IT and Climate Change: out of sight, but not out of mind?

Posted on 28/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

There isn’t a much bigger example of fundamental change than climate change. And there aren’t any bigger examples of breaking down the barriers to change than trying to get some meaningful action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. At a time of economic autumn, there is a risk of climate change and sustainability heading down the business/government ‘must-do’ pecking order.

So it’s good that the United Nations conference on Climate Change has come round this week to concentrate minds. This year, it’s in South Africa, in Durban.

I liked this blog written by Colin Curtis, director of sustainability at Dimemsion Data, who sums up some of the issues and discusses how the company’s own IT department has performed in reducing the organisation’s carbon footprint, notably through virtualisation.

I suspect with the travails of the Euro, we may hear less about the UN conference this week than we did a couple of years ago in Copenhagen. But out of sight needn’t mean out of mind.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Climate Change, energy efficiency, environmental

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Why those driving the creation of public sector mutuals are Investors, not Conservers

Posted on 25/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

All those considering setting up public sector mutuals like Hammersmith & Fulham  – and those in the middle of running successful mutual pathfinders such as Central Surrey Health – know the importance of investing in their vision and backing it.

That’s why I liked this piece by Craig Dearden-Philips, who while discussing third sector organisations, makes a distinction between Investors and Conservers.

“My guess though is that the people who make the biggest difference in the world , certainly socially, are almost all on Investors. These people are not ‘born’. They make a choice about how to live. They know that the Investment Principle works – and they live by it.

“Of course, Investment isn’t just a one way street. Investments frequently don’t pay off. In people, in relationships, in business. You get burned as much as you get it right. And investments that are not made judiciously, in people or ventures that are wrong to begin with, are not defensible either. Being investment-minded isn’t about being a soft-heart. But it is about understanding the powerful link between investment and reward and making this, somehow, a feature in the way you operate.”

Wise words.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, health, managing change, mutualisation, mutuals, NHS, public sector, public services, SME, social economy, social enterprise

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The capital, contractual, governance and leadership questions facing creative councils over mutuals

Posted on 24/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

There are some good points raised in this article in about the challenges facing creative councils who may be considering the adoption of new mutual models.

It raises some useful questions around capital, governance, contracts, relationships, management, growth, leadership and how the private sector can help.

Worth a read.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector, public services, reforms

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Officials pay supplier invoices – then raise purchase orders

Posted on 24/11/2011 | 1 comment

This morning the National Audit Office has published a report that says the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in up to 35% of cases, raises its purchase order after it gets the invoice from suppliers.

It’s unlikely that any private sector company could survive if it didn’t know what it owed, didn’t know what it had bought, and had to wait for an invoice from the supplier to raise the purchase order.

Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO, says in his report today:

“While I welcome the considerable improvements that the Commission has made in its controls over procurement, there are still areas where it needs to make improvements. In particular, up to 35% of the Commission’s purchase orders are still not raised until after the Commission has received an invoice for goods and services.

“This means that Commission staff are committing funds without going through proper processes and are avoiding some of the checking processes. Consequently the Commission does not have an accurate understanding of its committed expenditure at any one point in time.

“The Chief Executive has made it clear that he takes noncompliance with these processes seriously such that in cases of repeated non-compliance delegations will be withdrawn.”

A common practice? 

Is this absence of proper accounting worryingly common in central government and its agencies, particularly on IT contracts?

Auditors told us that in the case of NPfIT contracts they found some invoices that were paid when they came in, awaiting reconciliation with any past paperwork.

This, perhaps, ties in with the experiences of Conservative MP Richard Bacon, a member of Public Accounts Committee who, when asking civil servants for a breakdown of IT spending has, in the past, been referred to the department’s IT supplier.

On the C-Nomis IT project for prisons, the National Offender Management Service paid £161m without keeping any record of what the payments were for.

The Cabinet Office wants to cut the £17bn or so spent every year on public sector IT. But before departments, agencies and other organisations cut their costs they’ll need to know what those costs are. Maybe they should ask their major IT suppliers? We wonder if the domination of GovIT by a small number of suppliers has got to the stage where it’s the suppliers managing the civil service IT budgets. If that’s the case it is not the fault of suppliers.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, capacity building, change management, Government IT, managing change, managing outsourced services, operational issues, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, public sector, public services, supplier relationships

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Chief procurement officer: “40% of government contracts in September were with SMEs”

Posted on 23/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The Government has put forward the Olympic Delivery Authority as an example of procurement best practice in the public sector.

Chief procurement officer John Collington told the Cabinet Office  procurement conference earlier this week: “They have delivered the Olympics in time and on schedule in terms of the work so far and they have done so with openness and transparency.

“We in government must take the same approach, so every procurement must start with the principle, what will that supply chain look like and how will SMEs be allowed into that supply chain.”

Collington said that in September 2011, 1600 contracts, or 40% of government contracts, were agreed with small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), compared with only 5% in January.

Coillington has promised more business with SMEs in the future, along with new commercial contractual models, more instances of re-use of equipment and systems across government and more savings and value for money.

