FireControl – should PA Consulting share some responsibility for what happened?

Posted on 01/07/2011 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

The defence and aerospace supplier EADS is widely regarded as the main supplier of the FireControl project which was cancelled in December 2010, with wasted costs of at least £469m.

But did the project have too many consultants, some of whom were  accountability-free? The question is raised by report published today on FireControl by the National Audit Office.

Says the report:

 “The implementation of FiReControl was heavily reliant on consultants and interim staff, who contributed around half the Department’s [for Communities and Local Government] project team at a cost of £68.6m, over three-quarters of the total spend on the national team supporting the project.

“PA Consulting was contracted to provide consultancy services at a cost of £42m to the end of March 2011. Its staff held key positions throughout the project, including the Project Manager, one of only two senior members of the team who remained on the project throughout its duration.

“Despite the Department’s reliance on consultants, there was no framework to assess their performance until the end of 2008, when the National Audit Office recommended that the Department’s contracts with consultants should include mechanisms to enable regular objective monitoring of performance, such as performance indicators and key milestones.

“Without such mechanisms, the Department was unable to determine whether or not the services provided offered value for money.

“A review of the FiReControl project by the Office of Government Commerce in 2008 similarly found that some consultants in key management roles did not have a level of authority matching their responsibilities, which led to decisions being referred to others.

“Other consultants were found to hold a disproportionate (and accountability-free) amount of authority. In response, the Department reviewed its use of consultants and interims within FiReControl and reduced the number employed, leading to a fall of 24% in consultancy costs between 2008-09 and 2009-10, and a further fall of 26 per cent in the following year.”

The failure of the FireControl project – and many other central government IT-based programmes dating back decades – shows the need for independent challenge as projects progress or otherwise.

Gateway reviews are independent reports on the state of a project but they appear to be ignored if they’re too critical, as in the cases of FireControl and the Rural Payments Agency’s Single Payment Scheme; and the Gateway review reports are secret – even today – so there is no outside pressure on departments to act on them.

What’s to be welcomed is the intervention of the Cabinet Office in major projects. FireControl systems could have been delivered. They could have worked. But there were too many missed deadlines and continuing uncertainties, as the NAO points out in today’s report.

The Cabinet Office’s major Projects Review Group, as it was then, said the FireControl contract should be ended – and it was a few months later, amicably, in December 2010.

All credit to the NAO for naming PA Consulting, as well as the main supplier EADS.

NAO report on FireControl.

What FireControl and NPfIT have in common.

FireControl disaster blasted by unions

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What the FireControl disaster and NPfIT have in common

Posted on 01/07/2011 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

From today’s National Audit Office report on FireControl project which wasted at least £469m:

“FiReControl was flawed from the outset because it did not have the support of the majority of those essential to its success – its users”

Were the Fire and Rescue Service’s FireControl project and the National Programme for IT in the NHS launched to discover all that can go wrong with a large IT-based project?

One could be forgiven for thinking so. The two projects were conceived in the early part of the new millennium as national, centralised schemes which, in the main, did not have any support from the people who would be using them.

The schemes were launched by civil servants and ministers with good intentions and little or no experience in the many IT-related project disasters that went before.

The projects that had failed since the late 1970s and early 1980s went wrong for similar reasons. As early as 1984 the Public Accounts Committee met to question civil servants on the common factors in a succession of “administrative computing” failures.

Since then every department has come to its IT-based projects and programmes with little understanding – and very little interest – in the lessons from history; and it’s said that those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat past mistakes.

The FireControl system, which is the subject of an NAO report today, and the NPfIT, had something striking in common: the fact that the system users were the ones with the control of money and decisions on how they spent it – and they did not want technology imposed on them by civil servants in London. That was clear from the start. But it did not stop either the NPfIT or FireControl going ahead.

Indeed a Gateway Review by the Office of Government Commerce in April 2004, after the FireControl project had been approved, found that the “extraordinarily fast pace” of the project was introducing new risks to its delivery, and was escalating the risks already identified. The review concluded that the project was in poor condition overall and at significant risk of failing to deliver.

