DavePress » Government IT

Productivity, responsiveness and lighter weight

Dave — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:10:49 +0000

I rather like this, from Gartner’s Mark McDonald:

While the future will require IT to deliver enterprise specific strategies and initiatives there are a few considerations to keep mind:

Productivity is different than efficiency and those differences matter

It is better for IT to be responsive rather than just being “agile”

Leveraging the capabilities of lighter weight technologies and how they impact IT

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Jos Creese new Socitm President

Dave — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 17:18:54 +0000

Hampshire County Council’s Head of IT Jos Creese is the President of Socitm for the next 12 months, and if this quote is anything to go by, he seems an ideal man for the job:

IT professionals must carve out a role as agents of change, helping to re-shape the face of public services. This means involvement in policy formulation and service redesign, not technology. It also means taking risks and being at the forefront of change, rather than keeping busy in the data centre.

As reported on UKauthorITy.com.

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Dom Campbell on agile procurement

Dave — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:28:04 +0000

Great work by Dom Campbell on procurement, and I really love the title: Its Time People Started Getting Fired For Buying IBM from the WeMedia site.

Embedded below, if you can’t see it, here’s a link.

WeThink – IBM – Final

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Cloud computing during a catastrophe

Dave — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:35:26 +0000

It often amuses people when they learn I was once a Risk Manager at a County Council. I have no idea why.

One of my roles at the time was to look after business continuity arrangements – in other words, what the organisation did when something terrible happened.

I was well into internet stuff at the time, and I was amused today when I by chance came across a blog post I wrote (in August 2007!) on the Communities of Practice on how a cloud based system like Google Apps could be used in an emergency by a local authority when corporate systems were unavailable.

Obviously Google has fixed a few of the issues I mention – Sites provides wiki functionality and a better way of doing websites than the old web page creator. They still haven’t integrated Blogger yet, though. Also iGoogle seems to have been dropped from the Google Apps inventory.

With G-cloud being a little way off, does anyone have any examples of public sector organisation using the cloud as a contingency digital comms setup? Would be good to hear about it.

Here’s the post:

Google Apps for Your Domain (or Google Apps for short) is a set of Google services which can be set up at a web address of your own choosing. You get fully customisable versions of:

Gmail (a web based email system)

Calendar (a web based group calendaring system)

Docs & Spreadsheets (web based word processor and spreadsheet applications)

Talk – instant messaging and voice over IP

iGoogle – personalisable web portal

Web page creator – does what it says on the tin

It’s free for the first 200 accounts and effectively provides you with a cost free, enterprise level groupware solution.

There are countless situations where Google Apps could be used within the local government context. But one opportunity where it could make a real difference would be within business continuity arrangements. Here are some examples of how it could benefit an organisation undergoing a crisis:

Safe Web Pages

The Shire Hall is burning down, and the web server has melted. How to get the required message out to web visitors? Use the web domain you get with the Google Apps account as a backup webspace, a simple site with emergency details already up which can be activated when required. Because it’s held on Google’s servers, the information is safe from the disaster. You should be able to get your .gov.uk web address forwarding to this one in no time, so visitors wouldn’t be inconvenienced.

The system used to generate the web pages is overly simple and you can’t do too many exciting things with them. But for getting a message across in an emergency, they do the job.

Communications on the move

So, if the web server is dead, chances are the email server will be too. Communications in an emergency can be a very tricky business and having as many possible routes as possible for different groups to talk to each other is vital. Email without doubt has a role to play and some Councils already have web based accounts created, with services like Hotmail, in readiness for such a crisis. These accounts can be accessed from any computer with a web connection, which makes it much more viable as a communications medium.

However, Google Apps provides email addresses @yourdomain.com which has obvious benefits in terms of presentation – it looks a lot more professional if you are contacting external organisations. But the real advantages lie in the power of the Gmail interface that you get. For a start, there are 2 gigabytes of storage space for each account – meaning that no emails have to be deleted for space saving purposes. Secondly, the email can be accessed using any mobile device, whether by downloading the client from Google or just by accessing it through your phone or PDA’s web browser.

Key Documents Always Available

Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets service provides a simple word processor and spreadsheet which run within the web browser. You therefore don’t need any other software installed on your machine and as the documents are stored online, you know you are getting access to the latest versions. It also makes it a lot easier to collaborate on documents, for example a spreadsheet giving status updates.

Another use for this service would be to have copies of key documents saved online in this shared space. Such documents could include procedures for vital tasks to be completed in an emergency, staff lists, property plans, contact details, contract records etc.

