NWeGG Conference 2006

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NWeGG Conference 2006

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This years annual NWeGG Conference was held at the City of Manchester Stadium.

Text Only Version

Janet Callender - Chief Executive TMBC

Today we're going to be talking about Transformational Strategy and I think in my view the key to any strategy is to have a good defence and I wanted to say this at the outset. whilst some of you might not know it actually, City has got the best defence home record in the Premiership this season. We have yet to concede a goal at home. For those of you who are not necessarily supporters of City can you take that away with you? We have the best home defence record in the Premiership. We might have conceded the odd one away but that's not to be an issue. So bear that in mind as we go forward. But really importantly what I wanted to say in case some of you didn't know is that there's a real reason why we're here today because Manchester City Football Club was actually the first football club to introduce a community scheme to work with the community to improve the lives of the people in their communities and it's called 'City in the Community' and it was established actually some twenty years ago, it's actually now coming up to its twentieth birthday so we'll be celebrating that when Fulham come to play in a couple of weeks time but we at Tameside Council are really proud to be partners in the 'City in the Community' scheme because they do have this strong community ethos, they link very much with our community strategy priorities and we've all got the same focus, we've all got the same focus about improving people's lives and in their vision documents they call it a blueprint for the community. What they actually say is it's really important it says that Manchester City Football Club is an important, vibrant and active part of the community and takes its responsibilities in the neighbourhood very seriously. It goes beyond the essential minimum to help our community developments work for positive neighbourhood renewal and improved prosperity.

I think it's really fitting that we do hold our second annual NWeGG Conference here today because it's really fitting that we're going to be discussing transforming local services and more importantly we're going to be discussing transforming people's lives and it is great well it was great before the lights went down to see so many familiar faces here today and there's so many of us now been working together for some time to really explore and develop exciting new ways of driving forward the 'E' or now the 'T' agendas and it's also good that we have a lot of people who've travelled from across the UK here with us today. In fact I think we've got people from Scotland, England and Wales here today not quite the north-west but what I want to say is it's great that you wanted to join us, it's great that you want to share in the learning of today's events and we do particularly welcome you. And I'd also before we move on like to quickly welcome our speakers, we have got a true Premiership line-up today. It's great to be able to say that in Manchester we've got some good weather today I was going to say all sorts of things, apologise about the weather, but now I'm actually able to say that the warm welcome we're going to give you today is actually matched by the unseasonal warm weather so it's good to have you all here, but it is also good to say that that's actually not a surprise to particularly Ian, John and Peter who are no strangers actually to the vagaries of the Manchester weather because all our speakers actually do live in the north-west so that's really positive and it's a real support for us in NWeGG and we're really grateful that you are all able to spare the time today to be with us and not just today but throughout the year and we do value your support. And again you know it's really helpful that we do take the opportunity to thank our sponsors and our suppliers because again in planning our event today we've tried to have a sort of richness around the event that ensures that we maintain a good balance between the formal plenary and seminar sessions and also the networking sessions and we really are going to try and preserve that networking time at all cost but what I want to say is make the most of the exhibition and make the most of the networking time.

But the one thing I really wanted to stress today is let's not forget that most importantly I want to thank all of you for being here because NWeGG is all of our organisations, it belongs to all of us, it supports each of us in the way that we lead our communities. It's now funded by all of us through our subscriptions and our Business Plan and our programme priorities have been developed now in consultation with all of you. So our mission is that we must and should reap all the benefits that being an NWeGG member affords to us and I'm really pleased that so many of you have been actively involved over the past twelve months in taking our agenda forward. We're really fortunate in the north-west because we've got a real commitment to work collaboratively together. We're certainly fortunate that we've got more than our fair share of forward-looking, innovative, creative-thinking Councils and we are really lucky to be so effectively supported by our six regional partnerships. So again always bear in mind that NWeGG is here for us for all of us to help us shape and lead our future transformational agendas. But just looking back very quickly about some of the successes over the past twelve months and I will be brief but really today's conference is a manifestation of the fact that we've been really trying to 'up our game' in NWeGG. We've really been trying to become more professional in the way that we conduct ourselves. We've been trying to align ourselves more closely to the key priorities that we're facing in the north-west and we're trying to work more closely with other organisations both regionally and nationally we have a role to play shaping our futures and as I say this conference is probably the most obvious manifestation of that. But around the region now there are so many rich examples to NWeGG where colleagues are working with partners in the sub-regional groups and they're working together, they're supporting, they're collaborating, we've got all of the special interest groups and we're working across a whole range now of thematic schemes and projects and initiatives and it is incredibly pleasing to see and we've actually now facilitated about forty workshops this year, so workshops, seminars, conferences. We've had a strong learning ethos running through our programmes for this year and we've been focussing around as you know effective programme management.

We've been thinking more closely about how we could support integrated children's services and we've been thinking as ever about I.T. security and information sharing, and throughout those events we've attracted some twelve hundred people across the north-west to come with us and help us shape our future thinking and help us share that learning around the north-west and that has been a really, really good success story for the year, and I think most of you will know now that we've also tried to refresh the NWeGG brand, we've actually tried to refresh the full members' meetings. So we now have two full members' events a year, we have a spring and winter event and again we've tried to introduce some low key sponsorship for those events for the first time and again you know this time we're attracting about two hundred and forty to three hundred people to our all member events which is a huge percentage increase on previous years and I think it shows that we're all now engaging better and we are actually now meeting the needs of our members which is the challenge that you laid down for us last year. We're also now working with our colleagues much more strongly. We had our first event with SOCITM this year, we've had our first events with the North West Employers' Organisation, we've been working with the Centre of Excellence, we've been working with the North West Improvement Network for the SD Toolkit you know we're all working together now to make sure that we avoid duplication and we reduce the burden on all of us who are trying to lead these complex agendas and this is something that we really want to try and build on in the future to make sure that we really do join up that drive for improvement and work together across all the agencies.

And one or two of you may have noticed in passing that we've taken responsibility now for Government Connect and the Local Government e-Standards Board and what I'm really delighted to announce this morning, it's hot off the press, is that Government Connect, the Department of Work and Pensions and Tameside Council on behalf of NWeGG, have now come together with a tripartite agreement that will see DWP, Department of Work and Pensions, invest some two million in Government Connect and will actually commit them to using the Government Connect infrastructure in the future and that will deliver both their existing agendas and a range of future Local Authority interactive solutions and applications. It's really exciting to know again now that we're starting to work more collaboratively local to Central Government again is very powerful so I was really pleased to announce that this morning and hopefully that will be the first of many agreements we'll have now with Central Government departments. Again, I think it will demonstrate that Government Connect is increasingly being seen as a key piece of technology in Central Government's future plans.

So just continuing very quickly now with our past achievements over the last twelve months. We have continued to develop an increasingly mature relationship with Central Government and again I'm delighted that colleagues could be with us to speak this morning but again we are working very effectively now alongside our regional partners as I said such as the Regional Centre NWIN and Government Office North West and we do regard now our colleagues from DCOG, DWP and the Cabinet Office as true partners and in fairness in the past perhaps we've seen you as our regulators or perhaps our paymasters but I think it is good now that we're developing this mature relationship where we do truly see you as our friends and colleagues.

