Transformation through Technology 24 th May 2012 Transformation through Rethinking and Better IT

1. Transformation through Technology 24th May 2012 Transformation through Rethinking and Better IT fresh thinking to delivering better IT • Introduction – a passion to make a difference • Our Story – working with Blackpool Council – Customer First • Our Approach – Doing and Achieving Better ICT • The Learning • Why Pentagull?

2. Phil Baron • Current role • Phil is an ICT and local government specialist working both as a consultant and a director of newly formed technology company. Phil has worked for the last 14 years with Blackpool Council at the senior management level covering a range of responsibilities from ICT, customer services and leading on a number of organisational-wide change programmes. • Experience • Phil has 25 years’ experience working within ICT in local government at the strategic, tactical and operational levels. Phil was an Assistant Director of ICT and Customer Services in a large Unitary Council and for the past 12 years has been working with organisational-wide transformational change programmes including e-Government, business process redesign, putting the “Customer First”, mobile and flexible working and IT modernisation. Phil was awarded “runner-up” in the Government Computing awards for Innovator of the Year 2007 for his work with improving the design of front line services supported by better IT. • Recent transactions • Led the rethink and redesign of Blackpool Council’s Customer Access strategy and its operational design including the supporting technologies. This has saved the Council in excess of £1.5 million including improved performance reducing the actual annual contacts from 900,000 to around 300,000 within a couple of years. • Responsibility for ICT and Customer Services with over 150 staff and an annual budget of £9 million. Recently managed a reduction of £1 million from the base budget with both services undergoing significant restructures including a number of compulsory and voluntary redundancies. • Phil has recently led and supported the ICT element of the Building Schools for the Future programme looking at a range of solutions for managing ICT within schools. The focus changed due to announcements from central government and Phil was able to shape the revised contract to provide the best options for the schools and the CSA. • Helped to save £3 million over 5 years for Blackpool Council with the introduction of an in-house delivered IP digital telephony service including contact centre call handling technologies. A range of options were looked at including a complete managed service from a number of known telecommunications companies. • Developed and generated an external set of business opportunities for Blackpool Council that led to an total annual income of £500k that helped to reduced the total cost of the ICT service for the Council. Phil also helped the growth of a trading account for Printing Services from £250k to £1 million gross within 4 years. • Introduced and promoted the first town-wide public sector wireless service known as Wireless Blackpool. This was part of the regeneration of the town and also part of Phil’s vision for a local electronic grid supporting an e-Community of private, public and third sector organisations. • Led Blackpool Council’s Changing Times initiative that brought together access to services, business improvement, electronic services, ICT modernisation and e-Community. Phil introduced the first Council open day events (all services under one roof), a video known as Mrs Pearce and annual service awards. • Assisted on a voluntary basis with the amalgamation of two separate infant and junior schools into one new primary school. Phil acted as the temporary Chair of Governors to bring the new school into a new era and has been active with the school to support them during their first few years. • PHIL BARON • Managing Director • Pentagull • M: +44 (0) 07572464120 • E: philip.baron@pentagull.co.uk • www.pentagull.co.uk

3. Phil Baron – a passion to make a difference • 25 yrs in ICT and local government • 7 yrs at Lancashire County Council • 14 yrs at Blackpool Council • 12 yrs as Assistant Director for ICT • 5 yrs as Assistant Director for Customer Services and ICT • 10 months as Managing Director for Pentagull Ltd • Our Story focused on Customer First and creating Better IT

4. Customer First stop, rethinkand redesign Context • Customer First was a “shiny” new service in 2004 • Fundamental to strategic transformation programme known as Changing Times and Access to Services • Also part of e-government and investment in technology • Main contact and service resolution point • Big aspirations - new principles • One phone number • 90% of all contact resolved at first point of contact • Single view of customer across all services • All information systems joined and fully integrated • Customer insight driving future service planning • Blackpool recognised as one of the best in the UK • Won lots of awards and over 80 site visits • Service grew from £500k to £3million in three years

