Some thoughts on local digital strategy

How will digital teams and initiatives in Local Government support growth and wellbeing whilst the levels of funding are dropping off so steeply?

I’ve been having quite a few conversations recently about what Local digital strategies (ie the digital strategy for a place) would look like and some of these conversations resulted in a recent post by Carl Haggerty on a Framework for Digital Local Public Services which is a good thing to read if you haven’t already. This is because we are both involved with the #localgovdigital group that the LGA is sponsoring.

For my money the biggest departure that this work has with anything that has gone before it in digital local government is that we are focusing outside of the organisational perimeter and looking at joining up everything around a place for maximum benefit to the people that use it – even if that doesn’t involve us directly. In this post I want to talk a bit about what we might mean by “value” as applied to places and then this can be a building block for guiding the sorts of digital interventions we might make to those places.

So the headline: places have intrinsic value and we need to understand what that value is before we go about enhancing that value with digital transformations. I think it’s really important that we understand the value of what we have before we change it, or otherwise how will we know it’s been an improvement? A good starting point is that a place might be giving us value in one of two categories: well-being or growth.

By this I mean that people will access different kinds of benefit from a place and we might be able to map out those benefits in order to target our digital strategies better. For example, I’m lucky enough to live near Dartmoor: it is absolutely beautiful and people will go there  to recuperate, disconnect and go hiking or gaze at the scenery, buy cream teas etc. Dartmoor therefore has a value in terms of bringing wellbeing to people and this would not be enhanced by stonking great communications towers littering the landscape and it also has an economic value in terms of the money it brings in by virtue of being unspoilt. This also wouldn’t be improved by having stonking great communications towers. However, people do sometimes get lost when wandering over the North moor and being able to get a mobile phone signal (or similar) could be a life-saver.

Contrast this with the centre of the city where I live, where faster comms mean business growth, social value, and better public services and straight away, we can start to see that different places need different kinds of digital intervention to maximise their values to different groups of people.

Modelling this formally should enable us to design and plan digital interventions that maximise the value returned by places.  One way to do this is by using a business value framework such as the Value Proposition Canvas. It is a tool that was developed to help with understanding the benefits of products or services.

Working this through we could tackle it one of two ways: we could start on the left hand side with a place and consider what sort of “assets” it has, then deduce what kinds of gains (or pain relievers) the place has, or we could start on the right with the sort of problems, jobs to be done or opportunities that  people might have that a place would address.

The classic VPC approach would indicate that we need to start with our citizens and ask what sort of value places might enable for them. However, places don’t just exist because people do – they would be perfectly happy without anyone. So we can’t start on the right of the canvas, then, asking what functional, social, or emotional jobs might people be trying to achieve: we need to be place-centric and look at what products or services a place offers as a starting point and then map that to demand. A trunk road, for example, offers transport infrastructure comprising road surfaces, traffic regulation services (speed limits, traffic lights, surveillance cameras), and traffic information services (street furniture, variable message signs, etc); whereas an area of outstanding natural beauty might offer scenery, refreshments, gifts, or other recreation.

We also need to consider which other products or services might be needed for people to consume the products or services a place offers (for example, people might need transport to get to some AONB’s and will require vehicles to use a road). Digital transformations might act on the place itself or on ancillary products.

Next we look at the gain creators. Does the place do something that saves people time, effort, or money? Does it meet or exceed people’s expectations?

Finally we need to look at the “pain relievers”. Is there something about this place that solves a problem for people or produce a saving? Does this place make people feel better?

Of course, these are just categories and a bit of framework. We will need to actually get out there and listen to people if we are to deduce what value a place really has for the people that use it. This post has gone on too long already so I’ll save that for the next one. Without wanting to create a hostage to fortune, we also need to look at both the way that places will respond to environmental factors and a taxonomy of digital interventions that we might make so all being well I’ll tackle those topics shortly too.