So just thinking very quickly as we move on, what about the future then, what does the future hold for NWeGG? Well we all know that we're leading our organisations and our communities in a climate of constant change. If there's one thing that's certain now it's that we're always going to be in a changing environment and that status quo is certainly not an option and one thing that is really clear is that increasingly now the public demand on us to deliver services that actually are fit for purpose, services that are delivered as and when people in our communities want them and not to meet the needs of our organisations, is becoming key, and I think some of you will be aware that Tony Blair when he was in Manchester for the recent Labour Party Conference talked about the 'Google' generation. He talked about the 'Google' generation who've beyond the idea of services only being available between nine to five and closed at weekends and Bank Holidays, and he really stressed that today's technology is profoundly empowering and whilst we must recognise that in some ways public services are different, people will no longer accept as being the passive recipients of services handed down to them from on high and we're going to have to think about how we design our services from the customer perspective.

We're really going to have to put the customers at the heart of everything we do and it's about what makes sense to the customer, it's not acceptable any more to actually design our service in the way that what makes sense to us as organisations and if you've had the opportunity to read the recently published White Paper or even just a summary of the recent published White Paper, you will see that this is reflected throughout the White Paper thinking and it was captured again by Phil Woolas who is a Minister of Local Government who also was in Manchester a couple of weeks ago for the SOLICE Conference and he talked about the politics of place, he talked to us about being place shapers and place makers. He talked to us about being place shapers across the entire public sector landscape not just being confined as we often are now to silos of service delivery or particular spheres of influence. So I think if you actually look at the White Paper you are going to have to become a more familiar and we're all going to have become familiar with whole concept as community leaders and place makers and place shapers and some of this language is very new and will take I think some time to unpack, but the message is very clear because the White Paper I think does set a very clear change of direction for Local Government. It's moving away from complex time and resource intensive inspection regimes of recent years, to a much more outcomes-based approach. It's going to be focused on localities, it's going to be based on individual's needs and aspirations, it's not going to be designed as I said around individual organisations and its silos and I think already those of us who work in Local Government can see the impact that our Local Strategic Partnerships are having in thinking about a more multi-agency approach to delivering outcomes to our communities and particularly the impact our Local Area Agreements have been having in terms of helping us to work together and think about our priorities and think about aligning our resources together.

And if you think about our original vision for NWeGG if you remember it was all about when we started out on this journey we said that NWeGG was all about enhancing the capacity and capability of NWeGG members to deliver public services anytime, anyhow, anywhere. Remember it was the sort of Martini type vision so again just reflect on what I've said it's enhancing the capacity and capability of NWeGG members to delivery public services anytime, anyhow, anywhere and if you think about that we were really ahead of the game because everything we have in our original vision there is a strong resonance now within the White Paper and it's as relevant today as our original vision was going back a few years ago. But now I think to deliver this vision you know the challenge is going to be about providing the leadership. But how do we actually lead the necessary cultural change across our organisations and across our communities if we are really going to establish new ways of working? How are we going to really provide the leadership to re-model processes to incorporate technology in ways that benefit both the Council and the customer, whether it's to better and more efficient services or both. It's all going to about leadership and capacity and I want just in closing to say to you please remember the 'e' in NWeGG because again some people still think it is just about electronic Government and some people think that agenda maybe has had its day and some people think that agenda is just for the 'techies' but actually what I want to say to you is it's much more than that. It's always been much more than that in NWeGG. It's about making the best use of information and communications technologies together with the organisational change and skills improvement to improve service delivery, it's much more than technology, it's about how we lead our communities and that's why I think you know last year when I spoke with you I actually said you know our 'e' has become much more synonymous it's now talked about yes it's electronic Government but the 'e' in NWeGG stands for excellence, efficient, enabling, enterprising, entrepreneurial, you name it we have it I could go on and we do call it the evolving 'e' and that's really powerful that we understand now that NWeGG is about really transforming local public services and if we can lead that agenda effectively, we will be able to say that our job has been a good one.

So I think that if you look at our evolving 'e' it does capture our bold and ambitious plans for the future, it's a future where we can build on our track record of doing it for ourselves, a future where we'll continue to work together in the north-west, to help ourselves and our communities and it is going to be for the benefit of our organisations but most importantly we want to work together to improve the quality of life of everyone who works, lives, visits or does visit in our communities. But I think we should go forward in terms of optimism and confidence about the future because we do have a reputation here in the north-west for taking the initiatives of being leaders and this goes way back to the industrial revolution and I think that as in the past this region will really rise to the challenge of improving public services and delivering efficiencies and I personally look forward to continuing this journey with you and would hope that you would continue to support NWeGG certainly in the way that you have over the last twelve months. Thank you very much.

Ian Watmore - Head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit

Thanks Janet, is the microphone now yeah can you hear at the back, awake, alive, good. I like the title Permanent Secretary but it is absolutely meaningless to everybody in normal society and recently as is my want I had to do a few visits and presentations internationally and we had some Japanese visitors over not very long ago and because my Japanese is appalling we got some interpreters in play and so I was introduced to this eminent Japanese visitor and my interpreter started sniggering and I said to him what's funny about that and he said oh well the other translators just translated your job title as eternal typist, so at this point I knew my place in life. As Janet said I live in the North West, I've been living in the North West, this is my twentieth year, I moved up in 1987 and I'm very proud of being in the North West, however, my first twenty eight years were spent in London which is why I'm a lifelong Arsenal fan and I usually come into this stadium for the annual drubbing of Man City but I can't say that 'cos about three weeks ago I was here and the humiliation as we lost 1-0 to Man City so I have to take my hat off on that day the fact the we missed eighteen open goals has got nothing to do with it and I wish Man City every success with their 0-0 draw philosophy for the rest of the season, so it's the only way they're going to stay up. Anyway I'm also thinking it was quite poignant that this stadium should be actually on Alan Turing Way, with Turing probably the finest British exponent of Information Technology before Ernest Lee came along with the internet so I think that's another good selection of venue and of course as many people know I think the North West is a bit of hub for technology in Britain not just in Government but particularly in Government for example we now run the Government Gateway Solution out of Birchwood near Warrington we have obviously Government Connect under Janet's leadership here down the road in Tameside and last year we held a very successful European Union Presidency event at Manchester, so I think you know we are trying to put the North West on the map in this area, in this particular part of government life.

Before I start my remarks I did want to say thank you to Janet personally I don't know that how many of you know Janet well but I think she is what we under Gus Donald's leadership in the civil service would exemplify as a true leader I think she brings real passion and energy to this agenda she does it from her seat as the Chief Executive not as a 'techi' she's been absolutely instrumental in the whole NWeGG agenda but she also plays a big role on the national stage, both in leading on Government Connect but now she sits on one of our national committees which is a good delivery council along with some senior leaders out of Whitehall, the wider public sector and the voluntary sector as we begin to shape the government's next agenda under the ruling services. So Janet you're a star we're very proud to have you and thank you for inviting us here today.

