Gordon on LRG

2009 LRG Solution Forum Awards

2009-04-27T11:06:00Z

Well we had a fantastic few days in Bilbao and heard some great presentations on how technology is being used to support ambitious programmes from Government around the world. The presentations are available here

I'll write a separate blog article about some of the key points that were made.

We also announced the winners of our annual awards and I am delighted to recognise them again here. These were inspiring projects and demonstrate a wide variety of exciting developments in the use of technology in Local and Regional Governments.

Best Example of Govt 2.0

Winner: City of Barcelona, Spain

Highly Commended: City of Sunderland, UK

Best e-Identity Project

Winner: Shared Learning Group, UK

Best Inclusion/Social Care Project

Winner: Medway Council, UK and CareWorks

Highly Commended: Turnstone Support and Cerrus International

Best Efficiency Project

Winner: BiscayTIK, Spain

Highly Commended: EU Services Directive Project, Germany

Best Innovation Project

Winner: City of Brampton, Canada

Highly Commended: Frederikstad, Norway

Best Sustainable/Green IT ProjectExample of Govt 2.0

Winner: City of Bergen, Norway

Highly Commended: Wakefield Council, UK

Best Citizen Service Project

Winner: Municipality of Matosinhos, Portugal

Highly Commended: City of Milan, Italy

One Week Countdown

2009-04-15T16:09:00Z

There's only one week to go now before our annual Solutions Forum event takes place. This year we're going to Bilbao in Spain, hosted by the regional Government of Bizkaia.

I'm very much looking forward to meeting up with a wide variety of customers and partners and hearing from them about their experiences implementing e-government solutions using the Citizen Service Platform. At last year's event we formally launched the Citizen Service Platform and it will be very interesting to get everyone's feedback on the developments we have made over the last year.I think we've got much clearer at explaining what CSP is about now that we have identified the 8 application capabilities:

Citizen Interaction
Intelligent Forms and Workflow
Case and Records Management
Mobility, Collaboration and Productivity
Performance Management
Mapping Services
Financial Management
Identity Management

Microsoft partners have welcomed this approach as it has made it much easier for them to see how their applications fit into the CSP. These are all underpinned of course with Microsoft's infrastructure technolgies.

This year we will be launching our new CSP Community Portal which aims to showcase customer case studies and partner solutions from around the world. We are very keen to get your feedback on this site so please let us know how we can develop it to help you and please think of submitting your case study or solution for us to promote for you.

I'll provide an update on the Solutions Forum next week and will be pleased to announce our Award winners. We'll be posting the presentations on the new CSP Community Portal so look out for them there.

Gov 2.0 – nothing new under the sun.?

2009-03-16T11:04:00Z

Having watched the fuss and momentum that now propels any latest fad Gov 2.0 is the current vogue theme for the analysts and industry watchers to postulate on. Well in that case here’s my own take.

The concept of 2.0 obviously derives from the next evolution of the internet – in particular the participative aspects of the web. Definitions, there are many go back as far as 2005, but the areas that are of interest to government are those which allow deeper interaction with citizens, gathering and making sense of opinions and leveraging the social tools evolved to enable peer – peer discussions on in addition as well as top down engagement between government and citizens.

The political blog is now mainstream in the UK, from only 2 in 2003, nearly all national elected officials have blogs, and the first ‘blog scalp was reported by the BBC in 2008. At a more local level we have still to see how the political web will evolve but it could be a badly needed link to restore the level of engagement around local democratic issues which is often much less active than those at national level.

One place close to my heart is Scotland where with the re establishment of the Scottish Parliament 1999, which was the first state opening of parliament to be webcast live – not just as a gimmick but through a desire to be as close the the people as possible, which was the aim of the parliament before its dissolution in the 1707 act of Union.

Since the opening, like many parliaments now webcasts of proceeding and debates are part of the normal course of output from the chambers and halls at Hollyrood. Another 2.0 first from the same body was what was known as the e-petitioner system, effectively an online forum to allow the public to petition parliament and take part in opinion shaping and was awarded a good practise award from the EU in 2005.