Localgov is dying

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: local government is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered local government community when IDC confirmed that local government market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all services. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that local government has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we’ve known all along. Local government is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don’t need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict local government’s future. The hand writing is on the wall: local government faces a bleak future. In fact there won’t be any future at all for local government because local government is dying. Things are looking very bad for local government. As many of us are already aware, local government continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Municipal local government is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time developers G4S and Serco only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: city councils are dying.

Let’s keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenlyLocal leader Chris states that there are 11939 councillors on OpenlyLocal. How many users of GovNet are there? Let’s see. The number of OpenlyLocal versus GovNet posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 11939/5 = 2387 GovNet users. OpenlyLocal posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of GovNet posts. Therefore there are about 1200 users of OpenlyLocal. A recent article put FreeGov at about 80 percent of the Local Government market. Therefore there are (7000+2387+1200)*4 = 42348 FreeGov users. This is consistent with the number of FreeGov Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of West Somerset, abysmal council tax collection and so on, FreeGov went out of business and was taken over by SouthWest ONE who sell another troubled OS. Now SouthWest ONE is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Local Government has steadily declined in market share. Local Government is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Local Government is to survive at all it will be among localist dilettante dabblers. Local Government continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Local Government is dead.

(with thanks to Uncyclopedia)

Induction Checklist

One of my favourite Twitter followees is Jackie Rafferty and yesterday she posted a series of tweets oultining some of the key “benchmarks” when inducting new staff. I reproduce them here for convenience with some limited commentary.

(Update 17:32. Note: Jackie emphasised these were not in any particular order. Obviously some things are more important than others. #9 obviously ought to be the highest priority )

1. How long does it take to get the login details sorted?
2. Introductions to essential people in support service areas like Admin, Finance, HR etc
3. Does someone take you to lunch on day 1?
4. What do you do when the computer goes down, the printer or the loo run out of paper? (it’s the small things that trip you up)
5. If it is a hot desk environment what are the unspoken rules? (this led to an exchange between myself and Jackie that will be part of a future blog post)
6. Some should be expecting you and will give you time to go through this stuff
7. There is an induction process
8. You are told what the job is really about and relevant policies, guidelines & accountabilities are discussed with you
9. Which mug belongs to whom? Hot drink etiquette. Process for sharing/BYO coffee/tea. Who gets the fresh milk?
10. Discussion on the organisation’s social media policy (far fetched hope in most I suspect)
11. (Update 10:30am) Induction is a process, not a one-off event.

Jackie said herself that these were a set of thoughts rather than a rigorous list, so please feel free to add your own in the comments and I’ll update the list.

CitizenState: heuristic democracy

This: http://citizenstate.tumblr.com/post/36517466969/the-startup-state

Since I work in the public sector I have a strange relationship with politics. Of course, I have political views on specific issues and I do my civic duty by voting every once in a while but at the same time I’m involved in a small way with implementing policy, most of which I didn’t vote for or agree with. I have to detach from my political opinion and do a professional job, and in the process of doing that I find that my original views get challenged, sometimes strongly, and so my opinions change over time.

I consider myself fortunate that I get to experience the effects of policy from this sort of vantage point. The people on the sharp end often don’t get the opportunity to go on such a “journey”. People in receipt of public services are often (but not always) the most vulnerable and the least able to advocate for themselves.

But nevertheless it’s important to realise that our ideologies are often disconnected from reality. Policies that are demonised by some occasionally turn out ok: stuff that seemed like a great idea to everyone often goes completely wrong. This is because “policy” in a political sense is heuristic: it’s a mental shortcut to help build consensus around the effect of a principle. This is “fast” thinking and is optimised for communication, pithy soundbites, 140-character tweets and for broad brush statements on complex topics.

I’m no expert on political theory and I don’t have much time for party politics, so let’s cut to the chase. The link above suggests we do one or more of three things:

1. Share a link to a good project that delivers a public service outside the State.
2. Share a thought about how we could deliver a public service outside the State (maybe write a blog post about it).
3. Share a thought about how democracy could be redesigned.