I have been in this job about two years, just over two years and in one of the first interviews I did was in the mag Government IT which I do sponsoring this conference and it was interesting I read re-read the article that I put in about two years ago just to sort of see how much progress we'd made about what we said we'd do and I was quite pleasantly surprised you re-read these things and you think oh God did I really say that we were going to do that, but on this occasion I re-read the whole article and I feel we've made good progress on a broad range of fronts and I want to talk about that in a minute, but of course the main strategic direction was set when we published the Transformational Government Strategy last November and I think that document has got real buy around the place. We then published the implementation plan that went with that in March and John Suffolk on the panel there was recruited in June to really take forward and drive this plan forward across the whole of the public sector and doubtless that will emerge later from his presentations, but in particular we're about to publish the first annual update of that strategy which is a commitment we made in the original document to publish every year an update on how we're going so that will be coming out in the nearest future. But rather than regurgitate everything that's in the document I thought I'd just play you a short video to just remind you of the main points. Cue the video (video plays)

I don't know how many of you had seen that video before but it came out about a year ago and you'll notice the trend setting nature of it as the Dove adverts on TV as already nicked the music for it so those of you that watch television commercials who spot it next time. That video was put together semi light hearted but there were lots of subliminal important messages, the first being that this about business services, not about technology and the second being that this is about personalised services centred on the needs of the citizen over the direct customer or as a stakeholder and it was also about joining up and sharing across traditional silo values to provide a better to provide a better service and of course implicit behind all of that is the dependence that we would have on technology when these visions come about and so the professional standards that we need to adopt and employ in order to both build and run services dependent upon such advance technologies so those are the key messages that came out of that video, what I wanted to do was not re-hash all of that but just give you ten reasons why I think we've moved on a lot in the last two years and just a personal reflection on the two years that I've been in the job and some of the challenges that were laid at the door when I arrived and where are we now, I'm not suggesting the world is perfect there's lots of stuff to get better, I believe anybody in this job whether its at national or local level is only passing through in the sense this is a continuous journey and for a brief period of time we have responsibility for taking the journey forward to the next level and then handing it on to others it's a never ending journey, but I'm going to give you ten things that I think are important, the first is that when I arrived there was frankly a schism between central and Local Government on this issue people were not talking, there was an open letter published to me in the press by SOCITM criticising the past and I think we've moved hugely forward now in that local and central government are collaborating on most of our solutions and the different dimensions to our problem and indeed we have Local Government representation on all the national councils that we've set up CIO council delivery council and the like and I think you know there's the dialogue between us can always be improved but I think its much much better than it was.

Second thing was people were pointing out what was going to happen when 2005 ended and for those who can't remember why that was being asked it was the date when the original five year targets particularly for Local Government was set, funding fro the then ODPM was established and everybody was you know going to claim them, 31st December would come round and it would all collapse. Well I think this event is evidence that that was a catalytic five years, we're now taking that forward in all sorts of different ways though Local Government foria up and down the land of which NWeGG is a particularly good example and I also think the national and local boundaries in service provision are beginning to break down although its beginning to and good examples that Janet eluded to was the way the Pension Service and local authorities are now working together to deliver better services to the elderly.

The third problem I faced was direct gov we've had a fairly immediate response to the previous UK on line portal, direct gov had been launched there were a lot of problems on funding and very low usage of the service. We are two years on we now have five million people routinely using direct gov, week in week out we have local authorities hooked in under local direct gov and now we have critical transactions like the award winning car tax online facilities which the Transport Department run seamlessly provided through direct gov and frankly direct gov has become the envy of the rest of the world in terms of central government portals and destination web sites for Government service. We've also built up in parallel with that the Business Link service under DTI and I think we genuinely can now claim that we have you know Citizen Centric and Business Centric web sites for people to access public services and get public information under the tag line of putting public services all in one place.

The fourth thing we had is something called the Government Gateway, now the Government Gateway was a piece of technology that was build primarily to enable to file tax returns online have grown to a number of other services, wasn't per se a problem but it had been lessened to a contract in the private section under the name of True North and this contract had gone slightly wrong as one journalist put it 'True North West truly south' and we had a lot of issues there. Again two years on and we've sorted those out we've relocated the service up here into the North West, we have nine million people registered on Government Gateway and its growing all the time, so the electronic hub of the identity management agenda and of course Government Connect is coming on stream under Janet's leadership and building on some of these of other products like Gateway and taking them in and making them locally relevant and branded.

The fifth area we focused on was shared services, what we were doing about that well John's team at the moment are preparing to publish the shared service plans that we've got for nine or so sectors across the public service economy if you like, but I think there are some good signs I mean in Local Government the hub is held up as a real example out of what you can do in a shared services role and of course we're beginning to get some real efficiency gains from some of the procurement sharing that's going on the 'e-auctions' that are now mainstream are really a reverse 'ebay' type auctions for public procurement are really starting to get dramatic savings to the public purse.

The sixth area we faced was a complete absence of any profession, in Central Government IT, Local Government has obviously preserved its profession with SOCITM but Central Government let it lapse, there were battles if you like if that's the right word with the professional bodies and again two years on we've now established a Central Government IT profession, I think we've got about eight thousand people now formally registered under it, it's growing every month, but perhaps more significantly we've got something that I think in this magazine today Katie Davies highlights call the Professional IT Alliance which is really Central Government and SOCITM joining forces with these external bodies like E Skills, like the British Computer Society, like the National Computer Centre again also Headquarters in Manchester and we've created this professional IT alliance to create a real approach to IT professionalism that underpins all our services.

The seventh thing I've highlighted is the opportunity that's being provided through other digital strategies that the Government has put in place. I'll pick out two for you which I'll return to in a minute, one, the Digital Challenge and if you like the City or Local Authority opportunity to take part in a National Competition and become the Digital Challenge winner both to get some prize money out of the Department of Communities Local Government but also to give prestige to the area of the country that won that who wins that prize. We also have the digital switch over of television coming again, I'll come back to that more, but these are two big opportunities that I think we need to exploit.

The next big opportunity that face is the one that Janet highlighted in terms of the Local Government White Paper was published less than a month ago builds on the earlier work done this year on local area agreements I think its absolutely central to the way that Government is thinking about the delivery of services to the public, they've recognised eighty percent or something of services are actually provided through local channels and by giving the place, the centre piece in this particular Policy Agenda I think there's a huge opportunity for people in this room and colleagues in Central Government to join forces in an area and really 'up the game' in terms of local service provision to citizens and individual communities.

The ninth thing that I remember was all the furore over at the time it was like 'ID' cards, I tried to do an interview on saying forget 'ID' cards talk about identity management and found myself in front of the Home Secretary on day two of the job or something trying to explain why I had spoken in public on ID cards. The fact is that I think we have the moved the agenda over the last two years towards an agenda where identity management is the issue, the business issue that we're all focused upon, 'ID' cards is part of that solution said but so are the other things that we're already involved with like Gateway and Connect and those other programmes. They give us the opportunity to really centre on identity management and some of you may have seen when the Prime Minister went out on the PR 0ffensive online yesterday talking about how identity management was going to be used within the Home Office for their security and protection agendas but increasingly is going to become the core of a better service, public service provision pending the better benefits to the economy as the business sector starts to take part in this agenda with the leadership of Sir James Crosby former Chief Exec of HBOS who's just been appointed to lead the public private panel on identity management, so there's a lot moving in that area.

