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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39169792,00.htm

Multiple choice helps council IT measure up
Case study: Can a benchmarking tool raise standards?

By Natasha Lomas

Published: Thursday 24 January 2008

An online benchmarking tool is helping Staffordshire County Council assess the skills of its IT staff in order to more effectively target training and help raise standards in accordance with a government push for increased IT professionalism in the public sector.

The tool, which is being offered to public sector organisations by global trade association CompTIA, uses a multiple choice questionnaire to assess the skills of IT staff and enable them to benchmark themselves against each other and known industry standards. Any gaps in skill-sets can then be identified and made a training priority.

Vic Falcus, head of IT service management at Staffordshire County Council, said the council signed up to the benchmarking exercise as it wanted to get a handle on its IT team's capabilities "at the delivery level" - and also identify any areas of weakness or skills gaps that should be targeted by future training.

Around 60 mostly junior IT support staff took the questionnaire just before Christmas and team managers are now evaluating the results in conjunction with internal competency frameworks "to ensure staff are up to scratch and best able to do the jobs they are in".

Recruiting skilled IT staff in the public sector can be a problem because pay scales can't always compete with those in the private sector - so raising the skill sets of existing staff is a priority. Recruitment can be especially troublesome for the most in demand skills, said Falcus.

He told silicon.com: "Practically every job article you see these days, if you've got SAP skills then you can pretty much name your own price… That certainly gives me and my role in local government some difficulty in terms of recruitment."