Shared Services. A working model?

Local Government is trying to save money as it has never done before. That of course begs the question  – if the services remain viable after all this cutting why was it not done before? I digress.

Some council’s are joining arms; huddling together. They’re forming small circles to defend against the icy blasts of the Cut, Cut, Cutting gales raging through local government land. Within the opportunities that concept presents in sharing services they are trying to discover savings. Savings usually means losing duplication. And to me that means people.

I spoke recently with the manager of one such service on the east coast of England.

East Lindsey and South Holland District Council’s in Lincolnshire have formed a company, Compass Point Business Services Ltd to share back office services. Chaired by one of the Councillors, Cllr P. PRZYSZLAK, this hybrid commercial/local government venture is seeking to offer similar service provision to that provided by Mouchel Business Services, who provide similar services to Lincolnshire County Council. One assumes, because of its symbiotic relationship with local government, Compass Point  Business Services Ltd won’t have quite the same issues with capital and looking for work. Both will be assured I would guess. Not quite a level playing field in terms of supplier equality.

In a conversation with Martin Payne of Compass Point in late January I asked if there was any intention to merge the web sites of both organisation, or at least to merge the provision. It’s early days yet and it looks like the web is a side issue to be dealt with after the back office merging of Revs & Bens has taken place.

Could you tell me a little about Compass point and how it will work with the web provision of both Councils?

Payne “Before Compass Point was formed East Lindsey moved our web site, back in August 2009 I think, from local hosting to being hosted at South Holland. There’s no major work planned at the moment. We’re using an old version of MS CMS and we would be looking to change this at some point in the future.”

How is the shared service working via a private limited company?

Payne. “ We are not a private limited company. We are owned jointly by East Lindsey and South Holland DC’s. It does get confusing when we talk to suppliers about licensing. We are allowed to look for business from other public service entities like other local authorities etc. but we’re very busy trying to merge the 5 services we have done so far.”

Are you looking outside of the County to sell your services?

Payne. “Definitely. Yes.”

Are you not fettered by Political issues?

Payne. “ this has all come about by attempts to save money. The intention is to save £30m but compass point have the ambition to attract business from other parts of the Country. Initially the intention was to include Boston but that didn’t come about. Perhaps that will change in the next 12 months. Our business model is to provide say Revs and Bens to the other districts, Lincoln for example. The ambition is to grow in that market place.”

How does this fit in with the Lincolnshire wide desire to share IT?

Payne. “ I don’t know if we will be seen as the outsiders. I’m not sure what is going to happen. I’m sure Politics will become involved in those decisions”

How many staff went into Compass point?

Payne. “300 staff went into the business and we are now re-structuring down to a figure of nearer 200 long term.”

Early days indeed and Payne went on to say they were frantic at present sorting everything out.

It will be hard to forecast the outcome for this crossbreed. Will it be a cross between a tiger and a lion or simply a mule. Time will tell but in the interim it will be worth watching. From what I am hearing there is some disquiet in the staff who are going, but that’s not just restricted to this type of partnership I guess. Local Government is in a mess all around.

In the meanwhile Lincolnshire County Council are continuing their long term web partnership with West Lindsey and North Kesteven District Councils. That partnership has been in existence for 5 years or more. The partners share the County CMS, some templates and staff work closely together between County and Districts. The partnership has been quietly delivering savings year on year. And in Lincolnshire became an early demonstration of what shared services could look like.

Sitemorse. Wrong, wrong and wrong again.

Reputation on line article

Those chaps at Sitemorse, never slow to throw bricks at what they ‘judge’ as failing councils, picked on Lincolnshire County Council last week.

Using a spurious article from ‘The Sun’ where LCC were accused of spending £35,000 on a consultant to teach them how to Tweet, Vikki Chowney at Reputationonline here chose to construct a piece on Twitter in large organisations. Sitemorse used this article as a reference to say this… ” Rather than spending £35,000 twittering, perhaps Lincolnshire should focused on sorting out the complaince, quality and finctionality of thier own site as it was the greatest faller, dropping 254 places, scoring 3.77.”

Setting aside the own goals of the spelling mistakes; If ever you wanted a demonstration of how a piece is wrong in the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place then this is it.