And finally my tenth thing is two years ago everybody just said why did you take this job you must be mad, everything Government ever done with IT is a disaster and you know its trying to resurrect the Titanic or something, what are you doing? And I said at the time I don't believe it is true that everything you do is a disaster I think what we do have some big problems in particular Central Government with the way we implement business change and technology often gets the blame for that, but when those problems happen they are typically one in a hundred of the Government Projects and yet we give them national prominence in the press, we give Parliamentary time to them about fifteen times before we've finished kicking that problem and so it gives the impression of a much more distorted picture than the true picture that is out there, when you look across Local Government the vast majority of solutions are successful, when you look across Central Government its also true despite the high profile problems that we have had and so I started to talk to the NAO about this and they said well all right let's go and commission a report on this subject and later this month they will be publishing a report entitled 'Successful Projects in IT' and the banter usually goes, that'll be a short report then and at which point I'd say actually the problem of cutting it down to a manageable number and I think there's something like twenty three, twenty four projects, not all Government UK projects, some across the world, some private sector ones for comparison but they have been selected as illustration of what we can do when we do it right and what makes success happen not always learning from failure, learning from success and John Ollson and I have the pleasure of being summoned to the Public Accounts Committee later this month to take the PAC's congratulations on the subject I think not, but the negative effect of all of this is that with those ten things and hundreds of other things that are going on out there and a unification under a broad strategic agenda, I think the UK is becoming the world leader in modernising its public services in a quite exciting political agenda based on choice, contestability and other reforms and in all of this reform areas technology plays and absolutely pivotal part in this as you know you cannot deliver great services to people these days without employing the latest technologies that they need in their every day lives and expect to use in their everyday interaction with Government.

So I'm going to leave you with three you know thoughts for what you might do and you know on the, you know go back to your constituencies and prepare for Government sort of speech, think of three things that you might want to focus on. The first is the identity management debate, I think there is a real opportunity to join services around citizens if we properly embrace the identity management debate. Sometime those services will be customer transactional oriented like filing returns or applying for permits and licences whatever more often that not it will be more Social Services of the type that we might see when we're you know rehabilitating offenders back into the community, helping people out of their own local difficulties inside the deprived communities etcetera, etcetera. So can we use the Identity Management debate really to upscale our focus on citizen's services and really make a meaningful difference to people's lives in real communities not theoretically on white boards.

The second is, I would urge you to take advantage of this Digital Challenge Competition which I think was announced at a big fanfare just before the election and has now reached the stage where there are ten finalists It doesn't really matter in some services who are finalists are though I think somebody will win and that will be great for them but I think in every area we should be coalescing around the digital challenge approach to really get business and voluntary and public sectors working together to try and get universal access to citizens in an area so we can really provide services to everybody not just those who can afford to pay. And I think that was kind of one of the original missions behind the Digital Challenge I think I'm right in saying that Manchester with Tameside is the finalist from the North West region and I haven't got the details of when the competition will finally be decided, but nevertheless regardless of the competition I would urge you all to continue to focus on what was behind the Digital Challenge in terms of local community service provision. And thirdly I'd like to get you to think about how you would maximise the benefits of the digital switchover, for television services that's now virtually upon us.

For those of us the North West in this room we would know that the first project on the digital switchover has actually been piloted in Whitehaven in Cumbria and will then be rolled out across the Borders region, which includes the northern parts of our North West region but in 2009 the roll out happens in Granada which is you know going to be a real testing ground for the digital switchover and what will make that work in my view is one that the switch over is relatively seamless and easy to do and there are obviously loads and loads of issues to be worked through on that and through the pilot schemes and so on. But I think the opportunity is bigger than just converting peoples' TV's to Sky, NTL or some freeview box type arrangement. It is actually to put digital technology in every home and if we do that then off the back of that I think we have a real opportunity to expand and provide digital services of a much more broadly based nature than just the repeat of television programmes. So I would urge you to think about those three things, how you can take advantage of the real focus on identity management, how you can take advantage of the digital challenge and its fruition as a competition and finally what creativity and entrepreneurship you can inject on using the digital switchover as a vehicle and for reaching people in their everyday life and home. So with that I hope I hope I've given you a flavour of where we've come from and where I think we should be going to and thank you again for inviting me to your conference.

John Suffolk - Chief Information Officer, Her Majesty's Government

Janet Callender

I'd like to welcome everybody to this special edition of Mastermind. Our specialist indeed our only contestant this morning is John Suffolk. He's Her Majesty's Government's Chief Information Officer. For those who don't know John he was appointed in June this year and prior to this he was the Director General of the Criminal Justice I.T. or Cee-JIT as we commonly know them and he has over twenty-five years' experience in leading I.T. and major transformation programmes and has worked in the engineering and financial service industries and has extensive experience in delivering I.T. enabled change.

Can I say this morning that John has chosen his specialist subject. Not unusually he's chosen 'Transforming Corporate Services' so John you have twenty minutes on your specialist service 'Transforming Corporate Services' starting now.

John Suffolk

Thank you.

Janet Callender

What kind of services would you class as Corporate within the scope of transformational Government?

John Suffolk

Well the traditional definition is things like Finance, HR, Estates, Legal, some people include Marketing and others say well it's all blurring anyhow well it's front office and back office and other organisations have taken the complete end to end view in terms of what they're going to include and the big question they ask is where can I create value for the citizen, where can I create effective efficiency improvements in terms of my organisation but the traditional is the back office functions.

Janet Callender

Correct. Question two. Is transformational Government only about saving money?

John Suffolk

Er no clearly money is very important we spend a substantial amount of cash in terms of public services but it is not just about saving cash. It is about driving through efficiency and effectiveness in terms of the whole organisation. Now change does take some money so clearly driving that efficiency is very, very important but what's equally important is the way that we're improving the service to citizens. The whole issue in terms of taking out error, re-working delay in terms of all the processes not just the ones that frustrate the hell out of us as employees in terms of how do I get my expenses paid, how do I bring the new joiner on board you know as and when somebody leaves but the whole issue in terms of what the citizen sees in terms of how do I pay my Council charge, how do I get my bins emptied, how do I get something done? All that is about efficiency and effectiveness. Everything either takes us some time, everything either costs us some money and therefore they are prime opportunities for both cashable savings and efficiency as well.

Janet Callender

Correct. How can transforming Corporate Services improve Government services to citizens?

John Suffolk

Well most people think that that's quite a tough issue but I - there used to be an old adage that if you were looking at your Corporate Services you would have two times as many people focused on dealing with the customer than the people dealing with the people that deal with the customer and there was a sort of message which says if you're not serving a customer you should be serving somebody who is, and I believe that's absolutely true. If we look at the amount of time and effort we go into saying is this the right estate strategy what do we do with our buildings, what do we do with procurement and legal, that is all substantial cost and management time and many businesses pose themselves the question are those our core competencies? And some say they are and some a lot say actually no they're not our core competencies and we would like others to take away that worry that concern, that investment and the day-to-day operation of that which frees up management time and potentially frees up cash to focus on what they do see is why they exist which is about improved services. So focusing in terms of driving out in essence the inefficiencies, driving through what is the right thing for that organisation gives people time to focus on why we exist which is serving the citizen.

Janet Callender

Correct. Who will be held personally responsible if the strategy for the transformation of Government doesn't deliver?

John Suffolk

Mmm. I think that's a tough question. I think I'm going to pass on that one.

Janet Callender

What are the key challenges that you feel Local and Central Government need to face up to and which need to be tackled first?

