures – up to £3,500 per person per year for a desktop service.

It is unacceptable for your corporate desktop to take 10 minutes to boot and the same amount of time to close down. But that is the truth of what goes on everyday in Government IT and I suspect the public sector too.

It is unacceptable for staff to be unable to access Twitter or YouTube, when they use those services for what they do.

It is unacceptable for call centre staff not to be able to access the very service they are supporting at the call centre. It sounds funny but when you think of the consequences of that it is truly dreadful.

I think it is unacceptable in this day and age to ensure people are working by restricting their access to the Internet. If we cannot measure people by outputs where on earth are we?

It is unacceptable that 80% of Government IT is controlled  by five corporations.

It is unacceptable that some organisations outsource their IT strategy in Government.

It is unacceptable that to change one line of code in one application can cost up to £50,000.

It is unacceptable to wait 12 weeks to get a server commissioned for use. That’s pretty commonplace. When you think in terms of using a service like Amazon the most problematic thing on the critical path is the time it takes you to get your credit card out of your wallet and enter the details on screen.

Above all – and at the heart of a lot of this – it is unacceptable not to engage directly with the most agile forward-thinking suppliers that are in the SME market today and are not among the suppliers we have been using.

So things have changed and we haven’t is what has happened.

A lot of these things could have been explained away five or 10 years ago but I
don’t think they could have been explained away adequately in the last three years, probably at least.

So how does G-cloud help in all of this? I think G-Cloud is about a fundamental change in the way Government and I believe the public sector too does technology. It is not just about cloud computing. It requires a complete change of approach. A cultural change of approach. A change in the way we look at security; a change in the way we look at service management and above all change in the way we procure services we use. So cloud will be cheaper…

Using cloud solutions that have already been secured and accredited
will be cheaper almost always.  We will only pay for what we use. People will only use DR when they use DR.

Over time through the G-Cloud programme, products will be pre-procured and security accredited. They won’t be accredited by the programme itself but by the first users of this, so we don’t have to replicate that work time and time again because that is what a lot of our staff are doing. A lot of the tens of thousands of staff that are working on the client side of government and public sector IT are procuring the same things, accrediting the same things from a security perspective; and it is a complete and utter waste of time and huge money.

You’ll know from the outset the cost of the product and most importantly we will know the cost of exit. Nuclear power looked really cheap all the time somebody chose to ignore de-commissioning of nuclear power stations, and then it became a very different model.

Contracts will be under a year I believe… I don’t believe aggregated demand and long-term contracts bring value for money. Quite the reverse…  why anybody would offer somebody a contract  which meant we could carry on paying them money almost regardless of the service we got, with no meaningful incentive for better performance? That can all change. When we have the ability, through understanding exit and understanding the cost and performance of things, to move out of one product and into another in short order, I guarantee that the price will come down …

… Costs [of streaming] used to be outrageous and the quality was poor until the BBC put together standards on the way it’s done and the BBC can now buy services on daily basis and the cost has dropped by an order of magnitude and the quality is much improved. They know –  the service providers – that tomorrow somebody can go somewhere else. If Marks and Spencer does not provide clothes at the right price and quality people will go down the road and buy somewhere else. It is that, that drives quality and price, not a long-term contract.

[When people see that] products have clear pricing, clear details of what they do, clear details of what exiting that product is going to be like, and it says: ‘Andy Nelson at the Ministry of Justice has used this product over the last year and this is what he says about of it’, that starts to transform what happens on price and quality far and away above anything that any SLA can or ever has given us. So we won’t get ourselves locked in in any way. Not from a commercial or technical perspective. Many products nowadays are designed to get their little feelers locked into every part of your system….

Our staff over time will become skilled system integrators. That’s what will happen in the short term…

We will see people setting up services in minutes instead of years. How?

We have Foundation Delivery Partners – they are departments, local authorities, organisations that come together with others that are looking
to buy cloud products. The FDPs work with a bunch of people from the government procurement service who handle the commercial aspects; they work with staff from CESG to work out security implications and product by product they have begun to break down what it is they need to do, so subsequently that work does not need to be redone.

Over time we will have a model that describes lots of different circumstances of use of products so we will know – the senior risk information officer – will know what has been covered off already and will see the accreditation that has gone on and will know they will only have to fine tune that for the last bit of use in their department. That will dramatically reduce over time the amount of effort that goes into that security.

Large-scale IL3 email is coming soon; and large-scale IL3 collaboration
opportunities…

[The Government Digital Service is off] corporate systems to a solution that is IL0 and IL1 and 2, with IL3 on a few machines to one side. [There are] savings of 82% over adopting the corporate systems. People don’t wait 10 minutes for machines to boot up and shut down.

