Kable: Skills | Kable

Norfolk councils share IT services

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:05:00 GMT

Great Yarmouth BC and Norfolk CC have combined ICT services under plans to save £1m over five years

Great Yarmouth's IT systems and infrastructure will be managed by Norfolk, with the borough council's current staff moving over to the county council's ICT team, the authorities have said.

Great Yarmouth believes that the joining up ICT services with Norfolk is "the most resilient and cost effective way" to provide services to people living in the borough. The savings that are made will be spent on improving Great Yarmouth's IT infrastructure.

"People quite rightly expect to be able to access services at times that are convenient to them and whether it be the technology that staff work from to deliver the service to the public, or the technology that allows the public to access the service directly themselves, the infrastructure has to be as resilient as possible in order for that service to work effectively," said Barry Stone, Great Yarmouth's deputy leader.

"Sharing the county council's networks and technology, and the pooling of expertise of staff from both councils, will make the borough council more resilient."

Norfolk said that the arrangement shows a willingness to "deliver value for money" and could open up possibilities for the future sharing of other services between the councils.

IDeA launches efficiency network

Wed, 19 May 2010 23:05:00 GMT

The Improvement and Development Agency has set up an online community to support efficiency in the public sector

The Efficiency Exchange has been developed from the efficiency workstrand in the IDeA's online Communities of Practice project.

Programme manager Gordon Murray told GC News that the previous community had about 200 members and was not very active, but since the Exchange was soft launched earlier in the year it has attracted about 750 members, primarily from the public sector but also consultants and people from the third sector.

"There are two main areas to the Exchange," he said. "There's the one for collaborative knowledge sharing and problem solving, and the prototype benchmarking tool.

"We want to get people involved in its design, and work with us on how they want the benchmarking piece connected with the Community of Practice piece."

The knowledge sharing functions enable users to provide guidance to each other and share expertise on various issues. The benchmarking function makes it possible to compare costs and performance on a range of services regionally and nationally. The metrics for this were developed with Capital Ambition, the regional improvement and efficiency partnership (Riep) for London, and the South East Riep.

The tool also provides links to guidance that is relevant to any areas in which an organisation's performance needs to improve.

"If you do not get a good score the system directs you towards what you need to do to raise it," Murray said. "When you ask what is the guidance you should be reading, it could often be almost impossible to find it. But we've pulled in a lot of stuff with efficiency themes, including discussions and blogs, so that instead of hunting for information it is brought to you as a result of putting in the score."

He forecast that the Efficiency Exchange could attract up to 2,000 members, and said they would be encouraged to play an active role and provide each other with guidance.

NHS IT told to get out of backroom

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:57:22 GMT

Former NHS CIO Matthew Swindells has said that informatics needs to take a leading role in redesigning services

On the opening day of the society's HC2010 conference in Birmingham, Swindells – head of BCS Health and a former chief information officer of the NHS – told SmartHealthcare.com that informatics professionals are ideally placed to help health and social care services do more with less money.

But to do so, he said they will need to help develop the strategy of their organisations, not simply provide computer systems. "There's a whole culture change, of IT and information departments, stepping forward and saying we will contribute to our organisation," he said on 27 April 2010. "We may see chief information officers becoming chief executive officers, which is vanishingly rare in the NHS today."

Currently, a lot of health service organisations split IT and information, which he said should end, representing "an outdated view of the world".

Swindells said that informatics could help join up care between different types of health organisations and social services. It could play a particular role in reducing unnecessary use of expensive hospital capacity, by helping patients to look after themselves at home through telecare.

He said that many countries use nurses in outbound call centres, who contact elderly people to remind them to take medicines and check on their well being. "The big transformative technique for the health service will be getting older people back into their homes more quickly," said Swindells, and such phone banks can play a big role. "The reality is that there is barely any of this being done in the NHS."

Telecare could also be used to help about 900,000 people who need to test their blood regularly, mostly using hospital out patient departments or GP surgeries to do so. If they had equipment to use at home, and the NHS supported this technology, they would generally test themselves more often as well as saving money. "Technology becomes an enabler, rather than a drag," said Swindells.