John Suffolk

Well as Ian was suggesting in terms of his opening remarks, Local Government and Central Government have you know a different focus. They have different priorities, different Governing structure and therefore there isn't a single starting point for any kind of organisation. There are some common threads. The whole issue in terms of change is very difficult. We like to kid ourselves that we like change as individuals and of course often for people like us we're the ones doing the change to other people and that is always a very nice position to be in but when change actually happens to you personally it is always much more difficult. So the challenge always is how do you create a climate where people are used to change. It is absolutely true that the more change people go through the more change they get used to. It is by definition the fear of change begins to dissipate it is the fear of the unknown that creates people to resist change so I think we all have a role to play both local and central in terms of positioning people for the ongoing change that's going to be with us forever.

The second challenge that I see the challenge this Is where it gets difficult in my opinion from Local and Central Government in terms of Local and Central Government department they are trying address life's unsolved problems. How do you stop people, you know going back into crime once they've been through the justice system, how do you you know how do you know stop the you know the social exclusion. How do you stop teenage kids you know getting pregnant or going into drugs. They have you know really quite a tough challenges that we have to do at the central level and you also look at the scale of some of those organisations and a 150 years of culture and very very rarely one organisation and often an amalgam of ten, fifteen organisations and they've still got those multiple cultures that's a fundamentally difficult change that they have to go through and Local Government of course are much sharper in terms of being closer for the citizens. They have a different democratic structure, they're very much in terms of the delivering services you know and the coal face day in day out different kind of things that you have to do, but the common theme goes through all those is that change is not something that okay guys we're going to have an agenda for change needs two or three years we have day to day services that we have to provide and we have to mould in the change for those Agendas and that's very tough. Often people often come up to me now look at this great organisation just started up from nothing to nine months, now aren't they brilliant, they actually did a great job but they started with nothing. We started off with a big Local Authority we had two three five ten thousand people a big central department forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, ninety thousand people there are very few organisations in the FTSE top ten with more than one hundred thousand people in them and yet we're expected and we need to fundamentally change those organisations as well as running those businesses, those are the big tough challenges.

Janet Callender

Correct. What kind of examples of shared services and collaboration already exist and what tangible benefits have they delivered.

John Suffolk

Okay well I guess the first one is there's been a health shared business service going on now I think since April 2005, they've got over 100 organisations in health using that now and in that eighteen month period the average saving is 34% of cost, that's a pretty impressive saving. If you look at the MOD HR environment, eighty thousand civilians they expect to save to save 300 million pounds over ten years. Even Local Government you know level, Civic Watch, Civic Watch local groups getting together 67% reduction in terms of crime over three years, so it's not that we're not doing these things, though tangible evidence time and time again that when tiers come together to fundamentally transform their services whether they be front office or back office, there is demonstrable savings and evidence there and as Ian was saying it's not that we don't do great work, we do brilliant work time and time again. We have been completely hopeless in my opinion at actually promoting some of the great work you know of all great challenges that I have and one of things that I get great benefit from is that it is good to see people going for awards and this is the award season so you know every week there is another award going on and you know I have to do the evaluation and there is example after example ranging form people using GPS tracking to fix holes in roads so that will reduce their insurance claims, compensation claims, by the citizens every month, and people saving hundreds and thousands of pounds are using very basic technology every month, so three examples and we have lots of examples we have to do a better job or promoting them so people can copy them.

Janet Callender

Correct. What is the savings that can be made from transforming Corporate Services in Local and Central Government and in your view what is the biggest opportunity.

John Suffolk

Okay well it's estimated that on Finance and HR Local and Central we spend about seven billion a year and that's a lot of cash by anyone's books and you can take a view in terms of how much of that seven billion do you believe we could save if we shared more if we cut out duplication and we cut out errors and re-works and delay. Most people who have ever been involved with overhead cost reductions, you would normally not get out of bed for a saving of less than 15% and some are saying if you're being really aggressive 30% is not uncommon and the health example is 34% well legally if there's 20% is not unreasonable so that gives you saving of one point four billion and again that's a substantial amount of money to improving front line services. In terms of the best opportunities well I think wherever you have multiple local or central broadly doing similar things is a great opportunity. We can see it in health, we can see it in education, Ian mentioned that the sector plans for shared services, lots of opportunities in terms of education, the MOD we've already got the example there, Local Authority you know you begin to look at all of the services that Local you know Government provide you know and you have to you know pose the question you know how many ways do we need to do with the Revs and Bens or waste management whatever it happens to be so the starting point is multiple teams doing broadly the same things can we rationalise down can we create shared services, big teams big organisations where they themselves can begin to rationalise their own internal services and we've already got lots of evidence of that.

Janet Callender

Correct. Why do we need to become more intelligent as customers and why would it save Local Authorities money and improve quality of service delivery.

John Suffolk

Well I guess the alternative is that we remain unintelligent customers and if you're in the supply market that's fantastic you know it's Christmas every day of the week. My belief is though the reason why the need for intelligent customers is becoming so important is because it's quite tough just to do some deep silo functional based systems with process and business change but we're pretty good at that and we have a good track record. When we begin to do change at a horizontal level, things like you know shared services, transformation, it does become more horizontal you're more partnering with people you have to be more clear in terms of the articulation of what you're trying to do because you know you're part of a team now its not you just stating a single requirement. you're having to mobilise your requirements with a whole host of other organisations and if you're trying to buy services in, clearly the clearer the requirement the more specific the requirement the more likelihood that we're going to get what we asked for at the end of the day. So the whole issue in terms of being an intelligent customer in the broadest sense in the terms of requirements, outcomes, benefits, timing you know right down to you know 'X' of procedures what happens if partners one two disappear, it is a more intelligent world that we're going into, it's a slightly more complex world as well. So that's where the intelligent customer comes in, but take it down to the real basics if we spend seven billion a year on you know HR, we spend two billion a year on management consultancy in its own right and I guess if we did all of the maths and you know calculated every kind of component that we are building I cannot believe with the scale of purchasing that both Local and Central Government do there are not substantial savings to be had and we know that is the case. But of course if people don't know that you're buying something they have no opportunity to team up with you in terms of saying can we do joint purchasing or tri-purchasing, so the more we communicate on what our strategies are for purchasing the more likely that we can team and do bulk purchasing. Ian mentioned reverse auction, when I was coming into Government two and a half years ago they were just trialling this and it was all you know quite scary and exciting now they just take it for granted and again example after example of people saving substantial you know thousands and hundreds of thousands of pounds purely by doing some very simple you know auctioning techniques called reverse auctioning and that means people teaming up in terms of people saying I want to buy this stuff together and then there's the process there. So intelligent customer, big savers from procurement but also big savings in terms of how we can begin to work together.

Janet Callender

Again correct. How do the changes that Central and Local Government face differ or is it that one size fits all.