5. Customer First stop, rethinkand redesign Business Problem • Customer demand was still growing • Costs were rising significantly and no sign of cashable/tangible savings • Disillusionment of CRM and the single view of the customer • Needed to purchase more modules such as work flow, mobile, reporting etc. • The IT design was getting more and more complex • Difficult to integrate services and IT systems – costs of adaptors were expensive • Inflexible to change business needs • Double typing due to expensive integration • Took too long to change a process having to configure multiple systems • Difficult to get meaningful data from the CRM system • Large overhead of administration/development managing the work and IT systems • A number of points of failure to flow work from end-to-end

6. Customer First stop, rethinkand redesign Design Principles – solution and delivery • Sustainability – needs to be flexible and configurable by the service • Mobile – work needs to be moved in real time to the right person • Accessibility – data needed to be presented so easily accessible • Geographical Information – all enquires or inspections to be map based • Electronic – all processes to be completely electronic • Interoperability – capable to interface to other systems • Council Information – needed to be easily available • Work with staff who do the work

7. Customer First stop, rethinkand redesign Outcome and Results • Replaced costly IT systems with technology that worked significantly better • Enabled end-to-end visibility of high frequency customer demands • Reduced time needed to record data against the customer and freed up agents • Over £600k savings on administration of the work per annum • Software Licence costs reduced by 300% and less complex IT • Real time accurate data that assist management and teams to make better decisions • Assisted an overall annual reduction of budget of £1.5 million • Significant savings in time taken to process transactions and cases • A system capable of growing and changing to meet the needs of the Council

8. Our Approach How do we learn the better way? • Experimented with two approaches aligned to principles • Agile for our technical approach – Street Scene (2006-7) • - Couple of developers working with front line staff with freedom • - Customer asked – why can’t you just build a system • - Developers thought – we can and model processes very quickly • - Developer and customer started to understand each other – BINGO • - Better ICT emerged – our Enterprise ServiceBuilder platform was born • Systems Thinking for our service approach – Customer Access • - A multi-skilled team including a developer and ICT management • - Studied all the customer demand coming into the Council • - The team learnt lots about the current performance • - The team experimented with new service designs and pulled ICT • - There was fusion between the agile and systems thinking work • - Our business deployment approach emerged from this work

9. The Principles We needed something to guide us? • A set of principles that make sense • Be open minded and decisions based on data and knowledge • Design from the work by being in the work • Think flow first and not scale • Work with individuals and interactions from the work • Achieve working software over comprehensive documentation • Management role is removing barriers in the work • Measure only to improve and learn • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation • Respond to change over following a plan • The answer might be less or no ICT

10. The Results Don’t take our word for it!! • The results have been beyond what we could have predicted • Have a look at our case studies on our web site • ESB and our approach has gone viral across Blackpool Council • ESB has been built to deal with predictable demand from LG • Go ask Blackpool Council……..

11. Other examples in the work – gone viral

12. ESBKey Facts for Blackpool Council • 28 business areas and live since February 2008 • 1480 active users / 3500 users registered to use it • 549 object types • 920,291 current items • 72,934 archived items • 7,929,485 individual pieces of data • 55,387 documents in 33,106 folders • 37GB of file store • 3.8GB of database storage • Hosted across 12 individual servers for high availability and fault tolerance • A new item is created on average every couple of minutes • It is built to stay working even during an upgrade • (Figures correct as of April 2012)

13. The Learning What are we learning? • 2002-2006 – foot down hard on the e-Gov/IEG accelerator • 2007 – Don’t think this is working but don’t tell the CEO!! • Having humility and fortitude to learn and rethink • Getting knowledge and data from studying the work was key • Easier option would have been to continue with the same old • Even easier option would have been to move on • Harder option was to stop the large programme of change • But how do you stop the train? They don’t tell you this • And how do you manage this while keeping up appearances • It is very hard to see at first as we are clouded by what we currently think and do – counter intuitive to the norm – we typically buy applications and talk about open source but do we think about designing against demand?

14. …we did and that is why pentagull? Curious and want to know more? philip.baron@pentagull.co.uk 07572 464 120 www.pentagull.co.uk