As I no longer work for Lincolnshire County Council I am not here to defend their wasteful spend on a Comms consultant – you can read all about Mr Fletcher, the consultant in question, and just how much he has cost the tax payers of Lincolnshire here and here – what I am commenting on is the use of totally wrong information to rig up a jibe  at an authority simply because they don’t use your service.  Fletcher’s report was not about teaching LCC to Tweet. So far as I am aware Fletcher knows nothing about Twitter other than not to use it.

I have talked in the past about  Sitemorse’s curious practice of kicking their potential clients where it hurts and then expecting them to become users of their service. Here we see jackboot marketing ably demonstrated yet again by these masters of tact.

I have said to Sitemorse before they should check their facts, not only, as in this case, when they take a swipe at an erstwhile client but also when they construct their reports. Oh yes, and thay shud chack there spillung two.

Socitm on the cookie issue

After a couple of calls this week it seems like my recent piece here on cookie-gate wrong footed some folks a tad.

For example, when asked today what Socitm’s view is about cookies on web sites, Martin Greenwood said he was “not sure we (Socitm) have one right now” and that he had “known about it before and I’ve asked one or two people for their opinions, but I don’t’ have an a opinion yet”.

I suppose with ‘Better Connected 2011′ due for imminent publication ( March 1st) he has been busy.  A reasonable excuse for inactivity you may think. The issue is pressing however, as the legislation has the potential to bite chunks out of the business Socitm get from selling their ‘Web site take up service’ which Greenwood agreed uses cookies. Assuming of course they believe they should comply.

One thing is clear though, if Socitm pedal a service to Councils which uses cookies then they aren’t going to be in a rush to criticise you for using cookies on your own sites – until of course they sort the issue out for themselves. And given the level of activity that doesn’t look like any time soon.

In the meanwhile commercial companies who rely on cookies to deliver their business are moving, with commendable alacrity, towards compliance once the interpretation of the law becomes more clear.

A flurry in the bird coop. Crumbs!

There’s a flurry in the bird coop today. Those sly foxes at Sitemorse set the residents a flapping.

And the reason for them being discombobulated so? The impending placement of EU regulations on cookies, and their use, by web publishers.

A law passed in 2009 is due to become enforceable in May of this year. Wrapped up in a confection of seemingly disconnected legislation is a piece of ‘nut-case’ brittle just for us to crack our teeth on.

At first reading it seems we shall have to ask everybody ( everybody new to  our sites that is – and how would we know that without the use of cookies!) if they would accept the use of cookies in their visit. And of course if they don’t then they will be asked again next time, and again, and again. Barking mad.

You can read the law here… Tedious in the extreme. Best look here… and here… for a clearer view of what this really means.

It seems that even Struan Robertson web law guru ( then of Pinsent Masons – now of Google I believe) thought the legislation was at best badly drafted.

Robertson is quoted here… as saying:

“However, the problem here is the law itself. It is a shambles. It’s ambiguous and potentially contradictory and unhelpful not just to businesses but also to consumers. The lawmakers should have found a way to safeguard consumers that didn’t burden them with making decisions on complex relationships and technologies, and that didn’t set up a user barrier at the front door of every website.”

Our understanding is the ‘ambiguity’ mentioned by Robertson does not seem to have stopped the UK lawmakers from cutting and pasting the EU legislation into UK law ( still to be verified at time of writing). In France the legislators are considering the option that browsers ask the user every 3 months if they wish to accept cookies. If each country decides to make a different interpretation of this EU law then the resultant cookie soup will surely make the whole process inoperable, resulting in no meaningful change to the way cookies operate now.

DON’T PANIC 1
There is wriggle room, as you would expect from something described as a shambles.In the recital to the 2009 law it says…

“Exceptions to the obligation to provide information and offer the right to refuse should be limited to those situations where the technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.”

That’s OK then. Isn’t it? The recital goes further, saying…

“Where it is technically possible and effective, in accordance with the relevant provisions of Directive 95/46/EC, the user’s consent to processing may be expressed by using the appropriate settings of a browser or other application.”

That’s even better. No?

(Recitals are meant to explain the lawmakers’ rationale and sometimes they’re used to resolve ambiguities. They are not meant to contradict the business end of the Directive – and this recital sounds like a contradiction. Wriggle room indeed.)

Needless to say the Advertising folks have taken this to be as instructive as a green-light. I’m not sure the ICO, if that is the authority tasked to pursue us for the £5000 fines for breaking the rules, will see it that way. Here is what the IAB (Interactive Advertising Board) has stated…

“the law now clarifies that websites can rely on browser controls and similar applications to define the acceptance of cookies. Publishers and online marketers support this approach because greater transparency, user-friendly information and easy cookies-management will increase consumer trust and confidence.”