John Suffolk

Well one size doesn't fit all you I mean you have four hundred or so Local Authorities, you have tens of very large departments in Central Government and it isn't sensible to say one size fits all. Their cultures are different frequently their current priorities are different their maturity level is different in terms of where are they on the transformation curve and therefore in essence change has to fit in to into that context. So the changes in terms of Central Government are the ones that I mentioned earlier in terms of one of shear scale and complexity, some trying to fix some of life's very difficult problems to fix. Local Government you know it tends to be a more vibrant agenda because you're dealing with services at a local level on a much greater you know number on a day by day basis. The political structure is also different in terms of Local Government. But the challenges in terms of transformation are very similar, you know how do you balance people processing technology to deliver the outcomes that we're looking for whether that's efficiency or affectiveness. Clearly it's more complex to change organisations of fifty, sixty, seventy thousand people all organisations such as a prison or a hospital that runs three hundred and sixty five days you know a year, twenty four hours a day, very difficult to rip the heart out of an organisation and put it back in again without them you know missing a beat in terms of what's going on. So scale generates its own issues, but what I would say is we know that's an issue and therefore our planning should begin to mitigate against the risk that that brings forward.

Janet Callender

Correct. What actually is the key role that technology needs to play in transformation and how can we make the technology work.

John Suffolk

Okay it just isn't about technology you know, many of the people in this room are business people you know we start with an outcome that we want to deliver is that efficiency is that effectiveness you know what's the outcome that we want and that is a blend of changing our people it's about changing our processes and changing our technology. I have seen many examples in the private sector where we have put some beautiful technology in they are things that of you know of art and actually changed nothing for the business apart reducing their profit. Because we didn't focus in terms of changing the processes and we absolutely ignored the people element in terms of change and there is no point in putting great technology in, if actually people don't know how to use it. Yes and even if we train the people to death in terms of new technology if the underlying process is still completely rubbish and ineffective then in essence all we've done is made an ineffective you know process even more costly and ineffective and therefore our starting point always has to be the blend of people process in technology of whatever model you want to apply which says guys you know those three things have to work together to deliver the outcome. Technology plays its important part as Ian said I know of no organisation that's fundamentally transforming their business without using technology, if you look at everything behind even you know businesses that are turning themselves round like Sainsburys, you know that's a transformation driven on the back of technology, big logistical supply chain kind of activity. You look at every move in terms of the top flight organisations which we'd never heard of ten, fifteen years ago you know the Ryanairs, you know the Easyjets tremendously technology based organisations, but they've also got their processes right, they've also got their people right so how it will end technology's one element an important element but you've got to get everything right with it.

Janet Callender

Correct. We've heard a lot about change this morning already, is there really an appetite for change across all tiers of Government.

John Suffolk

Yes I think there is, it's I'm pretty new into this role and everywhere that I go, the things that people mention to me are shared services, transformation, efficiency, settlement conditions, spending review, the Varney work and therefore its clearly getting head space and agenda space for people and I think that's absolutely right. Would it be fair to say that everybody fully understands the consequences of the output and outcomes of those strategies, the answer is no they're not, you know some clearly are at different levels of maturity and they are finding their way through this, some are, incredibly advanced to give an example in terms of shared services, you know it's not uncommon for people to take a year to work out what is the right approach for them in terms of shared services. Are they a buyer of other people's shared services or are they a seller of their shared services to other people and we've seen this in quite a few instances where actually as they work through their business design as they work their competencies as they look at their scope and scale, as they look through their priorities, they begin to determine their approach, but I can generally say I've not come across an organisation whether it be Arms Length Body, NDPB, Local Authority or Central Government department where they are not into the transformational agenda. Clearly you know it's early days for some but really see you know tens and tens of examples of fundamental change going on, I think you know as Ian said we've come a long way in terms two years, that ball is rolling down the hill. It is very hard to stop that once that goes and I think you know it's well moving forward and the issue for us is to maximise the momentum that we have done to continue to do the change that we've already started.

Janet Callender

Correct. John who are the key change agents and where will Councils get advice help and support from.

John Suffolk

My personal belief is and people might think this is little bit twee but I believe to be true, the change starts from within. It's very difficult for people to have change imposed upon them and I absolutely can guarantee everybody in this room, anyone who's tried to push change on you, you will naturally begin to resist and push back and there's some real clear theory that sits behind that, and therefore the whole issue in terms of change agendas have to be owned from the individual. So anybody's whose in a position where they're saying I run an Estates function, I run Revs and Bens or I run you know a big HR function, has the ability to be a catalyst for change and it can be really quite simple which says, let me just go and compare the performance of my team and my operation to others from a benchmarking. Local Authority have been doing this for some time, the CPA you know helps in terms of doing that, it's a relatively new thing from the Central Government. So any head of function any Chief Executive any of the bodies that you know provide you know support like SOLACE or LGA or SOCITM Idea and there's lots of them, coming together with which says collectively is there are better ways of doing things, in terms of support you know there are people in you know Ian's team and our team in terms of delivering transformation we try and act as the glue across the central function to handle the reserves, some of the treasury kind of issues to do with you know VAT or head count or whatever else is going on, you know what's the best way of doing that so really we must provide support and to some extent one of our best skills and what I would say is one of our best compliments is acting a bit like a dating agency you know someone's looking for someone of this height and this colour and this kind of thing and we say well we know someone like that and we get people together. Because often people don't know who they go and one of our key you know abilities is to say, we may not do it ourselves but we know a man or woman who can and therefore there are a lot of people with tremendous ability out there which we try and pick up on our radar and we put them in touch with other organisations. So anybody can pose the catalyst based questions it does take leadership from the top, dealing from the mental change can be a lonely thing there are support mechanisms in place by the organisations I've said and if you ever get stuck you must to Ian and we'll always find a home or a partner to try and team up with people.

Janet Callender

Correct. What is the timescale. John I've started so I'll finish. What is the time scale for talking forward Local Government Transformation and how do Council's engage with the process.

John Suffolk

Well we've already started haven't we, it's like this is a new thing it's not a new thing you know Local Governments have been doing some real sterling work in terms of transformation and there are many many exemplars and therefore it is started the transformation has started it has been going for some time, the e-enable stuff did lay down a platform you know I look at the statistics of the amount of work going through there that started the process in many people's eyes so you know its not about you know when's it you know going to start, it has started and we need to keep it going, so that would be my position on that I think.

Janet Callender

Okay thank you John you've scored eleven oh twelve points.

John Suffolk

Oh.

Janet Callender

Twelve points but you did have one pass, if you recall you passed on question 4 and the question was who would be held personally responsible if the strategy for transformation for Government doesn't deliver. The answer is John Suffolk, Chief Information Officer HM Government.

John Suffolk

Really.

Janet Callender

Thank you John you may return to your seat.

John Suffolk

Thank you Janet.

Sir David Varney - Chancellor's Senior Advisor on Transformational Government

Thank you. I just want to start by putting the work on transformation into a context and the context is essentially that we got a global economy which is performing well but there are real structural shifts taking place. There's countries emerging most notably China and India and the nature of competition is going to change over the next ten to fifteen years. If we were to wind the clock back twenty years all those bits of Manchester that've been pulled down would be back up there and they'd be a tribute to a trading manufacturing economy with a relatively slim service sector. That's not the economy we're in today, much more service sector, manufacturing much slimmer and whilst there's a lot of confidence that the global economy's going to continue to grow, what its implications are for individual countries is something that they will need to concentrate on and we go into that with considerable strength.