That review was, at the time, as with similar reviews on the NPfIT, kept secret, so those outside the project, including MPs and the media, were unable to challenge the projects with a credibility that could have influenced decisions on the future of the schemes.

New gateway reviews are still kept secret today, despite the coalition’s promise of openness and transparency.

The good thing about the FireControl project and the NPfIT is that the Cabinet Office has taken control. A Cabinet Office Major Projects Review Group in in July 2010 concluded that negotiations should begin to terminate the FireControl contract – and indeed a settlement with the supplier EADS was reached successfully and amicably in December 2010. The Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority is now  reviewing the future of CSC’s £2.9bn worth of NPfIT contracts.

The bad thing is that the FireControl scheme has wasted at least £469m, according to today’s report of the National Audit Office. The NPfIT may have lost a great deal more.

NAO’s conclusion on FireControl

This was the NAO’s conclusion on the FireControl project. Much the same could be said of the NPfIT:

“This is an example of bad value for money. FiReControl will have wasted a minimum of £469m, through its failure to provide any enhancement to the capacity of the control centres of Fire and Rescue Services after seven years.

“At root, this outcome has been reached because the Department, without sufficient mandatory powers, decided to try to centrally impose a national control system on unwilling locally accountable bodies, which prize their distinctiveness from each other and their freedom to choose their own equipment.

“At the same time, it tried to rush through key elements of project initiation and ended up with an inadequate IT contract, under-appreciating its complexity and risk, and then mismanaged problems with the IT contractor’s performance and delivery.”

 Links:

FireControl project a comprehensive failure.

The failure of the FireControl project – NAO report.

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12 good reasons to mutualise

Posted on 01/07/2011 | 1 comment

By David Bicknell

There are 12 good reasons to mutualise, according to City law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse (FFW)

FFW has advised on the restructuring of NHS Hull’s community health services to became an example of how public services could be transferred to an employee led social enterprise, City Health Care Partnership CIC.

12 months into the project, says FFW, City Health Care Partnership CIC is enjoying the benefits of becoming a social enterprise which demonstrates that the drivers for social enterprise and public service mutualisation are as valid as ever.

These benefits, FFW says, include:

  1. Improved staff motivation
  2. Improved customer (i.e. patient) satisfaction
  3. Leaner and more efficient structures
  4. More responsive services
  5. Real teamwork
  6. Opportunities to grow the business
  7. Strengthened connection to the community
  8. Flexibility and agility
  9. Less red tape – ability to introduce better ways of
    working, more quickly
  10. Greater sense of inclusiveness and participation
  11. Control of destiny
  12. Ability to contribute to the wider needs of target
    communities

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Could a new mutuals model work for trading standards?

Posted on 30/06/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

A mutuals-like model for trading standards has been proposed by Consumer Focus, the statutory consumer champion, which in a paper, discusses the future of trading standards in light of spending cuts, the Government’s new empowerment strategy and changing consumer power.

The paper, ‘Hard times or our mutual friend’, by Paul Connolly,  is an excellent read and argues that the Trading Standards community should engage with another Government agenda:  mutualisation.

It says:

“Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude wants to see mutuals widely adopted. He suggests within 10 years they will become ‘one of the major types of organisation providing excellent public services’ in a redistribution of power and ownership comparable with 1980s reforms.

“His reasoning is clear. First, he wants to continue the process of public service reform by ensuring direct ‘in-house’ delivery continues to be ‘contested’. In the past this primarily meant outsourcing. Plainly under this administration private providers will continue to feature in service delivery. However, the Government has indicated it wants a more diversified range of providers, including more small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

“Further, creating mutual structures can contest services, while empowering staff and short circuiting the public/private antagonism.

“Indeed, workforce empowerment is key. Mutualisation and outsourcing to SMEs, cooperatives and charities, are both connected with Big Society thinking. Government wishes to divest itself of direct responsibility for state delivery, but to do so in ways which spread associated commercial opportunities to those who have not benefited previously.