However, PANIC, because “Cookie consent can’t be implied from Browser settings say privacy watchdog.”

Read the article here…

DON’T PANIC 2

Have you noticed how most of this appears to be about advertising and the resultant cookies? I can see why those in commerce would be troubled by this legislation but, and it’s an uninformed attempt at sanity type of but, wouldn’t most, if not all Local government web sites, be  covered by this…

“Exceptions to the obligation to provide information and offer the right to refuse should be limited to those situations where the technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user”? You decide.

Clearly we are going to have to provide a more robust and clearly stated cookie policy – probably making that more visible on our site too.

As with all legislation, and particularly when this is so apparently badly drafted  ( described here… as  being  a “monumental regulatory failure”) strict compliance is difficult, if not impossible, so a strong attempt at complying with the spirit may be sufficient, at least until the legislators sort themselves out. And when will that be? (Gallic shrug) It’s Europe!

First published 12.00 Thursday 20th January.

What price ‘Better Connected’ when the money has gone.

Budget cuts howl through the previously warm and snug corridors of local government like the arctic blast the country  succumbed to during the latter part of 2010. Minus 12 degC outside and chilling decisions being made inside.

Despite being the major means of dealing with councils, cuts are being made to web budgets. Lincolnshire, for example, cut budgets for web services before I left in early December and there’s probably more to come.

In my opinion it’s a short sighted view taken by some who are digitally and customer service illiterate. The web has proven to be the most cost effective method of dealing with the public. Moreover it’s the way that an increasing number of customers want to deal with councils.  Is it foolish then to curtail web provision’s ability to continue to grow as the main focus of customer service provision? Yes, especially as currently calls made to call centres are falling and web interaction with councils steadily rises .

I don’t suppose Lincolnshire will be the only council slashing web budgets, be that in development or in publishing power. Others will similarly make those chicken-licken style decisions and will leave the public all the poorer for it. That’s sad.

Having said that, just like any other service there must be things the web provides – or that are provided on the web – that are a luxury. Each web manager should take a long look at what is provided on their sites and make cost/value judgements on whether those fripperies  should stay.

British LG web sites are thought of as being amongst the best, if not the best, LG web sites in the world. And in some part ”Better Connected”, the yearly review by SOCITM, has been responsible for raising standards. There does come a point though when you’re near the top of the game, where raising the standard ever so marginally  - to meet some imagined need of SOCITM’s and thereby fulfill their requirement for Better Connected to exist and to make money – is just too expensive, and cannot, surely, be cost justified.

I would argue, especially in these trying times, enough is enough. Care not what SOCITM, in their desire to make a profit, say about you. It’s just too expensive a price to pay.

• If you are providing good quality, up to date information via a readily navigable and/or easily searchable web site;
• if your ethos is to be open and transparent and your web site demonstrates this;
• if you let your site be driven by your clients by asking them to complain about a bad service or even lack of service  (remember you learn nothing from those who compliment you. It’s only the complainers who really drive you forward – read ‘What would Google do’ by Jeff Jarvis);
• if your council, particularly officers,  think of  the web as the first method of dealing with the customer and provide the services and information accordingly,
• generally if you think first about what the clients want, as opposed to what the council- members and officers – want, and deliver that via your web site, then you will have the basis of an excellent site – no matter what SOCITM may say to the contrary.

SOCITM would argue they have been the ones who have driven up standards. As I’ve said I lean towards agreement. However, having got us up to the top of the tree lets see how they can lead us down to more cost effective branches. If indeed you really need any leading. I would argue you don’t.

Peter Barton

A clever illustration of the difference between then and now.

I’m aware there’s lots of naffness around at Christmas. It’s one of the things I hate most about the season but I’ve succumbed.  If you want an illustration of just how things were back then – and I don’t mean 2010 years ago, try  10 years – and how they are today take a look at this witty video on You-tube showing what a digital nativity would be like.

I particularly like the car rental and the available rooms on Google. Made me smile.

Have a good Christmas.
Peter Barton
Publisher

This may be old news but what are you doing about the £501 question?

Way back in May 2010 in an open letter (you can see it  here ), the Prime Minister, David Cameron, laid out his requirement for Central and Local Government to become more transparent by publishing their data on expenditure. In the case of Local government, everything over £500 must be shown.

