Society report highlights complexity of achieving
transformation
Joining large-scale shared services centres will not be the
answer for every council looking to transform its business model,
according to the Society of IT Management.
In a paper setting out how local authorities should transform
their businesses, Socitm has put forward a range of measures for
councils to choose from.
The Challenge of Transformation document says, "Transformation
is too complex for simple, formulaic approaches. Management
approaches, such as flexible working, shared services, information
management, knowledge sharing and workflow, could well play a
part.
"Top-down change has a poor success rate, particularly when it
involves business process re-engineering."
The Socitm report stresses that simply upgrading IT systems or
introducing new applications will fail to transform local
authorities.
"As transformation concerns imagination and innovation, the end
goal is unclear. Finding a solution involves much more than
engineering a system."
According to the report, business transformation projects in
local government are faced with four major obstacles to success:
resistance from staff who fear job cuts, the absence of a
supportive culture, problems with traditional management thinking,
and service users' ignorance about IT.
And for Socitm, these stumbling blocks are not helped by the
wider context, with the impetus for many business transformation
projects coming from the need to meet centrally imposed efficiency
savings targets through job cuts.
It is two years since the Treasury set a target of making
£21.5bn of cost cuts in the public sector, publishing a report by
former Office of Government Commerce head Peter Gershon that set
efficiency savings for every part of the public sector, including
local government.
The other crucial issue highlighted by the report is that many
of those efficiency savings were to be achieved by cutting
jobs.
The Challenge of Transformation warns IT managers that council
employees and their unions understand that most business
transformation projects will lead to job cuts.
"Quite obviously, unless the political direction is to improve
the quality of services, efficiency improvement equates to a need
for fewer people.
"People can easily try to maintain the status quo and wreck
projects through tactics such as non-cooperation, failing to engage
with initial fact-finding, dreaming up all manner of
rationalisations for why change should not happen, and not using
the system properly."
Given this, Socitm argues that those employees who will be
affected by business transformation need to be well-supported
throughout the project, from the moment that the change is first
announced.
The behaviour of senior management is also critical, since in
those cases where management teams have demonstrated transparency,
engaged with employees and engendered trust, the council has been
more likely to deliver a successful project.
However, the report warns that technology is still likely to get
the blame for any failure when the real culprit is staff resistance
to change.
According to the report, the lack of a supportive culture for
business transformation projects can also be due to the actions of
senior managers in the past.
"Management can do nothing about what has gone on previously. We
suggest that those management teams that have encountered trouble
with groups of employees or their representatives, will require
plenty of time to prepare the ground before embarking upon a major
transformation exercise."
In a similar vein, traditional management thinking is the third
obstacle to a successful project, with management-imposed, top-down
business transformation having a high failure rate in the public
sector.
"Transformational change can be every bit as threatening to the
manager as it is to the team," says the report.
"Management insecurity stems from finding that, as one has
climbed to the top of the organisational ladder, someone has taken
[the ladder] away."
The report highlights how middle management jobs are
particularly under threat because middle managers are no longer
needed to pass on instructions from senior management. Improved IT
systems will also remove the need for middle managers to aggregate
information for council leaders.
This trend will mean that those delivering front-line services
will be expected to collaborate with their colleagues both to cut
the local authority's costs and to improve the service to
customers.
However, the report still argues that the most substantial
obstacle to business transformation is service heads' ignorance
about IT.
"Some heads of IT may lack credibility with service managers
because previous projects have overrun their budget, time or cost,
or failed to deliver the anticipated service benefits.
"An informed dialogue about how services can exploit IT requires
technology managers who can relate to service requirements as well
as service managers who have at least a basic understanding of the
enabling technologies."
According to Socitm, councils could be more successful with
their business transformation projects if they appointed a single
senior manager with overall responsibility for delivering
IT-enabled projects. The manager would be a CIO who understood
change management and also had a detailed knowledge of both IT
systems and business processes.
Watmore prepares implementation plan for
t-government
Ian Watmore is putting the finishing touches to the document
that will spell out how the public sector should implement
transformational change.
The head of the prime minister's delivery unit, who was
Whitehall's CIO until January, expects to publish the implementing
transformational government document before the new financial
year.
Watmore published a consultation document last November
containing proposals for how all public sector bodies could both
improve customer services and cut costs through IT-enabled
projects.
Speaking at last month's Society of IT Management Business
Transformation conference, Watmore said, "The main thrust of the
comments on the consultation paper is that they agree with the
strategy, but how are we going to deliver it?"
Last November's document said, "Bodies awarding funding should
presume that public service organisations only deliver good value
for money when they standardise and share services with
others."
Watmore is also working on the comprehensive spending review,
which will set spending levels across the public sector from 2008
to 2011.
At the Socitm conference, he said, "The financial position in
the public sector has hardened - the efficiency review is only just
picking up speed. Right now is the time to influence spending
decisions; it's a very important time in the journey that we are
on."
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