We don’t have all the answers… Great quality IT centres around an iterative process that gets stuff out and we learn quickly from what users do with it and is improved and improved.  I don’t recall a press release saying Google will update its apps products on 8 May next year. What happens is you notice a little banner saying we have done it differently: do you want to try it? How many times have you seen improvements on eBay and just experienced them as they arrived?

They are intuitive and what people want and they just happen… [Published in last few minutes] is a new cloud framework that is designed specifically to get SMEs across the threshold and working directly with departments, agencies, local authorities, police and health. There is a user guide. It is a key product.

We will watch very carefully how this gets used, and the impact on SMEs. I don’t anticipate any large organisations having difficulty with this. But the target is to get us engaged with SMEs.

We will watch what their problems are and we will correct that as we go. We are already working on the second version of this which will be due out, hopefully, early in the new year. With brilliant support from John Collington in the Government Procurement Service we will be adding new suppliers on a month by month basis which will dramatically change things and really gives us the flexibility we need.

The second manifestation of how serious we are in the cloud is a document to be published tomorrow which will give a very serious indication of intent around the use of cloud…”

Chris Chant’s talk – audio file Government Digital Service

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change, change management, Cloud, Cloud Computing, G-Cloud, government, Government IT, innovation, procurement, public sector, public services, reforms, SME, supplier relationships, Uncategorized

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Will the government’s ICT implementation plan finally lock on to the SME solutions it misses?

Posted on 30/10/2011 | 3 comments

By David Bicknell

The  government has the potential to leverage its huge buying power in the ICT marketplace. However, the government’s procurement of ICT has in many cases failed to deliver economies of scale and failed to deliver value for money to the taxpayer.

So that is why the latest ICT implementation plan has an objective for the reform of government procurement by centralising common goods and services spend by funding improvements in technology, processes and government wide procurement resources to better manage total procurement spend and government wide standards. 

The government insists it is therefore committed to become a single and effective ICT customer, leveraging buying power whilst remaining flexible on how it procures.

As part of that process the  government says it will create a more open, transparent and competitive ICT marketplace embracing open standards and open source that will remove barriers to SME participation in public sector procurement to create a fairer and more competitive marketplace.

It is important that these barriers to SME participation are removed, because these smaller innovative companies have solutions that the private sector recognises and which will pay to acquire, but which the government seems to miss.

One, ChangeBASE, which specialises in automated application analysis, remediation and conversion for platforms including Windows 7 and 8, Internet Explorer 8 and 9, Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Session Host, VDI, and Application Virtualisation, has just been snapped up by Quest Software  to help Quest become a single source to help organisations take advantage of technology changes to benefit both IT and users alike.

Another UK SME, Procession, continues to try and make the government aware of its technology for the creation of business application software that is both rapidf and agile. Procession’s CEO David Chassels recently wrote to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude to try and engage with the government in its goal of becoming a better and more intelligent buyer of ICT. It also plans to speak at a forthcoming “teacamp”, the latest of a series of informal meeting places to stimulate ideas and discussion about government work in ICT.

A third, BCS, provides a global universal library subscription service that provides monthly audit data analysis and optimisation for devices, making audit data much easier to manage and understand. It has also created a carbon footprint library that enables organisations to establish a desktop estate baseline for CO2 information so that they can establish and manage software influence on CO2 output and reduce their carbon offset purchase requirements.

There are countless other SMEs offering innovative solutions to help deliver value for money for the taxpayer that the government still probably has no knowledge about, and which have long since given government procurement up as a lost cause.  The  government says it will create a more open, transparent and competitive ICT marketplace that embraces open standards and open source and that removes barriers to SME participation in public sector procurement.

As they say, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

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Posted in Agile, Business Intelligence, Campaign4Change, innovation, procurement, SME, Value

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SMEs and Agile to play key role as Government launches ICT plan to deliver £1.4bn of savings

Posted on 23/10/2011 | 1 comment

By David Bicknell

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has launched a plan to implement the Government’s ICT strategy which it says will deliver around £1.4bn of savings within the next 4 years and help deliver better public services digitally. 

In its foreword to the Strategic Implementation Plan, the Government says it is committed to reducing waste and delivering modern public services at lower cost:

“We have already saved hundreds of millions of pounds in 2010/11 by stopping or reducing spend on ‘low value’ ICT projects. These quick wins demonstrate what can be achieved by taking a whole of government approach and challenging the way we operate and provide services.

