Mash-ups, social networking and web services? Yes, Westminster
Interview: David Wilde, CIO, Westminster City Council
Published: 1 June 2009 13:42 GMT by Jo Best
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What's in the works at Westminster City Council? Jo Best speaks to the CIO about the latest trends and projects.
After a career in IT and government spanning more than 20 years, Westminster CIO David Wilde doesn't appear to have lost his enthusiasm for the latest IT trends.
Asked what his pet technology is, Wilde doesn't hesitate: web services, he tells silicon.com. And social networking. And mash-ups.
A revamped version of the council's website is due to go live in the coming weeks, and Wilde promises it will offer much in the way of mash-ups, in the form of map-based information added to the homepage.
In the future, the web 2.0 trend could make further inroads into the council's online offerings. According to Wilde, social networking could also be incorporated into the Westminster site, perhaps for planning applications or gathering residents' opinions on what should happen to their local park.
Not conventional thinking, maybe, but Westminster has no conventional IT set-up: the council plans to be free of technology infrastructure by 2015, with the majority of bread-and-butter IT services outsourced by 2012.
HR, finance and customer management applications are already in the hands of outsourcers and the council is shortly to sign an end-user computing deal that will see its desktops and datacentres become wholly managed. The council's CRM system is also set to go the same way in a matter of months.
An infrastructure-free IT department is something of a departure for the public sector - albeit one that is likely to become increasingly common - and Wilde is proceeding cautiously.
With a two datacentre model and the aim to spread the council's core 16 or 17 business systems between a similar number of companies, "the resilience on that is better because I don't have my eggs in one basket", he told silicon.com.
The benefits of the infrastructure-free way of doing things include increased resilience and lower costs, according to Wilde, but what's to become of the IT staff - techies with no technology?
"The focus of [the IT department's] skills is changing now: I'm getting them to focus much more on service delivery management - what is it that needs to be delivered for the business, cost and quality of service? They're the things the staff are going to be learning about. It doesn't mean they're going to become contract managers - absolutely not. They still need to cover their areas of expertise," he said.
"[Staff] will still continue to operate in those technology sectors. I expect them to have very good knowledge of what's going on and what's going on on the horizon, but their core skills will also be about good supplier relationship management, good customer awareness and also a good idea of good value - what's a good deal?... In IT that's often something we don't see enough of," he added.
Given the depressed state of the economy at large, and the fact recent restructuring at Westminster saw the council shed a number of jobs and the IT department lose 25 per cent in capital investment, it's no wonder the good value is the buzzword of the moment.
The cost-cutting has led to the consolidation of capital projects at the council - from around 80 down to 40. Some other projects have also been delayed, or cancelled altogether, such as the organisation's planned electronic document and records management (EDRM) system deployment.
"It wasn't the right technology solution being implemented in the right way. We're now looking at a lower-cost approach to EDRM... rather than going, 'let's get an EDRM, stick it in and get everyone to use it', we're actually now going 'hang, on let's get our info governance right, understand where our information assets are and what they are and then look at the best way to store them and access them'," Wilde said.
The need for better information assurance and governance has also inspired the council towards greater use of dashboards based on Microsoft SharePoint technology.
The first such dashboard was developed in July last year. It took a composite of information from a number of sources and served it up as a single dashboard for the children's services department.
The dashboards were inspired by a period of low confidence in the IT department that caused Westminster's techies to talk to their users about what they expected from their IT team.
"You'd have the conversations with the business about what IT could do for them. There's also an understanding that it's not just about computers and networks, it's also about information assurance - knowing what information you need and how best to use it," Wilde said.
"The most interesting response was 'I want my information served up in a way where I can look at it and it will tell me how I'm doing in terms of delivering what I want to deliver'. It sounds really simple but in IT terms it's horrendously complex," he said.
Complex or not, it's proved a success according to Wilde - 20 dashboards have been built so far and another 10 are planned.
And the attitude of staff to their techies? "People like IT now, which is good!" Wilde concluded.
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