He said that concerns over patients' personal data could be overcome by giving people choice and control – then demonstrating the benefits to early adopters. "If you think how e-banking took off, it was done by people being able to opt-in," he said. Users realised advantages and reported them to others, and now online banking is a mainstream technology.

Informatics can also contribute to greater trust in health and social services, Swindells said, by collating data to be made public: "There's a information element in this, in creating the transparency that will help the public hold the NHS to account and add quality."

Home Office 'heavily reliant' on consultants

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:01:33 GMT

Nearly a third of the staff of the department's major project teams are contractors or consultants, according to the NAO

A National Audit Office report published on 23 March 2010 calls on the Home Office to reduce costs by employing civil servants rather than external consultants and contractors for major projects. The NAO estimates savings of £86,000 per civil servant post.

The government introduced plans to cut consultancy expenditure across all departments by around 50% after a 2006 NAO report found that Whitehall was spending around £1.8bn a year on consultants.

The report, Management of major projects, also criticises the quality of the Home Office's data. "The department has not kept a consolidated central record comparing outturn against estimates of its projects over time. The department cannot therefore document that it has improved the management of its major projects in terms of performance against time and cost," it says.

The report identifies that major projects data presented by the Home Office board has to be more accurate to ensure the that the department makes adequate progress.

"Data for the board should be validated and reconciled to make sure it is accurate and consistent across the portfolio of projects. Otherwise, there is a risk that the Home Office board will not have the accurate information it needs to make strategic decisions affecting the management of major projects," says the document.

According to the report, the Home Office has started making improvements and "has recently started work to develop a centralised skills database". The document specifies that there is currently "no central planning at the portfolio level of resource allocation" at the department, which makes it difficult for the department to shift resources effectively from one part of the organisation to another.

The document also reveals that the Home Office's planned link up to the EU-led central immigration database has suffered a setback. It says: "The Schengen Information System is designed to facilitate the exchange of criminality information with the EU, and the programme is building a UK system to connect to an EU-led central SIS system. There is now slippage in the EU-led system, and this may not be ready by the time that the UK system is complete."

The report covered several major Home Office projects include the National Identity Scheme, the Mobile Information Programme, the introduction of Airwave to the London Underground and e-Borders.

Government disputes extent of PCS strike

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:40:35 GMT

Union members are taking part in 48 hour strikes affecting HMRC contact centres and outsourced IT staff for the DWP and the MoD

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) said the strike over plans to reduce redundancy payouts saw more than 200,000 public sector workers refusing to cross picket lines, reports The Guardian.

The union said that those on strike on 8 March 2010 included some 999 operators at the Metropolitan Police Service, more than 3,200 staff at HMRC in Longbenton and 660 of the 700 staff at the same organisation's contact centre in Dundee.

It added that around 1,000 PCS members working for HP Enterprise Services were also taking part in a separate two-day strike over pay freezes and job losses, including those working on contracts for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in Newcastle, Washington, Preston and near Blackpool.

But the government said its own monitoring suggests only 80,000 of the 270,000 PCS civil service members are taking part. Four out of the five civil service unions accepted a compensation deal last month.

The strike is over plans to reduce payouts for civil servants made redundant in order to save £500m over three years. The government insists it has already compromised with unions to protect low-paid workers and preserve their higher payouts. But the unions say their members still stand to lose thousands of pounds and that the deal is part of moves to make it cheaper to sack people as the government tries to reduce the wage bill.

Mark Serwotka, the PCS general secretary, said: "The government needs to stop burying its head in the sand and wake up to the scale of anger that has been generated by their plans to cut jobs on the cheap.

"Loyal civil servants face losing tens of thousands of pounds if they are forced out of their jobs. The government is tearing up their contracts in front of their eyes, yet claims it can do nothing about bankers' bonuses because of contractual obligations."

Tessa Jowell, the Cabinet Office minister, said: "More than 70% of PCS members have decided not to take part in today's action. This means that 85% of all civil servants are working as normal today. Across the country services to the public are largely unaffected – all job centres and benefits offices are open, border entry points are working normally and court services are being maintained."