We've had a period of almost unparalleled economic stability and strength, inflation's been relatively mild. Against that background, lots of money has gone into the public services and we're at the point at the moment where give or take the political parties seem to be agreed that the public sector is not going to expand. Now we've got bits of public sector which health is probably one of the more notable ones, bit of education, which have seen almost double the rate of GDP growth so they've grown from being relatively small parts of public expenditure to now being big parts of public expenditure and that budget has got to come under stress and strain because as a number of us get older we also want more and better health care and the health care that we're getting is likely to be very expensive so I've got friends recently I've got a friend who's contracted rather sadly leukaemia, but the treatment he's getting is state of the art cell transplantation and advanced chemotherapy. And that does not come cheap and we are going to see a lot of pressure on those sorts of budgets. That if you've got a constrained Government budget and you've got pressures of both change in population mix and medical technology that means we're going to have to drive the efficiency and effectiveness across the public services. Now you can do that to start with by squeezing, taking what we call the low hanging fruit, but there comes a point when the low hanging fruit aren't there and it gets more difficult. And one of the things that business has found is that there comes a point where you have really have to do business very differently if you want to get to lower costs.

So let's look at the service part because that's the bit I'm really looking at, the service part of the economy. I guess in the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies public services were up there with the best of other services in the country, predominantly delivered through either face to face or back office but actually our expectation of service wasn't terribly high. I was born in nineteen forty-six and I was brought up to believe that the National Health Service was a virtue, that queuing was a state of grace because I was a patient and he was a doctor, his time was more important than mine and I would sit there as part of the treatment waiting for him to come in inevitably late and that was the nature of the public service and we had a bit of the attitude also on the benefits side that if you wanted a benefit you would do everything that we asked you to do because you were getting a benefit and it wasn't too dissimilar to the rest of the service economy. You wind the picture forward now and the leading edge of the service economy looks very different to the generality of the public service. It's much more convenient, it's available twenty-four times seven, the leading edge of it's much more efficient and we've seen revolutions in terms of the way industry's been run so the book industry and the electronics industry is being re-shaped by very, very smart procurement systems attached with the really aggressive and progressive delivery systems. You look at our systems by comparison and they look very slow, very clumpy.

There's another bit of the revolution that has not yet affected the generality of the public sector, I say the generality because you can always find one example, you'd expect it in a thing of this size to be able to find one example which is promising. If you look at the generality of what we're doing then I think you can be reasonably concerned about the future of the public services and the way in which they are delivered and we've got a system whereby we have got a large number of call centres let's take those as an example. In the call centre world our call centres tend to be about a hundred people strong, the average in the private sectors are about four hundred, two to four hundred is the sort of bracket but four hundred is what industry regard as the top end. I think ninety percent of the call centres we've got are under that size. We could staff a museum of technologies of running call centres. We have virtually every make of technology that's known. What's the end result? The end result of that is that you can't run a joined up call centre, a virtual call centre, because you don't have the common handshakes that can take place or at least if you do do it it's very clunky and not very fast, and we've done quite a lot of work in the time I've been looking at this subject in terms of call centres looking at the efficiency of usage of the time that's available to the agents. We typically run at about an average of forty-six percent usage of agent time. Private sector runs at about sixty-nine percent.

There's not much difference in pay scales, we tend to be around the average for the industry. We have less turnover than the private sector as we're a more attractive place, because they enjoy helping to solve problems rather than flogging goods. So as a sector of looking at service transformation, we have not yet brought to our call centres the sort of management discipline that would be necessary in the more straightened times we find ourselves in. We have a system whereby each department deals uniquely with you, so when you come to me as my customer, I look at you and I service you by saying you fill in my form. So let's take, if we take an event like bereavement the surviving relative will have to fill in about forty-four different forms from different parts of Government. There is a high commonality of content in the forms because they do all mainly ask the name, address, date of birth of the person who's died which is not a secret because we actual know it's reported to us, but we do it forty-four times and I guess if you have a nineteen forty-six attitude we would be very stoic about this but then I think the citizen says to themselves well why can't this be joined up, why can't we join this up, and one of the things that has happened in the public sector and it's happened to an extent in the private sector although perhaps it was beginning to push beyond this, is that if the departments concentrate on the transaction the customer, what do I do with him, they miss the wider dimension of the citizen.

Now we've got some examples around of Local Government, National Health Service, sometimes DWP sometimes HMRC, sometimes the Police, working together and starting to look at the citizen and the citizen experience. The best of the private sector have moved beyond transaction whether they call it brand or reputation but they talk about a human set of relationships with important stakeholders and that's a journey which we have to make.

We looked also at the network of offices that we've got around the place. We think that there's about four thousand two hundred offices between Central Government and Local Government. Central Government's got about twelve hundred, ninety percent of them with HMRC and DWP and Local Government about three thousand. If you look at the big national banks or the big retailers then you say there's a national network of around two thousand is the right sort of answer. I'm not saying that two thousand precisely is the right answer what I'm saying is if you look at benchmarking and what other people who've got to do similar sorts of work, interaction with the public, handling problems, you come to the conclusion that we have got quite a lot of real estate in fact when I went with HMRC I went to one of the boroughs in the east end of London with the HMRC. On the door the notice didn't say welcome it said if you are coming about housing benefit go two hundred yards down the road, turn right, keep moving and eventually you'll see an office at the end of it and if you're here about finding a job go round the corner another three hundred metres and you'll find an office there and we have not brought together these because we think in terms of departmental brand or the service that we provide.

We don't think in terms of the citizen. We've got in terms of the Web, which is a new piece of technology, we have brought this sort of anarchistic, creative energy to using the Web so we've got websites in virtually every department, they've sprung up all over the place, there's virtually no control on how you set up a website, we've made some limited in-roads with Direct Garden Business Links starting to create a framework, they're basically sort of warehouses in which departments can put their websites and there's an, I suppose a shining example of good practice in the fact that the Department of Transport have done both vehicle licensing can now be done online with MOTs and insurance so that's joined up and also they've accepted for provisional licences that you can use passport data which is a rare example of one department relying on another. So we've got on the websites we're all doing our own stuff. If you look at the way in which Amazon in a sense invites you in and then directs you either to an Amazon site or to one of their retailers, it's an example of best practice in terms of service delivery for the customer. So we've got clearly a long way to go. We've got a big challenge too in terms of the amount of customer insight we've got.

The amount of research that's actually been done on the way the public actually handles these services is still quite limited. There's been some work done between HMRC and DWP for people who are in and out of work and about twenty-five percent of the time, people do not get benefits to which they're entitled because the administrative system is processing the data and I think there are lots of aspects about service design as we make more transparent what the citizen does and is doing, the more we will redesign the business services that we provide. That's certainly the experience of other Governments that have pulled together and created common service platforms. The other factor which is driving Government thinking is international comparisons and on international comparisons we've done pretty well in the sort of I suppose the end of the twentieth century. What we're starting to see is Governments around the world respond to a citizen's demand for slicker, more convenient services by providing a direct link to the citizen.