“The Government ICT Strategy, published in March 2011, described our longer term programmes of reform to improve Government ICT and deliver greater savings. This Strategic Implementation Plan provides a reference for central government and is designed to be read alongside the Government ICT Strategy.

“Our plans are focused on standardising government ICT. In the past, government departments worked to their own requirements and often procured expensive bespoke ICT systems and solutions to meet them. As a result, departments have been tied in to inflexible and costly ICT solutions which together have created a fragmented ICT estate that impedes the efficiencies created by sharing and re-use. It also prevents government from offering joined-up, modern, digitally-based public services that are suited to local requirements.

“Affordability in the current ‘age of austerity’ requires a different approach. The approach set out in this plan ensures that departments will now work in a collegiate way, underpinned by rigorous controls and mandates.

“This is not just a plan to reduce the cost and inefficiency of departmental ICT.  Effective implementation of the Strategy has already begun in programmes that will radically reform front line public services. For example, the Universal Credit programme is one of the first ‘Digital by Default’ services, using an Agile approach to reduce delivery risk and improve business outcomes. 

“Success or failure of government ICT depends on greater business preparedness, competency in change management and effective process re-engineering. That is why, although we focus on the common infrastructure as a way of significantly reducing costs, the ICT Strategy (and this plan) recognises the need for a change in our approach to ICT implementation. In particular, implementation will be driven through the centre, as a series of smaller, local ICT elements, rather than ‘big bang’ programmes that often fail to deliver the value required.”

Significantly, the government says it will continue to reduce waste by engaging SMEs:

“Building on the £300 million already saved (from May 2010 – March 2011) by applying greater scrutiny to ICT expenditure, government will continue to reduce waste by making it easier for departments to share and re-use solutions through the creation of an ICT Asset and Services Knowledgebase, applications store, using more open source, and improving the ICT capability of the workforce. At the same time, it will reduce the risk of project failure and stimulate economic growth by adopting agile programme and project management methods and reforming procurement approaches to make it easier for SMEs to bid for contracts. 

“For all relevant software procurements across government, open source solutions will be considered fairly against proprietary solutions based on value for money (VFM) and total cost of ownership. Success will be measured initially by a survey of each department’s compliance with the existing open source policy. Longer term, open source usage will be measured annually by the use of a departmental maturity model. The ICT Asset and Services Knowledgebase will be used to record the reuse of existing open source solutions, and the deployment of new open source solutions.”

Specfically on procurement, the Government says it has the potential to leverage its huge buying power in the ICT marketplace. But it admits that government procurement of ICT “has in some cases failed to deliver economies of scale and failed to deliver value for money to the taxpayer.”

The government says its objective is to “reform government procurement through the centralisation of common goods and services spend by funding improvements in technology, processes and government wide procurement resources to better manage total procurement spend and government wide standards, such as those for green ICT.”

“Government is therefore committed to become a single and effective ICT customer, leveraging buying power whilst remaining flexible on how it procures. As part of this process government will create a more open, transparent and competitive ICT marketplace embracing open standards and open source that will remove barriers to SME participation in public sector procurement to create a fairer and more competitive marketplace.

Government Procurement has a number of strategic goals, including to:

  • create an integrated Government Procurement (GP) to deliver and manage the Operating Model for Centralised Procurement for all common goods and services including ICT, delivering cost reductions in excess of 25% from the 2009/10 baseline of £13bn;
  • transform Government Procurement Service (GPS) to be leaner, more efficient and to become the engine room of government procurement, delivering savings through sourcing, category, data and customer management across all categories of common spend including ICT;
  • formalise agreements between GPS and all departments to deliver centralised procurement and to improve capability, including within the ICT spend category;
  • deliver policy and capability improvements covering EU procurement regulations; transparency in procurement and contracting; removing barriers to SMEs; and
  • mandate open standards and a level playing field for open source; streamline the procurement process using ‘lean’ plus supporting programme to develop the capability of civil servants who lead government procurements.

The government says its key procurement metrics will be

  • Total spend under management on ICT common goods and services
  • Savings on ICT common goods and services
  • Number of ICT contracts with a lifetime value greater than £100m
  • Time to deliver ICT procurements
  • Number of active ICT procurements

On Agile, the government says many large government ICT projects have been slow to implement and technology requirements have not always been considered early on in the policy making process, resulting in an increased risk of project failure. Agile project methods, it argues, can improve the capability to deliver successful projects, allowing projects to respond to changing business requirements and releasing benefits earlier.

Its Agile objective is to improve the way in which the central government delivers business change by introducing Agile project management and delivery techniques.

By 2014, it says, Agile will reduce the average departmental ICT enabled change delivery timescales by 20%.