Recession clogged Jobcentre Plus IT

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:05:00 GMT

Research has revealed that IT problems hindered Jobcentre Plus in dealing with an influx of people at the beginning of the recession

Glitches with and crashes of the services's computerised job vacancies database, the Labour Market System (LMS), exacerbated delays experienced by unemployed people.

The research, commissioned and published by the Department for Work and Pensions, says that Jobcentre Plus staff were concerned that the LMS was not working "as intended" for new programmes, including the Jobseekers' Regime and Flexible New Deal.

"They reported that the expected 'markers' did not work, or did not appear," says the document. "This would often cause staff to backtrack for information; or to enter data that should have been pre-populated."

In addition, the researchers say that the LMS failed on a number of occasions, causing jobcentre staff to cancel interviews with clients.

The pressures of the recession reduced the amount of staff training. The researchers reported that the views of staff about e-learning courses, which advisers completed at their own pace and when time permitted, varied considerably.

Some staff felt they had been "thrown in at the deep end" and criticised the computerised system for not providing an explanation of answers to questions.

In some offices the problems were compounded by the temporary cancellation of weekly staff meetings, which had been a forum for knowledge sharing and problem solving.

Schools key to IT industry, says Coaker

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:22:26 GMT

Education minister Vernon Coaker has told a conference that IT innovation in the UK has to start in schools

In the opening speech to the Bett education and technology conference on 13 January 2010, Coaker said that the skills to ensure the UK "stays acclimatised" to IT developments must be supported through education.

British companies exhibiting at the event in London employ more than 25,000 people and generate £250m in exports, according to the minister.

"We need to be able to prepare the workforce for the future, where working with highly advanced technology will be the norm, not the exception," he said.

"We need our schools to use technology to enhance student's learning and give them life long technology skills that will prepare them for the world of work."

Over the past year education organisations have made more use of technology to benefit students, Coaker said. He gave Prospect House School in Putney, south London, as an example. The school is producing podcasts of lessons and distributing them to families through a virtual learning platform.

Coaker also mentioned Robin Hood Primary School in Wakefield, which is using dictaphone to get students to listen to their own sentences, so they can focus on their spelling and sentence structure.

He said that pilot Home Access projects in Oldham and Suffolk had been "incredibly successful", and that more than 12,000 families had applied for a grant to buy a computer and internet access.

"The results we received from the pilot were impressive," said Coaker. "On average, children were spending about an hour more per week for learning compared to their other non-eligible peers."

Health and DWP CIOs are best paid

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:49:36 GMT

Two chief information officers are in the civil service's highest standard pay band: health's Christine Connelly and work and pensions' Joe Harley

Christine Connelly is employed on senior civil service pay band three, with a salary of between £99,960 and £205,000 for her permanent contract as the Department of Health's director general of informatics and CIO.

She is responsible for an annual budget of £1.5bn, one of the biggest in Whitehall, which includes the costs of the NHS National Programme for IT.

The other band three CIO revealed in responses to parliamentary written questions is Joe Harley at the Department for Work and Pensions. He is also responsible for one of the largest budgets, totalling £1.19bn this year.

Band three is the highest available in the senior civil service, although permanent secretaries, who head departments, are paid in a higher range from £139,740 to £273,250.

The information was requested by Conservative MP and shadow minister for business innovation and science Adam Afriyie. A spokesperson for his office said the questions were part of "routine information gathering".

CIOs in most departments have been placed on senior pay band two, paid between £81,600 and £160,000. They include the Department for Children, Schools and Families where the CIO is responsible for a budget of £44m; the Ministry of Justice (£242m budget); Department for International Development (£25m budget); the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (£160m budget); Communities and Local Government (£30.4m budget); the Ministry of Defence (£86.5m budget) and the Home Office (£5.1m budget).

Neither of the departments for Scotland and Wales has a CIO, while the Department for Transport splits the role between the director general and the director responsible for for issues including information and knowledge management, data security and ICT.