“This includes giving opportunities to existing public sector staff. Indeed, enthusiasts for mutuals believe workforce energies can be harnessed to support reform. Frontline staff understand their services, but are often inhibited from innovating by constraining bureaucracy.

“Decoupling mutuals from bureaucracies and giving staff stakes that link productivity to personal rewards encourage entrepreneurship and improve standards.

“Mutuals are not a ‘fluffy’ option. They are run as businesses. But the staff engagement model of mutuals, where rewards are linked to innovation, service improvement and productivity gains, means there is a real prospect of harmonising the interests of service producers and the individuals and communities they serve.

“There are many challenges associated with mutualisation. Is the largest public sector retrenchment in history the ideal moment to encourage people to risk a semi-commercialised model of delivery? Should staff downsizing precede or follow mutual incorporation? And how on current trends will the numbers mutualising substantiate Maude’s claims of an importance comparable with privatisation?

“The 12 pilots on the Cabinet Office website are pretty small, niche services, mostly in the health and social care arenas. Small and mutualisation might be perceived as a natural match, but there’s nothing to stop a whole agency, hospital, or local authority mutualising, John Lewis-style, or a series of small thematically-linked mutuals being incorporated under a franchising umbrella, like the Co-Op. Whatever, a substantial increase in adopters will be needed to match Maude’s ambitions. That will mean lots of services taking a risk. The danger for this intriguing agenda – which has attracted interest across the political spectrum – is that it doesn’t fly because volunteers are few.

“Nevertheless, Government continues to signal its intent in this area. Mutualisation is being strongly encouraged in areas of health, such as community care. The Public Services (Social Enterprise and Social Value) Bill is intended to put wind in the sails of mutualisation, while the Localism Bill calls for staff-managed approaches to be among the options considered in re engineering local services.

“The Trading Standards profession could do Francis Maude and themselves a favour by ‘going mutual’. Under the leadership of the Trading Standards Institute (TSI) – itself already in effect a social enterprise – and the Trading Standards Policy Forum, with possible input from Local Better Regulation Office (LBRO), one of two approaches could be adopted: a national super-mutual, covering England initially, but evolving to the devolved contexts following suitable negotiations, could be formed.

“It would be a single incorporated body. It would have a national head office. It would co-ordinate the use of any resources it received from central Government (the implied new BIS monies for instance) to address complex, nationwide and international threats. It would oversee and co-ordinate the delivery activities of suitably located regional, sub-regional and local offices.

“The mutual’s services would be purchased by local and central Government to meet statutory Trading Standards obligations.

“A second option, perhaps more realistic given that some Local Authority Trading Standards Services (LATSS) partnerships have already incorporated as businesses, would be for TSI and the other players to create a mutuals confederation. This would be a franchise support hub for a national network of local mutuals, each created as and when individual LATSS departments chose to incorporate. The hub would again attract funding for national projects and but would also co-ordinate the activities of the network, providing mechanisms for collaboration between local mutuals, and new sub-regional and regional structures, where appropriate.”

It is intriguing to see the mutual model being considered in this way. I hope for those considering creating mutuals, that the Consumer Focus trading standards paper might offer some useful ideas. It’s certainly worth a read – and we’d be interested in your comments.

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NHS IT supplier “corrects” Health CIO’s statements

Posted on 30/06/2011 | 3 comments

An IT supplier to the NHS has written to MPs to “correct” statements made by Health CIO Christine Connelly.

The implications of the supplier’s corrections are that Conservative MP Richard Bacon might have been right all along:  that the Department of Health may be paying BT as much as £200m more than necessary to install the “RiO” patient record system at 25 trusts in the south of England.

The corrections by CSE Healthcare Systems – supplier of RiO – call into question some of the Department of Health’s justifications for the high costs of NPfIT versions of RiO.

RiO is an electronic patient record system that is supplied to mental health trusts and community service organisations. Trusts can buy directly from CSE Healthcare or via its partner BT Global Services which is the local service provider to London under the National Programme for IT.