The first should be easy: any social enterprise should be able to demonstrate social impact and simultaneously have a sustainable business model. A great example is Pluss (http://www.pluss.org.uk/), a social enterprise that helps people find work. I’ve chosen them because they used to be run by the local council and now they are owned by a consortium but independent. In the digital arena, microfinance organisations such as Kiva (http://www.kiva.org/start) or Grameen (http://www.grameenfoundation.org/) probably do more for local economic growth than the governments in the areas they operate (and driving growth and wellbeing are the two main pillars of government policy).

As for services that could be run from outside the state apparatus, I think that we need to distinguish between things that might just be privatised (and for example we have private health care) and things that can be genuinely run by citizens for citizens. Social care is an example of services for the most vulnerable that could be run at least partly outside the state system if we could find the reserves of skill, time and compassion that are needed and I think it would be cynical to think that those reserves aren’t actually there.

Finally, I think democracy could use a refresh for the networked age. We could easily participate in decision-making for our street or local community on a much more regular basis than we currently do and this would drive engagement at a larger level – for towns, cities, counties, or regions. Making this happen could be as straightforward as writing an app and creating ways that the digitally excluded could participate.

Two conferences

Last week I attended two conferences. This in itself is unusual for me as my office workload (and meeting schedule) don’t often allow me to get out, and the cost of many good conferences is prohibitive. So going to conferences is rare unless there are bonus items involved, or if the conference is local.

On Thursday I attended “Efficient ICT” which was organised and run by Gov.NET and was staged at the Queen Elizabeth II centre in the middle of London. We heard from the CIO and Deputy CIO of HMRC, the folks running the Kent PSN, the main sponsors and a raft of seminars from people such as Ubuntu, Suse, HP/Autonomy, and lots more.

This event followed a now quite standard design pattern: the main lobby is full of sponsors’ stands and you have to go through it to get anywhere or to get coffee. You are herded back and forth between pre-planned sessions designed to maximise the time you spend with suppliers.

And the main presentations? Well, the guy behind me fell asleep and started snoring. He had the right idea. I have no clue how people get to the top of public sector ICT (both on the supply and the demand side) without being able to deliver a passionate, lively presentation. Dull, monochrome stuff and mostly missing the point from where I am sitting (more on that in another post, hopefully).

This event was free, thankfully, and I am fortunate in that I have some good friends in central London who kindly put me up for the night so the impact on the public purse was limited to an advance train ticket and my time. I also took the opportunity to meet up with some interesting people who are London-based: I would have had more value from just spending the day in and around central London just going to see different people and buying them coffee. Next time that is what I will do instead!

On Friday I was back in Devon for Open Space South West which was hosted by my employer and organised by my friend and colleague Carl Haggerty.

There were sponsors and one or two of them spoke, but there was no selling opportunity for them. The event had low overheads. All the breakout sessions were devised on the day by attendees. And all the programme speakers were up for it – passionate, lively, prepared. They had all done their homework specifically for the event, from Redfront’s ad-hoc research about what people wanted from public services all the way through to RIPFA’s analysis of the audience.

Technical problems meant one presenter couldn’t use the presentation she had prepared so she did it – without missing a beat – from memory. The whole thing just had a level of energy about it that had been completely missing the previous day.

So what am I saying? There seems to be an inverse relationship between quality and money, which is not directly causal. Events put on by the sector, for the sector, work better than events put on by, and for, people selling to the sector.

And hierarchy has a tendency to converge on mediocrity. That is all.

6 songs part 2

After last week’s post on the Six songs of me, top tweeter Janet Davis ratcheted up the difficulty by proposing an alternative set of questions. I like a challenge so here goes.

1. What song do you remember best from college/university?

I hung out with some slightly offbeat people at Uni. The song I remember everyone listening to most are “Ain’t no Friend of Mine” by The Sparkles (although a number of different versions did the rounds if I remember correctly, which I probably don’t). I’m not really in touch with any of those people any more and just now was the first time I’ve listened to it since. I really hate it.