Banned – consultants on some procurements
Government is giving more business to smaller firms

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Posted in Campaign4Change, government, Government IT, procurement, SME

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Government CIO to retire

Posted on 22/11/2011 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

CIO reports today that Joe Harley, the Government CIO and CIO for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), is retiring next year.

Harley has been CIO for the DWP for seven years and just last year was promoted to Government CIO.

The DWP says on its website:

“After more than seven years of major accomplishments as CIO for the DWP and one year as the Government CIO, Joe Harley, CBE, has decided to retire from the Civil Service in the Spring of 2012.

“Joe has transformed IT in the Department which has made a huge difference to the efficiency and effectiveness of IT and of the DWP as a whole.”

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said:

“I would like to thank Joe for his significant and exceptional contribution to DWP and the Government – he has been instrumental in building reform and modernising our approach to technology.

“Joe leaves us with our highest regards having secured this Government well-placed to deliver major reform in the future.”

Harley said:

“It’s been a great honour and a privilege to have served the Department and Government over the years. It’s been a hugely fulfilling experience. I am proud to have made some contribution to improving Public Services for the benefit of the citizen and the tax payer.”

DWP Permanent Secretary Robert Devereux said:

“I want to thank Joe for his enormous contribution to the Department’s performance. He has been pivotal in establishing commercial arrangements which give value for money, and in the delivery of major changes to IT underpinning services which are critical for millions of people every day. The IT for Universal Credit, in particular, is on track. I wish him well in his retirement.”

Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary Ian Watmore said:

“Joe has accomplished great things in his time as Government CIO, having created and published a transformational ICT Strategy, along with plans of how it will be implemented.

“I would like to thank him personally for his leadership and huge contribution to Public Service and the ICT Profession across Government.”

Minister for Cabinet Office Francis Maude said:

“Joe has played an integral role in the past year whilst as Government CIO – he has led the delivery of a new ICT strategy and strategic implementation plan.

“These will ensure that the old siloed way of developing government ICT projects comes to an end, and leaves us with all departments working together to produce a fit-for-purpose and cost effective ICT system potentially saving £1.4 billion over the next 4 years.”

The process for selecting his successor, as CIO for DWP, will begin immediately. The Cabinet Office will run a separate process for the next Government CIO along with the process that is already underway to replace Bill McCluggage, the Deputy Government CIO.

Comment

Joe Harley has achieved much within the DWP – including cutting costs and helping to set up the administration, based on agile principles, of Universal Credit .

But it was always going to be difficult combining a full-time job as DWP CIO with that of Government CIO.

Harley’s retirement gives the government a chance to appoint a full-time CIO who is passionate about structural change and can build a strong public profile on the need for it.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, capacity building, change, change management, Government IT, managing change, managing outsourced services, operational issues, procurement, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically, reforms, Universal Credit

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Banned – consultants on some procurements

Posted on 22/11/2011 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has told suppliers that the Government now forbids the use of consultants in central government procurements without his express agreement.

In a speech, Maude said “Too often in the past we have defaulted into a comfort zone of hiring external consultants to run any kind of complex procurements…

“It reduces the need and ability for public officials to develop the necessary skills. And it can happen that consultants being paid on day rates have no incentive to get procurements finished speedily, nor to drive simplicity.

“Far too many procurements feature absurdly over-prescriptive requirements. We should be procuring on the basis of the outcomes and outputs we seek, not the detailed inputs. We should be focusing on the “what”, not the “how”.

“This kind of procurement drives out innovative and competitive suppliers.  So we will ensure that in future we focus on outputs and outcomes. And we now forbid the use of consultants in central government procurements without my express agreement.

“Further in central Government we will insist that every official running a significant procurement is trained to run it swiftly and efficiently.”

Maude says he wants to ensure that officials and politicians are “equipped with the skills to engage knowledgeably and confidently with suppliers”.

The Cabinet Office says it is “mandating” that all civil servants responsible for running major procurements are trained in the Government’s new approach.

Mutuals

Maude says he wants the Government to have access to the widest range of the best suppliers.

“The only question we will consider when choosing suppliers is who will give us the best cost effective service. In the past people thought there was some kind of binary choice of the government providing a service or outsourcing. It didn’t get us the best services.

“What we’re interested in is better business models, which will include mutuals. And other kinds of different providers – social enterprises, charities, joint ventures.”

Taking EC laws too literally?
He suggested that the civil service has a tendency to “over-interpret” and “over-react” to EC tendering laws and so take a “deliberately short-sighted approach to working with business”.  The result of that “has been a bias against British-based firms”.

He added:  “So while Germany and France nurture mutually beneficial long-term relationships with their key suppliers – the British public sector has taken a speed dating approach to ours.

“It’s not even as if this approach has led to outstandingly good purchasing delivering brilliantly cheap deals.  Actually the reverse.  Because we have made it really difficult and expensive for smaller British suppliers even to bid for business, we’ve excluded some of the most innovative and competitive suppliers from doing business with us and for us.