Through the NPfIT, BT is installing RiO at 25 trusts in the south of England under a £224.3m NPfIT deal – £8.9m per site, compared with £500,000 to £1.5m per site if supplied to the NHS directly by CSE outside of the national programme.

At a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee on 23 May 2011, Conservative MP Richard Bacon asked Connelly to explain why RiO costs so much more when it is supplied by BT.

Connelly told the Committee that the Department of Health had investigated the RiO costs at Bradford District Care Trust, which is a mental health trust.

Bradford bought RiO outside the NPfIT, using the ASCC framework contract, which enables trusts to buy systems directly from suppliers without going through NPfIT local service providers.

The total cost of RiO at Bradford was £1.3m, which Connelly said was for a 59‑month contract.

She told MPs:

“So the comparison: in terms of the services that we provide, there are a whole set of services that are not within that £1.3m that are inside the Local Service Provider contract.

“Earlier somebody said, ‘Well, doesn’t everybody have disaster recovery.’  Well, actually, no, and at this Trust only 25% availability is provided in their local arrangements, which are not included in these costs.

“So we have a cost in terms of the BT LSP in the South for the same period, which includes the hardware, the support, the disaster recovery at 100%, the Spine connectivity, all of which are not supplied inside this Bradford system.

“If we looked at those costs through BT’s cost profile, it would be valued at £2.5m.”

Bacon pointed out that £2.5m was still much less than £8.9m being charged by BT. He wanted the difference explained.

Connelly said:

“So first there is the period. So we need to take a look at the average period that you would expect to be there, because we pay a one‑off deployment charge and then we pay a monthly charge.  So in terms of the figure that you quote, it is generally for about a four-year period, and the figure we quote is generally for about a six-year period, sometimes a little more.  I think what we get is 24/7 support.

“We get full disaster recovery.  I think it is fine to say, “Oh, anybody has that.”  The cost of full disaster recovery is significant, when you look at the costs that BT have; we invited an external auditor to go look at the cost build-up, and they have audited these costs.  We looked at BT’s profit margin, and they have taken a significant reduction in their profit margin between the original contract and the contract that we have today…”

To which Bacon replied:  “But it is not the taxpayer’s fault if BT has unbelievably high costs.”

Bacon said that one reason the costs are so high is that CSE cannot talk directly to NHS trusts and must go through BT.  “That is the problem with this structure,” said Bacon. “It is like having you over here, and the customer over there, and an enormous thicket, a forest of lawyers, in between.”

Connelly replied that a change to the programme means that suppliers of RiO are now on site “talking to Trusts themselves”.  In London and the South, for RiO, a new user group brings together all the Trusts. Cerner, the supplier of NPfIT patient administration systems in London and the south of England, also deals directly with trusts rather than through BT, said Connelly.

Taking issue with Connelly’s comments about Bradford, this was CSE’s written statement to the Public Accounts Committee:

“During the evidence presented by Ms Christine Connelly, one of our contracts for RiO,  Bradford Mental Health Trust was referenced.

“Ms Connelly’s statement was that Bradford is receiving a lower standard of service than provided by BT in London and hence the lower price charged by CSE Healthcare Systems to Bradford.

“CSE Healthcare Systems wishes to correct the evidence given.

• Ms Connelly stated that the service is NOT 24*7 hours – the service is a 24*7 service.

• Ms Connelly stated that Disaster Recovery (DR) was NOT included in the service – a DR service is included.

• There was no mention of Facilities Management – we provide remote Facilities Management

• The service contract is for five years – not four years as stated.

• Ms Connelly implied that the system only had 25% availability – our records demonstrate that this is not true; the system is architected to achieve an availability of over 99%.”

**

Another NHS IT supplier Maracis has provided evidence that RiO costs several times more under the NPfIT than outside the programme, for similar levels of service, disaster recovery, availability and support periods.

On its website CSE Healthcare says its system is compliant with the NPfIT data “spine” and supports established standards for interoperability such as HL7 and XML.

The Public Accounts Committee is finalising a report on the NPfIT detailed care record systems. Its findings will be based on its questioning of Connelly and other witnesses, written evidence from CSE and others, and a report of the National Audit Office in May.