In delivering this, the government says it will be measured by:

  • Number of departments who have used the online Agile facility
  • Number of projects using “agile” techniques, by department
  • Total number of instances where the virtual centre of excellence has been utilised

ICT Strategy Strategic Implementation Plan

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, Cloud Computing, government, Government IT, procurement, SME, Universal Credit

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Maude: “We want services to be run by mutuals, social enterprises and small businesses”

Posted on 20/10/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude is to reinforce the message that the government wants its  services to be run and delivered by mutuals, social enterprises and small businesses.

Maude will tell a conference: “In the current climate we can no longer afford waste – demand for services is growing at a time of fiscal constraint.

“But we should not tolerate wasting public money whatever the economic climate. We need to find new ways of delivering public services that are high quality, cost effective and genuinely responsive to the needs of individuals, communities and businesses at local level.

“We believe that nearly all public services can be improved by being delivered by a wide range of organisations. What and how services are delivered are more important than who they are delivered by, and competition breeds innovation and creativity. These in turn will deliver service improvements.

“We want services to be run and delivered by mutuals, social enterprises and small businesses; and we want the talented people who are enthusiastic about what they do to be freed up to deliver services in the way that they think is best.”

Maude’s message comes as most public sector managers say they outsource work to save money, with few believing it leads to improved services.

A survey of 100 human resources directors from government departments, local authorities, NHS trusts and police forces revealed concerns that outsourcing services to private firms would lead to a loss of expertise in the public sector.

The research, by Totaljobs.com, found that almost two-thirds of managers believed outsourcing would cut costs, while only one in four said it would deliver better quality services.

The report will be discussed at the conference aimed at examining the implications on recruitment and skills of Government plans to achieve £40 billion of procurement savings in the next three years

Mike Booker of Totaljobs.com said: “The perception that the skills needed in the public and private sector are somehow different is being swept away by the more pressing need to work together to achieve £40 billion in savings.

“While we’re seeing large numbers of public sector workers looking to migrate to the private sector, it must not be forgotten that essential private sector skills are in high demand in the public sector with our site alone housing 326 postings for public sector procurement professionals.”

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Posted in Campaign4Change, procurement, public sector, public services, SME, social economy, social enterprise

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Civil Service too risk averse at a micro level

Posted on 23/09/2011 | 1 comment

 Faced with big challenges, the Civil Service thought small thoughts.  [Tony Blair, memoirs]

A report by the House of Commons Public Administration Committee has warned that the Coalition Government needs a more transparent and flexible Civil Service when it comes to commissioning public services from charities, social enterprises, mutuals and private companies.

The Committee’s report says the Civil Service needs to transfer power out of Whitehall and into communities and as a result fundamentally change the way it works.

It says the challenge of this new role will be compounded by the need to meet sizeable reductions in administrative budgets set out in the 2010 Spending Review.

Its conclusions are that while the Government seeks to embrace change, it has failed to recognise the scale of reform required or to set out the change programme required to achieve this reform. It says there is a reluctance to produce what they see as the latest in a long line of reform initiatives in Whitehall. This antipathy to a plan for reform fails to take note of the critical factors for success in Civil Service reform initiatives and wider corporate change programmes: coordination from the centre and strong political leadership. As a result, it warns, key policies like the ‘Big Society’ agenda and decentralisation will fail.

The Committee says: “We have recommended that the Government should produce a comprehensive change programme articulating clearly what it believes the Civil Service is for, how it must change and with a timetable of clear milestones. Such a change programme would enable real change in Whitehall and avoid the fate of previous unsuccessful reform initiatives.

“Such a change programme must also include proposals for the Civil Service to retain and to develop the new skill sets required to meet the demands of the Big Society policy agenda, and to address long-running concerns about the decline in specialist expertise in Whitehall, the failure to innovate and to take risks, and the failure to work across departmental silos. Such a plan is required to combat inertia and deliver government policies where Ministers and departments may otherwise be unwilling or unable to drive change.

“To reflect the changing role of the Civil Service, we have also recommended that the Government should consider the development of a new Haldane model of accountability which can sustain localism and decentralisation; or they must explain how the existing model remains relevant. The new realities of devolving power out of Whitehall to local government and elsewhere should be codified in the Civil Service governance structures.

“Ministers seem to believe that change will just happen. It is essential that the Cabinet Office take leadership of the reforms and coordinate the efforts in individual departments and across Whitehall as a whole. The scale of the challenges faced by the Civil Service calls for the establishment of a world class centre of Government, headed by someone with the authority to insist on delivery across Whitehall.”