Francis Maude will be heading up the Public Sector Transparency Board overseeing the Salome like removal of the veils covering the mysteries of public sector procurement. Added to this is the “responsibility for setting open data standards across the public sector, publishing further datasets on the basis of public demand, and – in conjunction with the Ministry of Justice – will further develop the Right to Data and advise on its implementation”. So the right to this data will become enshrined in law it seems. All very laudable. And to be specific this is what Cameron expects from Local Government in his drive towards transparency:

• “New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011.
• New local government contracts and tender documents for expenditure over £500 to be published in full from January 2011”.

And how does that translate into what Councils should be providing? The Government web site data.gov.uk made these recommendations back in June 2010

“… our immediate advice to local authorities is:

• Users will be interested in the core information held in the accounts system – such as expenditure code, amount paid, transaction date, beneficiary, and payment reference number. The expenditure code has to be explained and steps taken to help users identify the beneficiary
• As a first stage, publish the raw data and any lookup table needed to interpret it in a spreadsheet as a CSV or XML file as soon as possible. This should be put on the council’s website as a document for anyone to download. Or even published in a service such as Google Docs
• There is not yet a national approach for publishing local authority expenditure data. This should not stop publication of data in its raw, machine-readable form. Observing such raw data being used is the only route to a national approach, should one be required
• Publishing raw data will allow the panel and others to assess how that data could/should be presented to users. Sight of the data is worth a hundred meetings. Members of the panel will study the data, take part in the discussion and revise this advice.
• As a second stage, informed by the discussion, the panel and users can then give feedback about publishing data (RDF, CSV, etc) in a way that can be consistent across all local authorities involving structured, regularly updated data published on the Web using open standards”.

You can read the full article  here. And the original comments from Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s paper, ‘Putting Government Data Online’ which seemed to kick all of this off, is here.

From this can be seen at worst its suggested, nay required, to place all information about expenditure over £500 on line in something as simple as a CSV file from January 2011.

In saying “…our shared commitment to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account” Cameron’s intention is clear. It’s about the accountability of Councils for their spending to the public they serve.

It’s long been the case that politicians hide their doings using a chamber full of excuses like it’s too difficult, too complicated, too expensive or the public won’t understand etc. And even now, despite this forced openness, some are obfuscating by merely uploading a spreadsheet or even a pdf, neither of which is very helpful and does not meet the sprit of the request from central Government.

And yet, despite the lack of a clear instruction from the government on just how the data should be produced – come on Francis spell it out – some are turning searchlights on the birds nest of data they hold simplifying it and  bringing it into sharp focus for the ordinary man in the street.

One such is Lichfield District Council  which has produced a really useful system of its own in order to put a more friendly face on the otherwise confusing data produced in their ( or anybody else’s)  CSV.

Lichfield’s web manager, Stuart Harrison, takes the CSV produced by the internal accounting systems and uploads it to his own purpose built application which he wrote for the task in PHP.

Talking of the data produced he said “the intention of the CX and myself was to make it easier for people to understand” .

The CSV files are still there for anyone wishing to download the full fat version but from what I’ve seen Harrison’s purpose built simplifier does an excellent job.

Harrison says he is prepared to share the code, which he is going to make available in the near future. Contact him for details on:- Stuart.Harrison  at  lichfielddc.gov.uk

As I write this, Lichfield’s figures are not currently up – taken down for some tweaking – but they will return here. In the near future.

As an aside – it will be interesting to see how Socitm view any lack of these figures during their upcoming annual “better Connected” review of local government web sites.

The deadline to get this all out there seems to be the 1^st January folks so, if you haven’t sorted this out yet, best get your skates on.

Birmingham DIY web site was free wasn’t it?

Gormley's Iron Man, Victoria Square, Birmingham

I declare an interest here. I’m a Brummie and proud of it. Imagine then my feelings about the furore over the cost of the web site and the setting up of the FREE! DIY site by a bunch of web coves eager to prove a point.

I was disappointed of course; the largest authority in Europe spent the largest amount of cash on it’s web site and some said it wasn’t very good either. As a Brummie my shoulders sagged.

Having ran a large local government web site for the past – too many years – I am fully aware of the problems besetting every web architect / manager/ content editor etc from out of date data to “I’m just too busy darling to bother with YOUR web site” (your web site?) type attitudes of the care-less folks across the organisations. Perhaps that’s a bit unfair. They have their jobs to do too.  Nevertheless content is a pain and the churn rate is so high that… well it fair makes your head spin.