The other song that reminds me of this period of time is “Stand” by REM. In my final year I hid away a bit to get studying done and discovered late night radio. I remember the first time I heard this song and it’s been a favourite since. I’ve never done the dance though.

2) What song best evokes your experience of a study or work trip?

Difficult. I’ve not been on many study or work trips where music has featured much, and I’m racking my brain. Null response on this one.

3) Which song is most likely to bring a tear to your eye (or to make you weep copiously)?

I’ll cry at virtually anything except music. Some of the Mozart piano concertos (especially number 20) remind me of my Mum and that makes me go a little bit, though.

4) What is the best song to kickstart your most creative thinking?

Difficult to choose just one here. Technically the answer is “anything I like”, but if I had to choose just one it would be something quite sparse. Portishead’s “It Could Be Sweet” fits the bill.

5) Which song helps you work when you really need to concentrate?

If you want to concentrate you need something quite long. “Close to the Edge” by Yes does it for me. Sorry.

6) When you’re angry, on which song do you want to turn up the volume?

Hoo boy. I’ve learned that anger is really a cover-up for something else. At those times I meditate. Preferably to Spiritualised. “Pure Phase“, “Sway“or “Angel Sigh“are best.

7) Which song sums up the person you would like to be?

I’m quite content with who I am, really. If anything I merely struggle towards being better-adjusted. For this song I am going to pick “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” by The Flaming Lips because a) I think the Lips are well-adjusted, and b) who wouldn’t want to be a black belt in karate?

 

Six songs

The Guardian website (disclaimer: I am a bleeding heart pinko liberal leftie) has set out a challenge: to select six songs that sum you up. There’s a full article here explaining why it’s an important project and a link to the project website, sixsongsof.me for people to record their own list. The difficulty is ratcheted up beyond the usual “epic mixtape” level by the project asking you very specific questions: unfortunately, not all the songs that were ever recorded are selectable using the site.

My problem is that the answers to some of the questions that  wanted to use weren’t there and in some cases I wanted to add some narrative, alternatives and/or explanation. So I’m blogging it instead.

Here goes then.

1) What was the first song you ever bought?

Embarrassing. It was January by Pilot. So sue me. I was 7 or something.

2) What song always gets you dancing?

Lots of options here.  I like pop music and I don’t much care how trashy it is. On the other hand, I like to think I can appreciate something that’s well-crafted and for sheer energy I have two favourites: Talking Heads Crosseyed and Painless (this live performance is particularly groovemungous) and the poppy punk of Angel Interceptor by Ash which never fails to put me in a good mood.

3) What song takes you back to your childhood?

Only one option here – Funky Gibbon by the Goodies. Although most of my family played musical instruments, I wasn’t born humming Bach fugues. No YouTube link because I don’t want to lose *that* many readers.

4) What is your perfect love song?

My lovely other half used to have an MP3 alarm tone on her phone of Weird Fishes / Arpeggi by Radiohead. So that song always makes me realise I need to make her a cup of tea. Also, it’s just musically and lyrically beautiful. Some people think Radiohead are miserable. Those people are losers.

5) What song would you want at your funeral?

One funeral is too many to go to, but the ones I’ve been to have had two songs: one when people are going in and another when the coffin is going out. So I have two selections here, which are actually written in my will so they will happen.

On the way in, it’s Pyramid Song by Radiohead. Preferably performed by a choir, but we can’t have everything.

On the way out, Zombie Woof by Frank Zappa. I want to make some people smile plus it has the most epic guitar solo in the middle. And like one of the commenters, I have lived for the riff at 3:56.

6) “One last song that makes you, you.”

Difficult. But I was listening to the Beck album Odelay the other day and thought how much I loved the way he cuts up styles and how the songs don’t really end, they sort of collapse. I love that. I could name any one of the songs on that album, I love them all. I would love to be half as eclectic and dare to just meander off instead of being crisp and “professional”. But I’m going to select “Loser” (which isn’t on that album) because he isn’t one. But then again, aren’t we all? Or something like that.