Instant Status Updates

Google Talk, the instant messaging client, is built into the email interface and provides another method of communication which could well be useful in an emergency for those times when email just isn’t quick enough. Messages appear instantly on the recipients screen. Would be most beneficial as a way of providing status updates to a central coordinator, for example.

Organising Time

The Calendar is an extremely powerful one, again web based making it accessible to anyone with the required privileges. With this system, however, calendars can be shared, merged and certain appointments made publicly available to anyone, should you wish to. In the time following an emergency this could become especially powerful.

Bringing it All Together

iGoogle is the personalised portal, which allows you to display various types of information on one page. This includes summaries of your email, calendar, docs and spreadsheets and talk. You can also add ‘widgets’ which contain updates on RSS feeds and other tools like to do lists and sticky notes.

What’s Missing?

There are two glaring omissions from the Google Apps toolkit. Firstly, and most importantly, there is no wiki function available. The use that a wiki could be put to in an emergency situation is considerable. The collaborative word processing functionality of Docs could be used in this context, but it wouldn’t have the immediacy and ease of access of a wiki. This is hopefully going to be put right soon, as Google bought JotSpot, an enterprise level wiki solution, some time ago and this will hopefully make its way into Apps once it has been Googlified.

Secondly, there is no integrated blog. This would be a pretty easy one for Google to achieve, given that it already runs Blogger, probably the most popular blogging platform there is. I actually have quite a strong personal dislike of Blogger, finding it slow, lacking in features and somewhat unreliable. But at least it would provide a means of providing regular updates without having to edit web pages manually with Page Creator.

Conclusion

These downsides apart, Google Apps provides a pretty good coverage of the tools you might need to manage and communicate in a crisis. And given the miniscule costs – just the price of a domain per year – it might not be worth not doing.

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Meeting with Microsoft

Dave — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:26:06 +0000

I had a very interesting hour today, chatting with James Brown and Dave Coplin at Microsoft. James works with the public sector all over the world, while Dave concentrates his effort on the UK. Dave also came along to last weekend’s govcamp – good man!

We had a great discussion about the state of public sector IT and the big issues, like open data, innovation and collaboration in government.

No one once claimed that Windows 7 was their idea.

I think it’s important that big vendors like Microsoft – and Google, IBM, SAP and others – are involved in these discussions. Here’s a few reasons why:

These guys know a lot of stuff, and they aren’t afraid to share it
Like it or not, a lot of public sector organisations buy their IT from bigco. If we – by which I mean the community of people interested in open and effective government – want real change to happen, these guys need to be involved in the conversations
Further, for long term technology enabled change to be sustainable within the huge – and not so huge – organisations that make up the public sector, the big boys have to be involved
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the issues we are all talking about are platform neutral. It’s in everyone’s interest that government becomes more innovative and collaborative, whether you are a civil servant, a one man govweb revolution, or a multinational supplier

Both James and Dave are keen to be a part of the conversation and the discussion around open government and the use of technology in organisations to drive improvement and efficiency. Dave even volunteered to write something for this blog in the near future – and now I’ve written it here, it looks like he’ll have to.

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City of Angeles moves to Google Apps

Dave — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:20:27 +0000

Interesting!

Google Apps will also help conserve resources in the city’s Information & Technology Agency (ITA), which is responsible for researching, testing & implementing new technologies in ways that make Los Angeles a better place to live, work and play. Because the email and other applications are hosted and maintained by Google, ITA employees who previously were responsible for maintaining our email system can be freed up to work on projects that are central to making the city run.

By ITA estimates, Google Apps will save the city of Los Angeles millions of dollars by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google will free up nearly 100 servers that were used for our existing email system, which will lower our electricity bills by almost $750,000 over five years. In short, this decision helps us to get the most out of the city’s IT budget.

The decision to move to Google Apps was not taken lightly. The city issued a request for proposals and received 15 proposals, which were evaluated by city officials. The top four proposals were invited to give oral presentations, with CSC’s proposal for Google Apps receiving the highest marks. This decision was reviewed and discussed by the Los Angeles City Council which, after a healthy debate, voted unanimously to move forward with Google Apps.

Here’s a video for more:

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Social media skunkworks?

Dave — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 17:42:27 +0000

My good friend Robert Brook – one of the most active and entertaining people I follow on Twitter – was recently interviewed by Chris Dalby, and it was caught on video.