Connelly, who is Director General of Informatics, has announced she is leaving at the end of this month, after three years. She is being replaced in the interim by Katie Davis, who is from the Cabinet Office.

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MP questions why IT costs at two nearby hospital trusts are vastly different for similar systems

Posted on 28/06/2011 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

A Conservative MP has asked the NHS Chief Executive Sir David Nicholson to explain why an NHS trust is deploying a centrally-chosen Cerner patient record system at more than twice the cost of a similar but non-NPfIT system at a nearby Foundation trust.

University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust is deploying the Medway system from System C  (now owned by McKesson] at a reported cost of £8.2m over seven years. The acute trust is one of the largest in the country.

With support for less than five years, the nearby North Bristol NHS trust is taking the Cerner Millennium patient record system under the NPfIT at a cost of £21m from BT – and the go-live date in June has slipped to July.

Now Richard Bacon, a member of the Public Accounts Committee, has written to Sir David Nicholson asking for an explanation of why the two trusts are paying vastly different amounts for systems that do similar things. Bacon has also asked Nicholson whether he believes the higher sum is value for money.

The average cost of BT Cerner go-lives under  the NPfIT is £28.3m according to the National Audit Office.

Bacon’s letter is part of evidence which suggests that continuing NPfIT contracts is costing hundreds of millions of pounds more than necessary.

The coalition government, despite its plan to cut public sector IT costs, may spend a further £3bn to 4.bn with the NPfIT’s two major suppliers, BT and CSC, though the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority is reviewing CSC’s £2.9bn worth of contracts.

Bacon’s letter also questions advance payments to CSC, and whether a recent hearing of the Public Accounts Committee was told the full truth.

An unwavering defender of the NPfIT, Nicholson is likely to defend the cost of the North Bristol implementation, and the advance payments to CSC. On costs, he will argue that North Bristol’s systems have better resilience than at non-NPfIT sites.

If that were true – and there is no evidence it is – the extra costs of having a “hot”, or real-time standby data centre, may not justify a doubling of a rival’s prices. 

This is Bacon’s letter to Sir David Nicholson:

Chief Executive, National Health Service, Department of Health, Richmond House, London SW1A 2NS

27 June 2011

Dear Sir David

NATIONAL PROGRAMME FOR IT IN THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

I am writing following the hearing of the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 23 May 2011, to follow up on two important issues that were raised during your evidence:

ADVANCE PAYMENTS TO SUPPLIERS

In your supplementary memorandum to the PAC following the hearing you gave a total of advance payments made up to 31 March 2011, in respect of all contracts over the whole period of the Programme, of £2,532m of which suppliers have retained £1,328m. You also identified a further £119 million of advance payments to be earned or refunded.  Since the memorandum was received by the PAC, it has been reported that the NHS made an advance payment of £200 million to CSC in April 2011.

I should be most grateful if you would let me know the answers to the following questions:

Is this report accurate?

Why was this payment was not reported to the PAC, either during the hearing or in the subsequent memorandum?

What was the justification for this payment and what value does it represent to the NHS?

What will happen in respect of this payment if a new memorandum of understanding is not in fact signed with CSC?

I would also be grateful if you would comment on the CSC filing with the US Security and Exchange Commission, which states that in the opinion of the company, if the NHS were to terminate the current contract “for convenience” it would owe fees totalling less than the $1 billion asset value CSC now has on its books for the contract.  

How is this consistent with the claim at the PAC  hearing by Ms Connelly that the cost of terminating the CSC deal could “potentially leave us exposed to a higher cost than if we completed as it stands today”?

2. THE COST OF DEPLOYING CERNER MILLENNIUM AT NORTH BRISTOL

Second, I would be grateful if you could comment on the cost of deploying Cerner Millennium at North Bristol, reported in your memorandum as £21 million, including service for 56 months, and on the current expected go-live date.  Specifically:

Can you explain why the delivery date agreed with BT at the contract “reset” was 4th June 2011?

Why it was then revised to 2nd July 2011?