 

 

Looking Forward to Open Space South West

Living in the South West UK is great for all sorts of reasons. We’re not so isolated we can’t get to events if we really want to, but we do get to put some distance between us and the hubbub that big cities provide; the scenery, of course, is lovely; you’re never more than a 10 minute drive from some countryside; the pace of life is slightly slower and the people are friendly.

Nevertheless, we do miss out on some things by virtue of being a bit removed from it all. Pretty well every week some of the people I follow on Twitter seem to be attending an event that I would go to if it were easy. In my own sector, the GovCamp unconference events that are so spectacularly successful have not yet hit the South West. There are some conferences locally that have been good in the past but I can’t attend any more due to cost. Something seems to be missing.

And something also seems to be missing from the events that I do attend: GovCamps are only slowly starting to attract the front line practitioners and senior decision-makers that are the people that would benefit most  from some of the ideas. The pure unconference format at GovCamps does bias an agenda in favour of what is cool rather than what is important. Difficult and complex problems don’t tend to get solved because there’s no easy way to enthuse people about them and so we end up taking bite-sized chunks off them instead.

These reasons are why I’m so pleased that my friend and colleague Carl Haggerty has tried to put together something slightly different, taking the best bits of conventional events and unconferences and mashing them up into a new format:

 

 

 

 

What is Open Space South West?
It is an event and a network, bringing together public sector providers, businesses, community organisations and academia to reimagine the ways in which collaboration and web technologies will shape the future of public services in the south west.

You’ll hear from inspiring people from across the region as well as nationally who are recognised as leaders in their field. The speakers will also lead and suggest workshops for further discussion and learning.

The event also includes an unconference format, which means that as a participant, you’ll get to shape the agenda and talk or hear about issues/challenges important to you.

The event is running at County Hall, Exeter on Friday 14th September 2012 and is free – although tickets are limited. Check out the website for full details and the frankly awesome range of speakers already booked up.

If you’re interested in helping improve public services in the region from frankly any perspective, this is probably the event you want to be at. And if you can’t make it, the hashtag #OpenSSW will enable you to follow on Twitter – hopefully there will be other remote participation options as well.

I’m looking forward to the event, of course, but mainly I’m looking forward to helping form a community of people all working together to improve lives for all – something that lasts longer and creates more value. Recommended.

 

On being awesome

I’m not awesome. At least, not any more than any other human. Or indeed, any other plant or animal. Or rock.

The other day I tweeted: “Be mediocre. Awesomeness doesn’t scale”.

This is 2 sentences. One part is weak trolling, the other part is a genuine plea to set aside our narcissism and build some stuff that is sustainable.

Louise Kidney: responded -> “be mediocre????? how depressing ;O(” … “Rome didn’t get built cos someone settled for mediocrity.” … “If we all wander around going ‘frak it, don’t be awesome’ there’d be no athletes, no visionaries, no boundaries broken…and the world would be boring, 1 dimensional, samey, sheep herding awfulness.” She also linked to this passionate defence of her position: http://louquietly.tumblr.com/post/20643056805/aspire which is typically forthright and well argued. I like Louise a lot. She knows who she is.

But a) that’s only responding to my first sentence, not the second. And b) I’m not her. I couldn’t give a monkeys about athletics. Vision is nothing without execution. If we all lived like Amish, would we be happier? Quite possibly. If Rome had never been built, sure I wouldn’t be sat here typing this: if everything was different nothing would be the same. And other insipid truisms.

Maybe I’m getting old, but I like silence. http://icerunner.co.uk/2012/01/the-value-of-nothing/

I quite like “boring, 1 dimensional, samey, sheep herding awfulness” sometimes. Because there’s more to “sitting here” than some might think. Check out these pictures of people before and after a meditation retreat: http://www.utne.com/The-Sweet-Pursuit/The-Meditation-Makeover-Before-and-After.aspx

I like simplicity. I like the feeling of working in a team. Being part of something bigger than me. Being a small cog is a bigger machine. I want stuff that lasts when the cool kids have moved on. I want everyone else to benefit, not just the hipsters.