HM Treasury was the only department to report that its CIO, Karen Delafield, is on pay band one, which has a salary range of £57,300 to £116,000.

Government IT contractors set for strike

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:22:33 GMT

Fujitsu staff working on government contracts are to stage six days of strikes in a dispute over job security, pay and pensions

Beginning on 18 December 2009 and continuing on the 7, 8, 11, 14 and 15 January, the stoppages could involve Fujitsu staff working at the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs, the Home Office and in local government.

Unite said that 75% of its members in Fujitsu had voted for industrial action and 92% had voted for action short of a strike. It added that it would definitely involve staff working for the public sector, but could not be specific about which organisations would be affected.

The strikes are over proposals for 1,000 redundancies in the UK, a pay freeze imposed earlier in 2009, and plans by Fujitsu to close the main final salary pension scheme to future accrual, reducing the total pay package of each affected employee by typically about 20%.

Unite had originally called action in November, but it said this was withdrawn when the company agreed to talks and to relax deadlines on jobs and pensions. The talks resulted in an offer from Fujitsu, but this was rejected by 83% of members.

Derek Simpson, Unite joint general secretary, said: "We recognise the effect any industrial action will have on key private and public sector customers and clients of Fujitsu, but the responsibility for this rests squarely with the company for failing to address the issues."

In a statement to GC News Fujitsu said: "We are disappointed that Unite has decided to announce industrial action while consultation continues with the elected employee representatives on the proposed changes to the pension scheme.

"If the industrial action goes ahead Fujitsu will take measures to ensure that service to its customers is maintained."

PCS postpones strike by DWP contractors

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:38:48 GMT

The Public and Commercial Services Union has called off a strike of HP staff working for the Department for Work and Pensions

The strike by 1,000 PCS members employed by HP was due to take place on 10 December 2009, but was called off ahead of talks this week, reports The Register.

HP confirmed the postponement and said it would meet the PCS on 16 December 2009.

The workers are mostly ex-EDS staff who have been unhappy with changes to their terms and conditions since HP took over the company. They work on outsourced government contracts at the Department of Work and Pensions and the MoD.

A PCS spokesperson said the strike has been postponed pending the talks. "Hopefully we can find a resolution at those talks, but if not then strike action will be back on the cards before Christmas."

Strike fears recede at Oxfordshire

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:33:02 GMT

Oxfordshire CC has reduced the number of compulsory redundancies it plans to make among IT staff

The county council had considered making as many as 50 of its 200 ICT staff redundant on a compulsory basis. However, union Unison said this has been reduced to eight through greater use of voluntary redundancies and alternative work, making strike action less likely.

"We've had some very tough negotiations, but we've worked with the council. There is some interim work many of these people can do," said Mark Fysh, Unison's branch secretary for Oxfordshire county.

"The situation is an awful lot better than it was," he added, saying that the union hopes to continue negotiations so as to reduce further the number of compulsory redundancies.

"As always, the council has been in discussions with Unison about mitigating redundancies," said a county spokesperson. "We have sought volunteers and we are working together with the union to find ways of minimising the numbers of compulsory redundancies. No final decisions have been made."

DWP's HP staff vote to strike

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:13:47 GMT

Staff at the HP division formerly known as EDS have voted by a large majority to strike over jobs and pay

The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said its members working on Department of Work and Pensions contracts will strike for one day on 10 December, reports The Register. Some 78% voted for a walkout, with 92% supporting action short of a strike including refusing to work overtime.

The PCS said its action will hit HP sites contracted to DWP at Newcastle, Washington, Preston and the Fylde Coast.

The dispute has its roots in HP's takeover of EDS last year, which has been followed by thousands of posts being cut and a pay freeze.

PCS general secretary Mark Serawotka said: "The ballot result illustrates the depth of anger amongst a workforce who face a second year of pay freezes despite the company delivering fourth quarter revenues of $30.8bn."

In November HP' branch of the Unite union also voted to walk out, in a separate dispute over engineering cuts.