In particular, the report says the main change of task, which will affect many but not all departments, will be an increase in commissioning and contracting. More onerous and time-consuming, however, will be monitoring the contracting process and dealing with problems and complaints arising.

The report says Whitehall has traditionally performed three core roles: policy advice, the management of public services, and the supervision of public bodies. If the Civil Service is to connect with Ministers’ ambitions for public service reform a fourth capability will need to be added to this trio: the ability to engage with groups from the voluntary and private sectors through the contracting and commissioning process. Every government department must focus on developing this fourth capability, and the Cabinet Office must ensure that this is embedded in the Civil Service change programme across government.

The report explains why SMEs have made so few inroads into government work. 

It goes so far as to depict ministers as not understanding Civil Service inertia, which means they cannot come up with a plan to do anything about it. Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maude, described a paradoxical situation where Government took huge risks at a macro level, but at a micro level tended to be very risk averse and hostile to innovation.

He added, “You do not often hear of someone’s career suffering because they preside over an inefficient status quo, but try something new that does not work and that can blot your copybook bigtime.”

 An example of one SME’s innovative ideas

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Are civil servants giving more work to SMEs – or less?

Posted on 15/09/2011 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

David Cameron, in a speech to a Government procurement conference on 11 February 2011, gave a pledge to ensure that  “25% of all government contracts are awarded to small and medium-sized enterprises”.

He said: “If we meet this goal it will mean billions of pounds worth of new business opportunities for SMEs”.

The Government has since dropped its pledge to give SMEs 25% of public sector contracts, though it remains an “aspiration”. To back this up, departments are under pressure to show they have awarded more work to small and medium-sized businesses.

As part of David Cameron’s Transparency commitments, all departments are required to publish each new contract let over £10,000 and state whether this contract has been let to a SME.

This information is available on the new Contracts Finder website alongside tender documents and opportunities. As part of the business plan process each department is also required to measure and publish the percentage of their third party spend that goes directly to SMEs.

The Government says it is investigating how best to collect data on spend with SMEs as sub-contractors.

That said, the firm target of 25% has been dropped because European tendering rules do not allow officials to give contracts specifically to smaller businesses.

The Cabinet Office says its official position now is:

“We will promote small business procurement, in particular by introducing an aspiration that 25% of government contracts should be awarded to small and medium-sized businesses.”

The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has been more cautious. He said at the time of Cameron’s talk that “as much as” 25% of public service contracts will be awarded to the private and voluntary sector in a bid to break up existing public service monopolies.

Have plans for more SME work gone into reverse? 

eWeek Europe now reports the concerns of SMEs that the 25% aspiration may give way to plans to consolidate government administrative work which could end up with major suppliers being given even more work.

eWeek Europe says that at the first meeting of the ‘New Suppliers to Government’ working group, which was put together by the Cabinet Office, members said the government’s aspiration to place 25% of its business with SMEs is in direct conflict with projects such as Sir Philip Green’s ‘Efficiency Review’,  which pushes for consolidation within the supply chain.

“There are two competing tensions inside the government,” said Mark Taylor, CEO of Sirius and lead for the New Suppliers to Government working group. “One of them is the Cabinet Office’s stated commitment to getting more SME involvement. However, the other drive within government is pushing things the other way…

 “The implication of that programme is they will reduce the number of people they buy from to a very small amount of very large suppliers,” said Taylor. While this can be an effective way to cut costs through economies of scale, it is not appropriate to every sector, added Taylor.

In the case of IT innovative ideas are coming from smaller companies, which can help reduce government spending through agile processes and open source.

Taylor cited the Ministry of Justice’s Cipher project as an example of how SMEs are being elbowed out of contracts as a result of these conflicting objectives. In March 2011, the MoJ cancelled freelance IT contractors supplied through SMEs and transferred their work to outsourcing company Capita and its £123m Cipher contract.

“The solution that we are proposing is very simple,” said Taylor. “In the private sector, companies of whatever size will purchase from whichever entity makes the most sense. If it’s a commoditised service, buy it from a huge supermarket at commodity prices. If it’s a specialised service that is appropriate for the business, buy it from an SME.”

Stephen Allott, the Cabinet Office’s crown representative for SMEs, has said it will take up to two years for Whitehall to stop excluding small businesses from work they could do more effectively than larger rivals.

Allott was quoted in the Telegraph as saying that meaningful reforms were being rolled out, but that they would take time to be implemented. “There are a lot of things that need to be fixed,” he said.

Comment:

There is a real risk that the coalition’s laudable aspirations to change the way government works will fall victim to a combination of strong lobbying by the big suppliers and overwhelming forces within the civil service to keep things much as they are, which usually means playing safe – or that is how it is perceived – by continuing to rely on the large suppliers, the so-called systems integrators.   