But more than all that I want stuff that scales globally. I want to help build stuff that everyone can use for ever. I don’t want to be chasing my own dreams on my own. I don’t want to stand out and be awesome.

If I have to sit in meetings all day nudging things forward inch by painful inch rather than being the swashbuckling, disruptive Lone Ranger to make that happen? Ok then.

Don’t climb higher than your angels can fly. Or something.

Overview of the #localgov platform

In a previous post I covered some aspects of why local government could be considered a platform business, or at least could move in that direction. I’m enormously grateful to Stuart Boardman, Carl Haggerty and Tom Graves for supplying me with some challenges and suggestions in terms of developing these ideas. I’ve taken these suggestions on board and I think I’m in a position to outline the “top-level” of what the overall model looks like.  I’ve even got some ideas about the next level of iteration down but I might park that for later so I can get the big picture out.

So, to recap: Local Government (in this model) is a hub. It’s purpose is to connect people (and places) with needs to people with funding to people who can provide services to help under the governance and ownership of people with the political mandate to do just that – with the aim of improving the lot of the people and places under its jurisdiction.

Top level of the local goverment platform model

In the traditional view local government has done all of this except for the bottom-left square. And I need to stress again that there’s no reason why it couldn’t continue to do so under this model – but in my opinion that might take away some of the value of the model.

Increasingly, in fact, the four corners of this model are being done by other people anyway. Local Government spends more time chasing grant funding; National, hyperlocal, regional and EU-wide policy reduces the room local politicians have to manoeuvre; service provision is increasingly diverse; and under the localism ethos individuals and community groups might start to commission services for themselves.

With the picture fragmenting, therefore, it is important to ask (as Tom Graves did) about governance and where it fits into the new landscape. Clearly governance is required: is public money being spent wisely? Are political decisions being taken for the right reasons? are services being provided fairly and efficiently? Are people’s (and places’) needs being adequately addressed?

Two things are therefore required to be added to the diagram. The first is data. Transparency of who is doing what, both with our money and with individual cases (subject to privacy and security rules); transparency of decision-making by politicians and officials; transparency of how services are being delivered by service providers. There is a requirement therefore for some quite meaty data warehousing and business intelligence in the centre – but this isn’t the whole story because effective governance needs the power to make changes. So the second thing we need to add are channels of control. I would suggest that these could all pass through the central hub – not sure if that’s a problem or not. We can park that issue for later. Either way, there is a requirement for a set of channels so that the various aspects of the model can govern each other (and I believe it does flow both ways in all cases).

Now lets make the thing functional. In the previous post I suggested the core functions that would need to be supported as

• understand the needs of people and places under its care
• search for funding opportunities that might help with those needs
• curate a set of service providers and help to ensure the markets for each are broadly functional
• provide a set of levers for those with a political mandate to push in order to deliver on political priorities
• provide intelligence to all so that commissioning decisions can be undertaken intelligently.

So let’s add that to the governance idea and break this down a bit.

Political levers

Politicians need 3 kinds of lever: Strategic (how do we balance our spending portfolio for maximum return), Managerial (how can we influence the direction and performance of service delivery), and Individual (how can we advocate for particular cases in the system). (Arguably, politicians can’t and maybe shouldn’t do the last thing, but they do. That’s what surgeries are for.)

The strategic levers are satisfied by the commissioning centre: business intelligence to inform decision-making and capabilities to  actually commission the work required. At a managerial level, though, once we’ve split the provision from the commissioner then it is logically difficult to provide this lever of control aside from normal service level or performance management. A sticking-plaster solution might be to appoint politicians to NED level (or stronger) on the boards of the service provider organisations, but the actual solution will need to vary according to the kind of organisation we are talking about. On an individual level, it might be even more controversial (or even illegal) to allow a politician access to a service providers’ systems in order to influence the provision of an individual case, but either directly or via a proxy this level of access and influence will be required.