And why it now appears that there is no agreed delivery date at all?

Can you also give your best comparison of the cost of deploying the Cerner Millennium system at North Bristol, with the cost to University Hospitals Bristol of deploying the System C Healthcare Medway system outside the National Programme?  It would appear from media reports that this latter contract includes deployment of functionality including PAS, Accident and Emergency, maternity, theatres, clinical data collection, and a data warehouse and reporting system, as well as integration of third party and current Trust applications.  According to the National Audit Office, the average cost for each new site under the BT South contract is £28.3 million, but the cost of the Medway system to UHB has been reported as £8.2 million over seven years. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/healthcare-network/2011/may/19/university-hospitals-bristol-foundation-trust-awards-e-patient-contract)   What is the justification for this apparent difference?

As the Senior Responsible Owner for the National Programme, can you give your explicit undertaking that the North Bristol contract represents value for money for taxpayers?

I look forward to receiving your reply.

With many thanks

Yours sincerely

Richard Bacon

MP for South Norfolk, Member of the Public Accounts Committee

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Cabinet Office takes on open-source specialist

Posted on 28/06/2011 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

“Let’s not waste this great opportunity to make British government IT the most effective and least expensive service per head in Western Europe.”

 An open source advocate and critic of the high costs of government IT, Liam Maxwell, is joining the Cabinet Office for 11 months  to provide expertise on how civil servants can use innovative new technology to deliver better, cheaper solutions.

His secondment from Eton College where he is ICT head underlines the determination of Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, to continue bringing in strong people to oversee major changes in the way government works.

What remains unclear, however, is how much influence the Cabinet Office will have on autonomous government departments and their permanent secretaries.

Although David Cameron has given his personal backing to the changes being sought by the Cabinet Office, the PM has  little or no direct control over what departments do or don’t do.

Simon Dickson at Puffbox points out that Liam Maxwell has said all the right things in the past. Maxwell co-wrote a 2008 paper for the Tories on ‘Open Source, Open Standards: Reforming IT procurement in Government’, and also a 2010 paper Better for Less‘ for the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age, which said:

“British Government IT is too expensive. Worse, it has been designed badly and built to last. IT must work together across government and deliver a meaningful return on investment. Government must stop believing it is special and use commodity IT services much more widely.

“As we saw with the Open Source policy, the wish is there. However, the one common thread of successive technology leadership in government is a failure to execute policy.

“There is at last a ministerial team in place that “gets it”. The austerity measures that all have to face should act as a powerful dynamic for change. Let’s not waste this great opportunity to make British government IT the most effective and least expensive service per head in Western Europe.” 

In a statement, the Cabinet office said that Maxwell will help to develop ideas for how technology can:

– increase the drive towards open standards and open source software

– help SMEs to enter the government marketplace

– maintain a horizon scan of future technologies and methods

– develop new, more flexible ways of delivery in government

Ian Watmore, the Government’s Chief Operating Officer said: “Liam’s insight and knowledge will make him a valuable source to the team over the coming year. He has a strong track record of delivering success in government ICT and he also brings significant experience of turning the theory into practice.”

Dickson said that Maxwell was a Windsor and Maidenhead councillor who drove the debate a year or so ago on councils switching to Open Document Format, part of OpenOffice.

The Guardian said Maxwell has been an adviser to the  Conservative party on government ICT.  At the Cabinet Office he will advise the Efficiency and Reform Group and Ian Watmore. He will begin the job in September and is taking a sabbatical from Eton.

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Why CIOs can become corporate sustainability heroes

Posted on 28/06/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

Technology has always been a driver of business change. Indeed it’s been said that the best Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are looking beyond the tactical duties of their  jobs to “enable new business models and help the CEO use technology as a  competitive weapon.” And that certainly applies to the most successful corporate sustainability programmes.

An excellent recent blog post by Heather Clancy on ZDNet recently summed up the challenge – and opportunity – facing CIOs – in both the public and private sectors.