“This already matters a very great deal.  But it’s going to matter even more in future.  For as we set out in our Open Public Services White Paper we expect ever more of our public services to be delivered not by the public sector itself but from outside, whether by mutuals, joint ventures, social or charitable enterprises or conventional commercial providers.

“This is a market that is going to increase in size and scale.

“So: an approach that hurts British businesses and British jobs; delivering poor value for the taxpayer: that’s what the Coalition Government inherited.  And it’s going to change.”

Comment

Maude talks about change with conviction, which is why some senior civil servants hope he’ll move on soon. Until that happens the civil service will support the need for change while doing little or nothing differently: civil servants haven’t even allowed Maude to carry out his promise of publishing “Gateway” reviews while they are still current.

But there are some things Maude can do whether the civil servants like it or not, such as ban consultants from buying exercises, which should stop some procurements from becoming unnecessarily complex and prolonged; and it is through Maude’s influence that a new and deeply unattractive NPfIT deal with CSC has not been signed.

But it’s only when Maude beats his chest and roars, and gives his full support to those civil servants who are equally passionate about change, that structural reform will happen.

And it needs to happen soon because Maude and the coalition will not be around forever – unlike the change-resisters within the civil service.

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Posted in Campaign4Change

Getting the mutuals message across more effectively through knowledge networks

Posted on 21/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

Despite all the discussion about mutuals – scarcely a week goes by without a new feature being written in a trade magazine about them – it seems the message has yet to reach some councils. A recent Transition Institute blog recently cited having to give a council director an ‘idiot’s guide’ to mutuals.

The blog made the excellent point that with the financial squeeze on local authorities getting ever tighter,  hard choices are having to be made to maintain public services. It points out that decision makers care about two things: one, maintaining a level of service so that outcomes do not seriously worsen, and two, saving money.

“Supporting staff ownership comes nowhere near these priorities on the agenda, if it features at all. If a staff-owned provider can deliver on both, then great, but a mutual is very unlikely to be given the kind of preferential treatment it needs and deserves to get off the ground if there’s an established voluntary or private sector provider waiting in the wings.”

What will make a difference? The blog suggests that apart from an effective Mutuals Support Programme,  what’s necessary are better knowledge networks than the public sector currently operates which can get over the need for new public service mutuals to have a real impact.

It rightly says: “At the moment we have small-scale, isolated, localised experience: brave pioneers beating a path through dense jungle, feeling like they have to do it all for the very first time, navigating the toughest political landscape imaginable. What we need are networks, a major cross-pollination and peer support effort that goes beyond the vague to the specific and real, and tackles head on the tactics and techniques you need to master to make the case for mutuals, to colleagues and political masters who are unlikely to care all that much.”

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Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector, public services, social economy, social enterprise

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Do councils have the management capacity to adopt a mutuals approach?

Posted on 18/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

There is more evidence of interest in mutuals in this article from Personnel Today.

It makes some good points, notably that cash-strapped councils may lack the management resource to nurture mutuals.

Peter Reilly, the Institute of Employment Studies’ director of HR research and consultancy, who is quoted in the article, detects a division in local government between those willing to experiment with the mutuals option and those who still need convincing. “I think you have got a much bigger number of councils watching and waiting to see what comes of it,” he says. He questions whether or not councils have the management capacity to undertake such a change “if you are also trying to take out 25% of your costs at the same time”.

It is a view backed by Councillor Steve Reed, leader of Labour-controlled Lambeth Council in London, who told Personnel Today, “It’s a huge ask of the organisation, if I am honest,” he says. “We’re dealing with cuts bigger than managers have ever dealt with in their lives and then you ask them to manage in a completely different way.”

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Posted in Campaign4Change, managing outsourced services, mutualisation, mutuals, public sector, public services

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G-Cloud and agile briefings

Posted on 18/11/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

On 22 November the Government Digital Service is giving a briefing for potential G-Cloud suppliers. It’ll be streamed live.

Officials say the briefing will be particularly useful to suppliers whose employees have never participated in a government tender.

At the ApplyCamp, officials will explain G-Cloud, steps in the OJEU procurement process, what information potential G-Cloud suppliers need to give, and what happens next.

The event is particularly aimed at Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service and other specialist cloud service suppliers. It will be held at Google, 76 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 9TQ – 3pm – 5pm.

Agile TeaCamp – 24 November

Between 4pm and 6pm at the Cafe Zest, House of Fraser, Victoria St, London, there will be talks on agile. Derrick Cameron, MD of software consultancy Eximium and COO of agile software house Procession will speak on “Becoming the Intelligent Buyer”.  Chris Parsons, a “freelance thinker, coder and trainer” will talk about the e-petitions project and the aims of the Agile Delivery Network.

Teacamps in November and December – Government Digital Service

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Posted in Agile, Business Intelligence, capacity building, change, change management, Cloud, Cloud Computing, EU procurement, G-Cloud, Government IT, innovation, Lean, managing change, procurement, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically, reforms, SME, supplier relationships

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