So although we can bake the first lever into this model, the other two both require standard contract terms to be instituted that allow for the necessary political “interference”. This might appear to be far from ideal, but if your company is delivering public services with public money then you might as well get used to it, in my opinion!

Citizen’s levers

In the final analysis, it is governance of the system by citizens that is most fundamental. Any individual citizen, however, is not all-powerful: democracy requires that we govern as an aggregate of people rather than getting our own way all the time. Nevertheless, we want to hold our politicians to account and the key demand here is transparency: let citizens have access to the same quality of intelligence that politicians use when making commissioning decisions so they can make up their own minds. In fact, lets just reuse the same set of systems to let them do it.

Secondly is the monitoring of service providers and their performance. In some cases citizens are co-opted onto management boards of public enterprises and if we want to do that then fine – but for the purposes of this system I think this is about giving citizens the same performance management data as politicians get. Again, lets just give them the same data and the same systems.

Third is the ability to submit cases (complaints, requests for services, feedback etc). These might end up anywhere and I think the job of the central “hub” is perhaps not to manage the cases individually but simply to route them to wherever they are best resolved in a fast and transparent fashion. I mentioned in a previous post that I don’t think we need CRM in local government: what I mean by that is that if everything else in this model works smoothly it won’t be needed.

The final lever for citizens is to allow them to commission services themselves. If an individual wants to make a difference in their community then they should be able to get help to improve their idea, apply for funding, and commission a service provider to do it. We are already seeing this sort of thing happening with personal budgets for social care.

Funders levers

Traditionally local government has raised its money through a central government grant, the Council Tax and business rates. However, other sources of funding exist and have been used for quite some time – EU grants, central government grants, the lottery, PFI initiatives, even private funding all play a part. So what do funding bodies need for their money?

Usually this is about two things: delivery and outcomes. If a funder funds a project it wants to see it completed and it wants to see the benefits of that project realised. Our hub must be able to track what money went where, how the project it supports is progressing, and what benefits are realised – otherwise we probably won’t be getting the same money the next time round. However, these processes are almost exclusively between commissioners and funders and the relationship between these two sets of people rather than some monolithic project management structure: commissioners (and there are going to be many of them, see above) have the responsibility to track their own projects. Since the Council itself is going to be doing a lot of that, it will need a system: it might even make that available to other commissioners, but the particular bit of the system that tracks individual projects and benefits is itself a service that can be commissioned. The “hub” merely needs to facilitate relationships.

Service provider levers

Of course, outsourcers have feelings too. It’s perhaps not as easy as it looks to have central or local government as your primary customer, even if it can (allegedly) be lucrative if you do it right. Service providers need the freedom to innovate their service delivery – wthin reason – but they also need support and standards and they need their feedback to be influential and to commission supporting services. So the first lever is that service providers are commissioners too and so they need the same access to intelligence, joined-up service delivery and channels that citizens, politicians, funders and council commissioners get.

Service providers that aren’t economically viable might be allowed to go to the wall in some cases, but in others they need to be constructively helped. This might mean the formation of local or national groupings of providers to lobby or to create shared platforms that provide core and common services to them. The commissioning hub must allow a seamless flow of clients, funding, and information to, from and between service providers and this must be based around recognised standards in order to work.

What’s in the box then?

These ideas lead to the central hub containing the following components:

• expertise in the funding landscape, performance management, public engagement, (big P) Politics and data
• a business intelligence toolset and competencies to crunch all the available data
• a web channel that ties services together (in a service-oriented architecture style of thing)
• document/records management that provides an archive of policy, actions and decisions
• Master data management (ensures we don’t double-count people or places in our calculations, and ensures joined up case management)
• Data warehousing (performance management, demographic, needs data on the full range of services)
• middleware to join processes up.

Those components are lifted from the previous post, but this post is probably long enough already so I’ll stop there for now. The internal architecture of the hub is probably next, but this is an evolving picture in my brain so please let me know what you think in the comments below.