For decades the big companies have had their way and have been paid very well for services of mixed quality. One result of the domination of big suppliers is that inefficiency is endemic. The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude wants government to change and we support him. He’ll need to do more to make change happen, though. Meanwhile the civil service is doing what it does best: keeping the hands of ministers off the steering wheel. Maude is being given so much work that, in his words, it’s difficult to “keep all the plates spinning”.

Many in the Cabinet Office want to support Maude and effect reform. But can they do it when Maude is distracted by having too much work, the big suppliers are doing all they can to keep and expand their existing contracts, and departmental civil servants are confortable in their existing SI relationships?

eWeek Europe

An example of one SME’s innovative ideas

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Posted in change, Government IT, procurement, public sector, public services, SME, Uncategorized

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Agile – a series of London Tea Parties

Posted on 15/09/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Anyone interested in agile techniques  – users and suppliers, public and private sectors – is invited to share ideas at a London Tea Party on 22 September at the Cafe Zest, 2nd Floor of the House of Fraser on Victoria Street, from 4pm – 6pm.

It is arranged by Abby Peel who has recently joined Mark O’Neill in the Innovation and Delivery team within the Government Digital Service. Peel is Head of Community.

Peel says that “AgileTea”  is an informal get-together for those who work with agile methods, are interested in it, or who know nothing about it but want to know more.

An example of agile in government is the Government e-petitions website which was launched recently to much public interest after being developed by the Innovation team in six weeks.

AgileTea will be the first of a regular series of informal, BarCamp style events that will bring together like-minded people to hear, contribute and engage in discussion of agile methods.

Each meeting will have guest speakers. Anyone can ask to give a short presentation of up to 10 minutes.  At the first AgileTea speakers will be Richard Pawson  from Naked Objects who’ll talk on “Experience of very large scale agile development at the Irish Department of Social Protection” and Mark Foden of Foden Grealy who’ll speak on “Where agile fits”.

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Why this SME’s innovative ideas may help Nick Clegg understand the real causes of the riots

Posted on 12/09/2011 | 1 comment

Could a new approach detect the early warning signs of radicalism in a way that ordinary research, surveys and intelligence gathering couldn’t? Or spot when programmes to reduce re-offending aren’t working?

In this guest blog, Andrew Moore, chief operating officer at DAV Management, whose customers include large public and private sector organisations, explains why government research into complex situations, such as the causes of the recent riots or making offender management more effective, requires a different approach that goes beyond supporting preconceived hypotheses to give new insights and fresh perspectives, and crucially, offers a means of detecting the early signals of situations that are developing in communities which can either be encouraged for the wider good or damped down before they can pose a threat.

Improving the Citizen Experience

An innovative approach to surveys and research

There is a currently a great deal of interest within government circles to determine how best to engage with its various stakeholders in different, more effective (and understandably less expensive) ways.

There’s the Big Society, the attempt to establish ‘happiness’ as a measure of the nation’s wellbeing (rather than just good old GDP), the need to engage citizens in a more direct and effective manner, with services designed around them rather than the structure of government.  In addition there are specific events that trigger the Government’s need to interact with sections of the population, such as the recent announcement by Nick Clegg that he wants to engage with communities affected by the summer riots in England, in order to understand who did what and why.  Then there are the government’s internal stakeholders – its employees, with whom it is seeking an altogether more symbiotic relationship – devolving power to the people on the front line who frequently know how to run services in a more effective and efficient manner.

‘Mutualisation’ and ‘Third Sector’ are terms that I suspect everyone is likely to become more familiar with over the next few years, even if now they may require some defining.  The long running debate about the future of the NHS is a very good case in point. And there’s the stated desire to get SMEs delivering innovation as part of effective government procurement.  As an interesting adjunct to this, let’s not forget that employees are also citizens, creating a fascinating cross-over of interlinked perspectives.

Of course there are other groups who may be thought of as stakeholders and these will have a very specific perspective on the delivery of public services.  I’m thinking here of offenders – those serving their debt to society and for whom the government is seeking ways to improve rehabilitation, reduce re-offending and become much more effective at identifying those most susceptible to radicalisation, extremism or self-harm. This of course has been brought into sharper focus by discussions over the severity of post-riot sentencing.

All in all, this represents a hefty agenda of public services reform and one which will test the government’s strategic planning and policy implementation ability to the max.  With such degrees of change being considered, it is encouraging to hear that government is embarking upon a listening exercise to garner the views of citizens, employees and service users, as some recipients of public services are now known.  Understanding what people want in order to deliver services they will use is a laudable objective, but what a task this must represent.  How on earth do you make this achievable?  Consider for a moment the potential population sample.  What constituency would you choose?  How do you get people to participate with sensible and meaningful responses?

