In the next in our series of interviews with leaders in public sector technology, we talk to Pat Oliver, Software and Hardware Management & Delivery Manager for Halton Borough Council. He talks, among other things, about the impact of the CSR and the effect this is having on IT plans at the authority.
Tell me something about your current role.
I have responsibility for both in-house and externally-facing systems and the authority’s technical infrastructure. One thing I feel very strongly about is that our internal systems and processes are just as important as our ‘external’ ones. So, for example, we’ve expanded the CRM system which we developed in-house to encompass a growing number of key administrative processes – in other words, we practise internally what we’re expected to achieve externally. There’s no difference in asking a member of staff to process a mileage claim form or a resident to pay something online: as far as the CRM system is concerned, it’s the same thing. So we’ve successfully automated a multitude of our more mundane administrative tasks such as ID applications, invoice processing and holiday requests.
What’s been the strategy behind the transformation programme at Halton?
Halton became a unitary authority in 1999 and we faced some geographic challenges: the area includes two major towns (Widnes and Runcorn) separated by the river Mersey. Initially services were split, so people on one side of the river had to go to the other side for some services. Our first aim was to rationalise this so that all services were available on both sides of the river.
Following consultation with residents on the ‘Halton 2000’ engagement group, our citizens were telling us that face-face was their preferred delivery channel. Twelve years ago our aim was always to make face-to-face contact the priority, followed by telephone interaction and online access lower down the order. That was what was driving us at the time – but this change programme has constantly evolved and now because of the Comprehensive Spending Review the authority is placed in a less reactive situation technically and has a considerable head start procedurally. While we don’t necessarily agree with the figures which are often used to show the cost of the three channels of interaction with local government, we do accept that it is a far cheaper route to service by web. So this is now moving to the fore in Halton.
You mentioned the CSR: what’s the likely impact at Halton?
We started an efficiency process three years before the CSR was announced, and then it was obvious from the time of the election what we were likely to face. So we’re looking at every opportunity to find more cost-effective ways of delivering services to the public.
Our guiding principle is to ensure that whatever we design or deliver has absolutely no effect on the most important objective: that services to the residents of the borough do not suffer.
The CSR will speed up our move to a more transactional website according to the SOCITM Better Connected definition. This hasn’t been our priority up until now. But of course we’ll have to balance this against the pressure on our resources.
Two parallel work streams have been initiated. One will do what we can to make our website more transactional. The other will look at how our central ICT service can work with departments more efficiently through leveraging online processes. This has already started through our use of the CRM system to support everyday administrative processes. We’ve also put in portals such as ‘I Want IT’ or ‘I Want Admin’, automating a lot of internal requests. We’re now looking at introducing ‘I Want Training’.
What role does mobile play in this strategy?
We always knew there had to be a better and more cost-effective way of delivering mobile services and that we needed to buy a solution that could be applied across a range of services. And that’s exactly what’s happening now. Where the application is suitable for a hand-held device, we will now use BlackBerry Smartphones primarily because they meet the Code of Connection. And we’re using NDL’s awiMX to link these to back-office applications.
The first service to be mobilised is enforcement within the Environmental Directorate to manage and report incidents such as fly tipping and dog fouling. We will roll this out wider to other enforcements areas such as graffiti. In short, as we now have a corporate solution we can apply it to new applications without having to fork out any money – which is critical in the current economic environment.
Do you see shared services as part of the cost-cutting drive?
There is an authority-wide understanding and I think that at the moment shared services is counter-intuitive. People are jealously guarding their own territories – it’s only natural in the current atmosphere of redundancies. But a lot of people don’t yet realise the ramifications of what is going to happen when the cuts bite and it’s inevitable that shared services will play a major part.
Looking on the positive side, the impending cuts offer a great opportunity for technology – it gives us the chance to implement processes and systems because of the need to automate in order to reduce manual overheads. The pressure we will face is being able to do more with lower budgets and fewer developers.
But these things are always cyclical and we’ve been here before. We face three to four years of pain but we will end up with a sleeker organisation. It’s going to be a rocky ride but we’ll get through it somehow.