A lot of thought goes into working out how to govern groups of people: the argument here is that you should let structures emerge within a broad framework, rather than try to nail down all the whys and wherefores. Participants really shouldn’t see the process: it should be transparent.
Monthly Archive for January, 2010
Will Perrin asked for some thoughts on what data councils should release. He then summarised the results in a useful fashion, very rapidly. Wibbi government allowed its civil servants to do the same thing?
John Suffolk (Government CIO) expects a
fun year ahead. I have tried to do some back of the envelope calculations based on his items and numbers in the OEP. My italics, all errors mine.
- HR must move to 1 HR person
to 77 FTE from a median of 1:44 (Guesstimate saving on £4.1bn spend is
£1.75bn) - Finance to reduce its
cost to 1% of operating cost from a median of 1.4% (Guesstimate saving
on £3.5bn spend is £1bn) - Marketing and
communications to reduce their costs by 25% (Guesstimate saving on £2.5bn
spend is £625m)
- Consultancy costs
should be reduce by 50% (Guesstimate savings on £2bn spend is £1bn)
- ICT had to reduce its
cost by reusing its systems - We should reduce
occupancy to 10 square metres per FTE (almost half the current mean value of 19.1; estimated running costs are currently £25bn, so there should be at least £5bn savings here) - Reduce the cost of the
senior civil service by 20% (I don’t think this was a large number to begin with: c. £500m, so £100m savings. But needs to be done if you are to cut elsewhere)
There is £4bn in “other” back office: what on earth is all that
covering? Marcomms and Consultancy combined are targeted to save £650m, but that isn’t
borne out by the
figures in OEP as shown above.
So why the focus on consulting when the real savings are in estates rationalisation and back office improvements? Because they are hard. Really hard.
Interesting to see that the new frameworks are only two years (with a potential two-year extension) this should help keep up with the pace of change in technology (the frameworks include web design, for example). But the £1bn expected to go through the frameworks is unlikely to make a dent in the £6.1bn savings expected from collaborative purchasing.
Looks like Fujitsu’s punt on the shared services contract with the Cabinet Office is paying off, as the DWP moves across. As suspected, this is not directly through Flex, but as a separate contract. So why let Flex in the first place?
@willperrin #hyperlocal road works (GPS/times), school dates and times, all reported indicators / tracked measures, election-related items.
@willperrin #hyperlocal road works (GPS/times), school dates and times, all reported indicators / tracked measures, election-related items.
@DirDigEng road works, school dates, what’s on, councillors, anything local election-related
Despite the gotcha graphs in the Sunday Times, some focused forensics shows that their comparators are invalid, so the conclusions are suspect at best. There are more part time jobs in the public sector, so the total pay to the public sector per head per hour is likely to be lower. Those pensions are good for the lower paid, but again, using quartiles doesn’t help avoid the previous criticism, and they make some assumptions about contribution rates, which rather help make the point.
I think on balance we will be seeing more deals like Essex’s with IBM (whether you believe in it or not). There are smaller examples: Wales and social services (unusual) and smallest: Lewisham and Bromley sharing IT. However, it isn’t one way only: Wolverhampton paid £7.1m to get out of a contract with Axon, and Barnet isn’t being allowed to do its easyCouncil approach.