Another online community first from Scotland was the development of the National Youth Portal YoungScot, which is an extension of an ‘offline’ community organisation to promote social development healthy lifestyles and financial responsibility to the young aged 11-26 group. Advanced in its day the site allowed for regional subsites allowing young people to take control of content they want to share amongst their local community, as well as personalisation and blogging.

Further afield we have cited the communities of StMary in Jamaica with new technology models for delivering web based information and Waterloo in Belgium with its city TV service.

Whist these early 2.0 initiatives have showed the value and use of embracing the next generation of web based technology they share one common constraint – they were all government initiated projects to extend e-government to beyond the transactional in to the more social world.

I was discussing this with a colleague in South Africa last week whose view was that web 2.0 will be as fundamental as the mass availability of the Personal Computer itself. Following his analogy if 1.0 was the development of the technology and 2.0 is the democratisation of it – then we are more likely to be just at the beginning of the phase, where to echo Andy Warhol’s 1968 prediction on the media that “one day everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”, then with Web 2.0 who knows how many famous people there could be.

Certainly it positions e-gov technology as one dimensional, transactional and top down, and fortunately reflects the very necessary social and participative dimension that fundamental to any healthy system of political accountability. We have seen early impacts at a National level , in particular the Obama campaign has been much commented on, however my greatest interest is how we can leverage these tools to affect the local public policy and services that we use every day. That would be a real 2.0 change.

Welcome to the LRG Blog of Gordon CSP McKenzie

2009-02-19T12:07:00Z

Hi, as this is my first CSP blog I thought I would begin with a summary of where the Citizen Service Platform came from and what our experience has been in Microsoft sharing the programme with our customers and partners.

But first the (mis)understanding parts. Coming from a software product company it was bound to happen – that many of our colleagues expected CSP to be our “eGOv on a box” product offer. Well it actually did begin with that intention, but when we examined the core capabilities needed via market research from IDC, we found that the key Local Government Technology Priorities were already in many of our existing products, like Exchange, Sharepoint Dynamics CRM to give some examples. The capabilities below are some examples of what customers said they needed.

So why was there a relative lack of deployment in these core capabilities if many of them existed in current products. The answer begins with a history of underfunding in ICT at the LRG level which is now thankfully being addressed, but also with two other key issues that the still face

1. Technology Integration around current and legacy systems.

2. Alignment around the new business demands of officials and expectation of Citizens.

The first aspect is something that we are addressing with our own technology and templates. Local government systems have to work with what is there today and also deliver new capability at the same time. So for example, its important to show how we can re purpose data in back office systems through to a contact centre or portal by encouraging the development of adapters or interfacing pieces that can be shared amongst the community. We aim to help customers achieve this through our wide partner community.

Secondly and more fundamentally – whilst it the past systems tended to work in isolation from each other, to meet the needs of the process, now applications have to evolve around the ultimate user, be it an official or a citizen. So for example whilst in the past it would have been acceptable to have a contact centre provide an efficient way of routing and capturing calls, nowadays such a system has to be integrated to the back office directly, be connected to the CRM system, the intranet and also the internet. This is one of the example templates we have offered up on our open source site at www.codeplex.com/csp, which illustrates how the Microsoft pieces like Sharepoint and CRM can support multi channel citizen interaction.

The demos of these examples are combined on a single integrated site at www.microsoftpsdemos.com which will evolve as we add more scenarios directly or from our partners. Since this site was launched for CSP we have had several thousand demos and anyone can sign up and load up a demo image which is the easiest way of understanding what we are about.

So what has the reaction been so far. Well positive – yes we have touched a real pain point in the market where the need to join up and integrate both new and older systems is key, but one strong learning point and an opportunity for our partners is that customers need help with the journey as well as having a picture of the destination.