Even if you can get all this feedback, how do you make sense of it?  How would you store, manage and interpret the sheer volume of data, relating to so many different aspects of life and stakeholder groups?  How could you be sure it doesn’t end up as an exercise designed to prove (or disprove) preconceived positions?  How would you spot the things that you don’t recognise – the identification of a strong belief system (that could make or break any changes in the way public services are delivered); the early signs of a rise in community ‘temperature’ that could lead to the kind of civil disorder witnessed in cities across England during August this year; or the indicators that some offenders are significantly more willing (and likely) to rehabilitate under certain conditions?  I could go on but I don’t want to labour the point.

It’s clear that in an exercise that will fundamentally change how most people interact with both central and local government, it makes sense to give those people a voice.  But this has to be in a controlled and manageable way, so that it is quick and easy to understand what that voice is telling you; gaining truly unique insights and fresh perspectives from which actionable decisions can be made and monitored that make a real difference to people’s lives, be they citizens, employees or service users – or, in some circumstances, perhaps a combination of all three!

Making people part of the process in this way is also an effective way of getting buy-in.  People are more likely to feel engaged, even if it’s by proxy (i.e. evidence of meaningful consultation establishes a degree of credibility) and by its very nature, changes the basis of the relationship between government and those stakeholders with whom it is seeking to engage.

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So what’s the point in all this, why are these things being suggested as anything new?  After all, the idea of planning, shaping and delivering services against a well-defined need is surely common sense and is recognised as such by most people.  Well, as they say, the problem with common sense is that it’s not that common.  The truth is that the kind of knowledge and insight that is likely to be required by government in order to shape and deliver its vision for public services, is difficult (if not impossible) to gain from traditional methods and technology. A different approach is required.

What if you were able to poll large samples of the population on a variety of different topics and have the findings presented to you quickly and simply, in a way that wasn’t mediated by ‘experts’ and allowed you to interact directly with the data – at both a quantitative and qualitative level?  What if you were able to see things that you hadn’t expected; things that blew away commonly held perceptions about citizens or employees – giving you a clear and substantiated view of how people are feeling, what they really think of particular programmes and initiatives and how they are responding to specific policies and interventions?  Imagine being able to detect early opportunities to take action on a particular initiative that enabled you to maximise the benefits downstream or damp down a threat before it was even recognised as such.

It all sounds too good to be true, but advances in cognitive based solutions, using micro-narratives (snippets, stories, reports and other qualitative data) captured from samples of your target ‘audience’ and self-indexed by them to provide meaning from which incisive action can be taken, are turning these scenarios into reality.

The problem for strategists and policy and decision makers is that the environment in which they are operating is hugely complex; there are many small causes that interact and interweave to produce an end result, but no one cause is dominant.  The whole environment is continually adapting and changing and you can’t measure it at a point in time – it’s constantly evolving.  This is what’s known as a ‘complex adaptive system’.  It’s the kind of environment where outcomes are difficult to predict.  It’s highly sensitive to small changes, meaning emerges through interaction and, with the benefit of hindsight, you might be able to see where, when and why things have happened and how you could have dealt with a particular situation, but at the time it was erratic and novel.  Sadly, hindsight does not lead to foresight and processes to prevent a similar situation occurring next time will fail, because the next time things will happen differently.  The August riots in England were a perfect example of this scenario, where multiple small, erratic events interacted and evolved to produce a disproportionate, unpredictable and, in this case, catastrophic outcome, which the government is still trying to understand the cause of.

Complex situations frequently occur when you are dealing with people because they are inherently unpredictable and often driven by emotion.  The bad news for government is that, one way or another, people are at the heart of all of the major change initiatives and civil events that are currently under the policy spotlight.  You begin to get a sense for the scale of the challenge.  Not an overnight thing this.  [By the way, if you’re having difficulty getting to grips with the concept of a complex adaptive system think of mayonnaise.  If you’ve ever tried to make this from scratch you’ll know how uncertain it feels as the ingredients combine and the mayo gradually emerges.  One slip and it will curdle, the end result is never the same and it can’t be reverse engineered].

Fortunately, when trying to get to grips with a complex situation, a cognitive approach again comes to our rescue.  It enables us to probe the situation, sense what’s happening where and why and then respond accordingly.  It’s liberating for policy makers as it opens the door for innovation, enabling organisations to try things and see what works best in particular situations.  Fast feedback loops promote a low-risk, ‘safe-to-fail’ environment where those ideas that aren’t working are quickly identified and turned off, enabling us to get behind those that are delivering tangible results.  In this way, new services and new ways of working can evolve, meaning that the end result has a much higher chance of widespread adoption and, hence, long-term success.