I’m guessing what Birmingham achieved is a good scaffold on which to build further services and data repositories and that costs money. But I’m not here to defend the eye watering figures mentioned.

What I am here to argue is that it’s really easy to pick. Pick, pick, pick, “Oh I wouldn’t have done this or that” or the ” I could do that for nothing” – as appears the case with the DIY site for Birmingham.

Also these DIY or cheap and cheerful sites don’t have the imposed standards hanging around their metaphoric necks. They can simply ignore them. Up-time being just one of those and from what I have heard here the DIY site for Brum wasn’t exactly stable, to say the least.

In a nutshell it’s pretty easy to to talk of the impossible but doing it is another thing altogether. And it’s even easier to whine from the sidelines without having any responsibilities for the finished product whatsoever.

Certainly my experience has shown that internal critics of a site, when sat down and asked what they would do to resolve the set of problems facing web managers, suddenly find the current ( though criticised) solution amazingly competent.

I have similar views about the so called “Free” open source software. What’s free about software that requires an unspecified amount of “techies” – and they are not free – within the council to build it so it works? It’s not free at all. I heard recently of one council that used  open source CMS software and then had 4 techies developing, running and managing it + those who actually ran the site and chased the content.

So all this “free” glistery stuff is not savings gold is it?

Flack jacket and helmet on at the ready. I sense incoming.

The worldly wise know the truth…

Selfridges

No matter what the economic climate – and in Local Government it’s witheringly bleak ( like the weather here tonight at minus 9degC) – there is always opportunity.

In this case the opportunity is to improve your web offerings even when budgets are being butchered by the politicos occupying the upper branches of the Government/Local Government forests.

However, you are going to have to be brave; turn your current thinking on it’s head, measure results, prove your effectiveness and above all hold your nerve.

Collective Responsibility is running a session in Birmingham ( the centre of the universe for us Brummies ) designed to offer advice, support and illustrations of just how others are doing it. Well worth a look.

The event is scheduled for January the 25th 2011 It’s called…

Council Websites: Creating & Finding Opportunities in an Arduous Market.

You can read all about it here…

You have to attend to help  you and yours survive the next few years and of course to see this amazing building.

Jean-Luc, the Borg and LG web sites.

Martha Lane Fox

Some years back DirectGov here was the butt, rightly or wrongly, of many a jibe by local government web officers. Things have changed. They have collected up their skirts and are now running at a pace that can’t be ignored.

Moreover with the governments avowed intent to rip the costs out of just about everything, the pressure for us all to be subsumed by a single giant beast grows. And of course DirectGov is being reviewed at present. My concerns were not helped at all by reading La Lane Fox’s  tweets this week (Martha Lane Fox, she who is doing the review)  where she is commenting about her being immersed in Direct Gov.
Martha’s Tweet
………………………………….
Marthalanefox

i have now read so many documents about directgov that my brain is melting – time to think now….

1:03 PM Sep 17th via web
…………………………………………..

As Martha is the Governments web guru you’d be best to take notice of  her sneezes and consider them as possible harbingers of the industry catching a cold.

More on the review of Direct Gov here…

where it says…

“The review of Directgov will focus on four key areas. These are:

1. central government’s objectives in digital delivery
2. who should do what?
3. sharing the platform
4. trends in digital delivery”
   

It’s the 2nd and 3rd elements that make me twitch.

Out in the Shires the more forward thinking can see a future where individual ‘district’ sites may be redundant. It’s argued they could become a part of a single whole.

It takes little stretch of even the most unimaginative to see this potential grow into something larger, possibly into a giant pot into which we all place our content. In fact into Direct.gov.  As ever it’s the detail that may frustrate the process. The detail in fact in managing that process. Like keeping thousands of marbles together on the deck of a pitching ship. Tricky

Is this a view of an alternative future do you think; a future where we have no individual sites but share our data with a mother brain? Very “Jean Luc and the Borg”.

OK, I’ll give you,  it’s a black view of a strange landscape but one that I wouldn’t gamble on not happening.

Of course there remains a small element of LG web sites difficult to centralise i.e. the Comms element, but I’m sure that’ll not be allowed to stand in the way of the great God “Kostensenkung”. And perhaps that’s how it should be.