MPs pan ICO for bad language

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:05:00 GMT

A select committee report on poor official language has picked on a letter from the Information Commissioner's Office

The Public Administration Select Committee provided the ICO letter as an example of an official letter which "illustrates how formulaic letter construction can alienate and confuse the reader".

The letter, provided by MP Andrew George, told the recipient in bold type that "Your case has now been closed" in his or her complaint against the Ministry of Justice, but also said the case would be reopened as soon as the recipient sent a copy of the original request for information.

"The perpetrators of this variety of official language often fail to consider adequately who they are writing for," said the committee's report, Bad Language: The Use and Abuse of Official Language, published on 30 November 2009, adding that official letters and forms "can often come across as unsympathetic or overly officious".

A spokesperson for the ICO said it is reviewing the standard letter in question, pointing out that it sometimes needs to ask for additional information from a complainant to make progress with a case.

The report said that management consultants were partly to blame for introducing "sterile jargon" into government, which it said was often used to dress up a simple idea, or "to hide the fact that the speaker or writer doesn't really understand what they are writing or talking about".

"We conclude that bad official language which results in tangible harm – such as preventing someone from receiving the benefits or services to which they are entitled – should be regarded as 'maladministration'," says the report.

"Bad official language deserves to be mocked, but it also needs to be taken seriously. We hope that our conclusions and suggestions will encourage government to mind its language in future."

Public projects take BCS prizes

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:28:27 GMT

Six of the British Computer Society's annual awards have gone to the public sector

Accounting for a quarter of the 25 categories, it reasserted the trend of recent years in which people and teams from public organisations have taken a significant proportion of the prizes.

One of the more high profile winners was Phil Pavitt, who won the IT leader of the year award for his work as chief information officer at Transport for London. He has recently moved on to a similar role at HM Revenue and Customs.

Other individuals to win in their categories were: Mark Porton of Liverpool Direct, the joint venture between Liverpool City Council and BT, who was named IT service and support professional of the year; James Archer of RB Kensington and Chelsea as business analyst of the year; and Jeff Ridgley of Oxford City Council who won APM group project manager of the year.

Two public sector projects also took top prizes. Venus – Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites – from the Digital Design Studio of the Glasgow School of Art and the Department of Computer Science at Hull University was named innovative project of the year.

Meanwhile, the Blood Track programme at Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals won the public sector project of the year award.

ITIL update begins

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:47:09 GMT

The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) is revising its IT Infrastructure Library

It is beginning to correct inconsistencies and clarify various elements of the concepts and policies for managing IT services.

ITIL is widely used by IT departments in government and is published by The Stationery Office (TSO) for the OGC as a series of books.

TSO said that ITIL version 3, which was published in June 2007, will remain the definitive version for the foreseeable future, and there are no current plans for ITIL version 4.

OGC will continue to update the core ITIL version 3 guidance through controlled releases in the future. Updates of the core publications will be released in early 2011.

The changes are scoped in the OGC Mandate for Change document. The framework itself will remain unchanged and no new concepts will be added, but all five ITIL volumes – Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement – will be reassessed to remedy any inconsistencies. Similarly, OGC will ensure that the structure of the guidance is consistent across all five books.

Based on user feedback, the update will include refinements to the manuals such as the clarification of diagrams and concepts, alongside other general incremental improvements. Also, the Service Strategy volume will be revised with simpler language to explain the concepts more clearly.

Janine Eves, OGC contract manager and publisher at TSO, said: "Since the ITIL v3 launch, ITIL users have made numerous suggestions for improvement via the Change Control Log, a mechanism TSO put in place to capture community feedback in order to continually improve ITIL v3. The comments made have been through the ITIL Change Advisory Board and have been seen as valuable improvements by OGC.

"This update is not going to be ITIL v4; the process is all about improving the usability of the core publications."

TSO and OGC have called for participants in the process. Authors will make any necessary changes to the text and reviewers will comment on the changes and advise whether drafts are acceptable. Details can be found in the new Call for Participants: ITIL Update document.

OGC is also planning to introduce an ITIL Master Level qualification.