The really good news for government is that game changing solutions of this type are really in the sweet spot when it comes to getting ‘more for less’, as today’s economy demands.  The levels of investment required are a fraction of the amounts that have typically been associated with major government change initiatives.  They are also much simpler to implement and run.  Once set up, data capture, analysis and reporting can be built into an organisation’s day to day operational processes, supporting (and stimulating) how it interacts with the citizens or service users it serves, or the employees it depends upon for the delivery of those services.  For example, making it part of how Offender Managers (previously known as Probation Officers) interact with offenders to try and reduce re-offending would be an excellent way to capture how the latter group is responding, say, to changing institutional attitudes and behaviours, revealing to what extent infantilisation (i.e. treating offenders in a condescending manner, as if still children) is being reduced.

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A recent case in Canada illustrates how the solution can be implemented to improve the delivery of healthcare services.  In this instance, the authorities in British Columbia initiated a programme to help them understand the perspectives of all parties implicated in the unfortunate death of an elderly patient.  This had resulted from a breakdown in communication and subsequent decision making following the patient’s admittance to hospital suffering from congestive heart failure. Not unusually in these circumstances the single, sentinel event of the patient’s death was seen from very different perspectives by the various groups involved.  By adopting a cognitive based approach the authority was able to bring together front line and management staff to make sense of these conflicting perspectives and, as a result of the unique ‘safe-to-fail’ experimentation techniques supported by the approach, it was able to trial and subsequently implement changes in both policy and service delivery that will not only help to prevent similar incidents occurring in the future but also raised the quality of healthcare provided to patients more generally.

Just think how powerful such an approach would be for Nick Clegg in his quest to understand the complex human behaviours and emotions that came together to fuel the aforementioned riots in England.  And to have this at your disposal not only as a platform from which to take decisive action now but also to generate alerts when the ‘community temperature’ again begins to rise, must surely present a huge opportunity that any civil authority worth its salt would want to take advantage of. Instead it would appear that research initiatives are being launched by those with an interest in understanding and curing society’s ills that, albeit well-meaning and based on credible empirical evidence, may still ultimately turn out to be incomplete.  My concern would be that if a traditional research approach is adopted to try and make sense of what is essentially a complex situation (as I have defined above) then such initiatives risk revealing only those things that are readily recognisable and, having been mediated by ‘experts’, support preconceived hypotheses.  They are likely to  miss the opportunity to discern unexpected findings arising directly from the contribution of the people affected by (and involved in) the riots and fail to detect the early signals of situations that are developing in those communities, which can either be encouraged for the wider good or damped down before they can cause further unrest.  Addressing these issues by adopting a cognitive based approach will provide a much more effective feed into future policy decisions and social interventions.

If you’re new to the concept of cognitive based solutions it can be a bit of a challenge to get to grips with how they work and just what they give you, but once you’ve experienced the power of the knowledge and understanding that they deliver, you start to see applications everywhere you look.  The big advantage is that it’s easy to get started with low-cost, low-risk pilots that can start to make a difference to any organisation in a very short space of time.

To learn more, visit http://davmanagement.com/default.asp?id=833&ver=1

Contact Andrew Moore at andrew.moore@davmanagement.com

Or call +44 (0)1189 974 0100

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Mutuals and SMEs under spotlight as government responds to EC procurement green paper

Posted on 07/09/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

A post on Public Service Europe has argued that the govenment needs to explain its positioning on some key public procurement issues, notably in relation to mutuals and SMEs.

The post, written by a UK lawyer, argues that the government’s proposals sound ‘refreshingly promising’ but may reflect some  contradictions in wider policy.

It suggests that “the penny seems to have dropped in government that procurement policy is central to getting the economy moving again and not simply the esoteric occupation of a small number of professionals. The government has now published a Procurement Policy Note (05/11) setting out how it intends to engage with the commission on the reform of the rules. The note states that the rules as they currently stand are too complex, onerous and costly and encourage a risk-averse and over-bureaucratic approach to procurement within the EU.”

It adds that, “The note confirms that the government will be actively influencing the commission, other EU member states and the European Parliament in the run up to the publication of the commission’s proposals for revised and updated directives, and calls on those in the public procurement community who may have links to such bodies or other stakeholders to participate in that process and push the UK message. Whether the government will be successful; only time will tell. In the meantime it could let us know where it stands on the above issues.”

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