Clancy suggests there are several reasons the CIO should be central to advancing the corporate sustainability cause. She explains them like this:

* IT is the one role within most companies that touches every division. One of the fastest growing software application categories today is  enterprise carbon and energy management. You can think of this sort of like ERP for electricity and greenhouse gas emissions data. I firmly believe that these features will quickly become integrated into the common operational tools use to run companies. That’s because what good is this data if it isn’t considered in context? The only way to get the complete context, of course, is by exposing that information across the company. That’s where the CIO comes in.

* CIOs are used to working across many different divisions in a “dotted line” role. Mark Greenlaw, the former  CIO-turned-sustainability executive for Cognizant, said one big example of this  is the insight that the IT team can bring to facilities managers who are trying to cut the electricity associated with lighting, drive smart building technology investments or address data centre power management issues.

* CIOs know how to CYA. What team outside the legal department has borne the brunt of covering your company’s ass when it comes to  privacy mandates, corporate disclosure rules and other compliance measures? Yes, the IT team. Right now, many companies report their progress toward environmental, diversity and social goals voluntarily, but it is easy to foresee a day when that might become mandatory. There is no way that businesses can get around that challenge without using technology to collection and report that data — on a much more real-time basis.

* CIOs have been programmed to think sustainably. Greenlaw said he has called upon his knowledge of how to pitch large capital projects, a skill he exercised often as CIO, as a means of investigating the technology investments that Cognizant might make to operate more sustainably. Those investments run the gamut from alternative energy technologies such as wind generation to the business value of long-term service agreements to the appropriate lighting retrofit approach.

* Increasingly, the lines between business technology and information technology are blurring. There is probably no bigger potential example of the convergence of purpose-built business technologies and what we have been trained to think of as IT than building management systems. Although building management systems aren’t under the direct control of IT, there are myriad ways information technology can help optimise their performance—and more are emerging every day.

You can read Clancy’s complete piece here.

It’s also worth reading this excellent piece on sustainability heroes by Jo Cofino in the Guardian.

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Co-operative and mutuals membership up 25% since credit crunch – now close to 10m

Posted on 27/06/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The Co-operative sector has grown by more than 25% since the credit crunch, with membership of co-operatives now close to 10m. Turnover in 2o10 was over £16bn, according to a report in the Observer.

The article says that the annual report from Co-operatives UK, to be published this week, will show that as well as  big players such as the John Lewis Partnership and the Co-operative Group performing strongly, a thriving new generation of smaller, grassroots organisations has sprung up.

The report also refers to efforts by some MPs to persuade Chancellor George Osborne to consider a mutual model for bailed-out bank Northern Rock, which Osborne is expected to put up for sale before the end of the year.

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NHS users should require mutuals to deliver more benefits than in-house, says NAO

Posted on 24/06/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The National Audit Office (NAO) has highlighted risks to value for money associated with the Department of Health’s programme aimed at enabling its staff to take the lead in leaving the NHS – or ‘spinning out’ – to set up health social enterprises or mutuals.

The NAO’s  Report recognises that, at this early stage of the ‘Right to Request Programme’, it is too early to assess its costs and benefits. But it makes the point that the Department of Health has not set measurable objectives specifically for the Right to Request Programme against which to evaluate its success. PCTs expect social enterprises or mutuals to deliver more benefits than other providers, but did not generally contract for them to deliver savings or any other additional benefits.

The NAO’s report points out that many risks and liabilities still reside with the PCTs and will need to be managed if value for money is to be achieved. In the last resort, the trust or its successors will be responsible for ensuring that essential services continue to operate. For a time, social enterprises will be highly dependent on work and cash flow from their respective PCTs. They will also be operating in an ‘increasingly competitive market’ owing to changes in health legislation currently going through Parliament. So PCTs or their successors will need to have a clear idea of how they will react if enterprises run into financial difficult or fail.

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said, “There are many risks to be managed if the Department is to get value for money from the £900 million contracts awarded to social enterprises. The Department needs to reassess its approach, when contracting with social enterprises, of not requiring efficiencies over and above what would have been achieved if the services had remained within the Department.”

You can access the full report here

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