In it, Robert discusses the work he does at the UK Parliament as a ’skunkworks’ – for those that don’t know, this is:

typically developed by a small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of innovation

Sounds like fun. The origin of the phrase is from Lockheed Martin, in case you are interested.

This way of fostering innovation and getting things done – by taking it under the radar – is an interesting one and something I have heard from others, who have spoken about organisations having a ’splinter-cell’ for social media, or describing innovative web stuff being done as ‘black ops’.

It ties in with a lot of the stuff that Cisco’s Guido Jouret said at the Cisco Public Sector Summit that I covered late last year. Some of the things that can stife innovation in large organisations, said Guido, include:

too much money – projects lose focus
too much time – projects drift
too many people – not everyone believes in the project as much as they need to
too much love – people get too attached to failing projects and
too much hate – jealousy elsewhere in the organisation kills projects

As a result, innovation projects have limited budgets, timescales, small teams, spend a lot of time in ’stealth mode’ (skunkworks?) and people on teams are kept close.

A lot of the good work that goes on in the public sector with the web happens on the quiet, guerilla style. If thing are really going to change, then this needs to stop and we need these projects out in the open, not to have people worried about talking about them openly.

However, that needs a culture shift and it might not happen soon. In the meantime, we need to get stuff done, and if it has to happen in a skunkworks style, then so be it.

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STOP BLOCKING

Dave — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:13:42 +0000

Steph has released some details of his short survey of the blocking of useful websites within the public sector. The following figures show the percentages of organisations which allow access to each type of site:

Google 100%
LinkedIn 100%
NetMums 100%
Wikipedia 97%
Digg 97%
Google Reader 91%
Wordpress.com 89%
Yahoo account 86%
Flickr 83%
Twitter 83%
Bebo 69%
YouTube (able to see well) 63%
Gmail 60%
Facebook 54%

The worst offending organisations seem to be:

DWP
Directgov (DWP)
Surrey County Council
‘A north east council’
Environment Agency
MOD
FCO
Home Office

And Steph concludes by saying:

Does DIUS or Cabinet Office have staff any more or less likely to waste time than the Home Office or DWP? Is ’security’ more important in Surrey than Devon? Might the good burghers of Directgov benefit from a bit more exposure to the social web? Would people at FCO tasked with engaging around the world be helped by being able to view more of the World Wide Web?

You decide. Or you could always pop your CV on LinkedIn to find an opening somewhere that actually lets you do your job?

I have spoken to a number of people about this issue. The reasons giving for blocking that are given by IT departments are quite often laughable: network overload? Increased risk of viruses? The truth is that the reason why these tools are blocked is because organisations don’t trust their staff not to abuse them. It sucks.

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Government spends ‘£16m on media monitoring’?

Dave — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 23:05:44 +0000

The Guardian reports that the Conservative Party have unearthed that the spending by the various arms of the UK government on ‘media monitoring’ – ie finding out what people are saying about them – reached the sum of £16 million pounds over the last three years.

Whitehall departments alone spend more than £11m on outside media monitoring companies, including £2.7m in the last financial year.

Quangos including the Arts Council for England, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, have spent another £2.248m.

The Conservatives pointed to the fact that the government has its own in-house monitoring service, which employs 19 staff and costs £1m a year to run.

The full cost of media monitoring is likely to be even higher, however, because the figures exclude two of the biggest government departments, the Department of Health and the Department of Work and Pensions.

ØThe Conservatives said the two departments refused to provide details of their respective spending because it was deemed to be "commercially sensitive".

That does sound like rather a lot of money to be spending. The quote above does mention COI’s own media monitoring service (see towards the bottom of this page) which I am sure is an awful lot cheaper than commercial alternatives.

Another way of cutting down on this sort of cost, of course, is to make use of monitoring tools on the web. Alright, subscribing to a few Google searches on key terms probably won’t replace the efforts of getting an agency to do it, but it surely would help if individual teams within an organisation are monitoring what people are saying online about their work.

After all, with almost all of the mainstream media now making most of their content available on their websites, I wonder just how much stuff would get missed – assuming you were tracking the right stuff?

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No Related Post

What is the role of government on the web?

Dave — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:29:34 +0000

Gerry McGovern has been writing an excellent trio of posts on the topic of government and the web. He has identified five things that government should be addressing:

Get away from a technology obsession
Manage customer top tasks, not government websites
Get politicians off government websites
Stop government vanity publishing
Develop a government archive

He expands on each of these things in the three posts. Recommended and thought-provoking reading.