So the most obvious one is Service Canada, which is a Federal Government initiative providing Federal Government services through a single organisation, which is going to cost them about half a billion Canadian dollars and is reckoned to save three point two billion and all the Government initiatives overseas that you see are driven by the idea that you join up first the front end of service delivery and then you get all the savings at the back office and we've got the single non-emergency number in New York three-four-five which has, what happened was when they produced that they got a tripling in the number of calls so the system they'd been running before was choking off calls which is what we see. We see that in helplines. Somebody kindly sent me a telephone directory which has been produced of all the helplines and it too has a helpline number that you can ring if you can't find your way through the telephone directory. Let me just take one of the helplines because it's not untypical. Fifty percent of the calls to this helpline go unanswered while the other fifty percent that are answered will make that a hundred percent of them that are answered, fourteen percent are about the subject of the helpline. So basically, ninety-three percent of the calls that come to the helpline are either unanswered or not about the subject of the helpline and I still treasure the Chief Executive who told me that his number – oh-one-four-seven-eight-three-two-six-four-nine-eight-two was a memorable number.

In your lunchtime maybe but if you look at what happens to the nine-nine-nine, nine-nine-nine gets a tremendous amount of calls which are people looking for help and they can't find the call they don't know what the number is to ring. So we need to make progress on how we manage that. You've got the Danes who do a one-stop shop on change of address you can go, the Belgians passed a law on it and unusually for the Belgians this looks as though they're going to enforce it, which is that you will only give your address once and then that goes out to the rest of Government. So internationally if we stay where we are what we're going to see over the next five years is an increasing adversely rating against international comparisons and I think that has an impact at least on the sort of way in which the public service is seen but of course progressively as people travel around the world they come back with these unbelievable stories about how fantastic it is to be in New York and ring three-four-five and something actually gets done and you get through, so there's going to, there'll be all a sort of anecdotal stuff. One of the really difficult issues that we've got to tackle, the issue is I suppose for us is that this transformational change is not like programmatic change.

If I just digress for a second. Programmatic changes in my mind my sort of analogy for this is when the caterpillar decides that he really wants to or she wants to go on a course, lose a bit of weight and get fit and there are good books for caterpillars getting slim. You can read them up, you eat less, work hard, do more exercise that'll get you slim. Transformational change is when you want to go from being a caterpillar to a butterfly and if you're a caterpillar no matter how high you jump in the air there's just no sensation of flying you just don't have the wings and the issue for when you're in transformational change is hard enough in a corporation where you've got lots of levers which you can use to incentivise people common economic projectives, by on large pretty good management information systems. Trying to do it in a public sector which is both different in terms of Central Government, Local Government, political changes and all of that, but in a system which has historically been silo'd and going down rather than going across is a major challenge. So the philosophy I bring to this is a combination of two approaches, in some areas we can be directive because we're giving money which is public money which is going to flow and we can create service transformation plans which will deliver some of the transformations we want.

In the other world I'm a sort of venture capitalist on the look-out for interesting ideas, interesting building on other people's successes, trying to see whether we can encourage both the bottom up approach to transformational change as well as the top down, and over time if the bottom up goes really well it will form the top down and we will be more and more shaped by what our citizens do so it's in the CSRO-seven period which I feel is the period in which we start to move this agenda forward. We'll make some decisions still being argued about by Cabinet but we will make some decisions which are direct decisions which we can make. In other cases we'll be trying to build experience and see what works. We have a culture I think sometimes in the country where we value the new over copying what somebody else does better than we do.

A friend of mine runs a company in this country called Unipart and he's been working on basically the idea of what's called League Management, Toyota-style production management of information to produce excellent results. He's been doing it for twenty years, he says when he goes to a conference and when people say to him have you had a good idea he says yes I've had one and I've been working on it for twenty years and I think I just about understand it they look at him as though he's got he's got special needs rather than recognising that actually what he's doing is copying somebody else who is brilliant at what they do and trying to make the fact that the ideas that he's inherited even better. So we do need to change the way in which some of the values that we've got, we don't have much clarity about our outcomes. If you come into this the way I did I had a mobile phone company where you can get statistics on almost anything because it's all electronic so you can easily find how many calls are dropped, how long calls last, who's talking to whom, you can do all of that stuff and with modern data processing you can find some quite sophisticated and surprising linkages between what you do as a marketer and what the pick up and impact is. Coming into Government is a bit like walking into a pea soup of fog because there's not that much in the way of management information and we need to do a lot more about that. Of course if you haven't got common infrastructure and you haven't got common definitions it's very hard to know what you're talking about but what the public will see is an increasing service which finds it difficult to join up so there will be I think real political pressure to respond to this particularly as the labour market changes, we bring more and more people into work, we've also got other roles to discharge they're not going to want to spend their time being pushed around by something which is too lazy to join itself up.

The other challenge is how to create the political and civil service governing structure which will sustain transformational Government. If you look at the main institutions of the civil service they're very strong as I said downwards but very weak across Government. I mean besides the car service it's hard to think of anything else which has really got by that's inside the normal business Government obviously if we go to the intelligence community there is an awful lot of stuff which is done and done well but we have the challenge of how you govern across Government staff, how do you finance it, how do you sustain it? Who makes standards in Government? I've been through some of that because in Shell we were terribly de-centralised and even if we said to people we were on SAP you could guarantee that we'd have a reversion of SAP with bells and whistles on, known to mankind rather than plain vanilla and I think we've got to move to a situation where there's a lot more shared and standardised back office environment. We've faced also that technology is going to change and provide us with even more temptations and even more abilities to complicate life for the citizen and that's because you've got the emergence of technology coming down from the technology companies which puts more and more of the system in the hands of either the Web or the Net.

Actually, the barriers to entry are much lower it's not the case that you need to be a big company actually small companies can get in and do it reasonably well which means that small pockets of money can easily create islands of excellence but there's no possibility of any continent of excellence and when you look at public expenditure we have got to achieve continents of excellence and drive those through. I think the other issue is going to be the sort of challenge for the senior leadership of the civil service and my experience since I've been in that is that and I'm part of the steering group that works with the Cabinet Secretary in terms of the cross-Government agendas, is that we've got a new generation of permanent Secretaries who are much more willing than some of their predecessors to explore what it means, to have horizontal activities. I think in Local Government there's going to be an interesting question of how do we, how, what is the mix of policy instruments and political will delivers the results which most make sense for Local Government and I think of lots of examples that I've gone round but they remain islands they don't become continents and that's a challenge for all of us I think how do we grow that best practice.

I think the end result of a successful transformational strategy is a public service that delivers public goods and a public outcome on a sustained basis because it's seen as part of a competitive economy in the way it delivers that service, and I think that's the challenge for us and the challenge also to be internationally competitive and I think if we get that momentum building in CSRO-seven we can go into CSRO-ten really taking some much more fundamental decisions on the basis of a much more informed position of what pilots of work, what cooperations of work, certainly the cooperation I've seen between HMRC and DWP suggests to me that there is a lot to be gained from this sort of cooperation and in a sense I feel a bit like being at university. I was on the university councils for ten years and there was a chap came in and said to us I'm starting a new course it's called Environmental Engineering, we do a bit of economics, you do a bit of engineering and you do a bit of bio-chemistry and he spent three years being kicked around by the big departments that said I run Biology, I run Engineering, I run Economics, this bloke's just an interloper and today that is one of the central off-routes in the university and it is a proper subject and I think it's about a message which is true or what we're going to see over the next twenty or thirty years that actually the big problems are not inside departments or inside Local Government or inside Central Government. The really fascinating problems are like the crossroads between a number of Government Agencies and it's only be getting that cooperation and collaboration focused around the citizen that we'll have a public service we can all be proud of, so thank you very much.

Page last updated: 9 November 2007