I’ve just got back from today’s socitm09 National Conference at Stoneleigh, and whilst most of the content was informative, it was also quite depressing....
The morning sessions focussed on the future – Tony Travers giving a broad brush view of the impact of the Credit Crunch on future funding (more about that in a later blog post), Richard Allen a refreshing presentation on unlocking the power of local information, and Rose Crozier on how socitm is at long last listening to, and focussing more on the needs of, its members. Although the messages were in some cases setting strong challenges for the future, there is clearly an uphill struggle for Local Authority IT departments and their staff over the coming years.
The afternoon session, however, was spent looking backwards and did nothing more than to emphasise how the majority of local authorities have not embraced the Internet and the use of electronic self-service sufficiently to reduce costs significantly. Martin Greenwood seems to have drawn the short straw to encourage LA’s to “use the concept of ‘avoidable contact’ to reinvigorate transformation”, and Dhanushka Madawala gave examples of the work Hillingdon had undertaken to reduce avoidable contact – all very basic stuff, but apparently necessary for many authorities....
(I will own up to having skipped the last session on “Digital Inclusion, LA’s and the third sector” in favour of attending IBM’s presentation on Business Process Optimisation).
Yet the exhibitors gave a far more encouraging message on what (presumably the upper-quartile of) Local Authorities are doing. Far from re-enforcing basic messages on Internet usage, suppliers were extolling their LA customers’ use of Web 2.0, blogs, Twitter and the like to try to really communicate with their citizens. Very encouraging.
Can so many other LA’s really be burying their heads in the ground and failing to embrace modern technology and, amongst other uses, adopt self-service to reduce their own costs?
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