Socitm'snext
president,Richard Steel, wants
to see a society that is more open, transparent, and which
engages more effectively with its membership.
The CIO of the London Borough of Newham will take over from
current president Rose Crozier this month, and says he is keen to
drive the period of change Socitm (Society of Information
Management) is undergoing.
Steel says Socitm needs to change with the IT profession. He
says new challenges such as the lack of public trust in government
and the rise of social networking have arisen and more robust
responses from an organisation representing IT in local government
is needed.
Socitm now wants to attract both IT professionals across the
public sector bodies and all IT council staff, on top of the
traditional membership of local authority IT managers. A new
membership model will be announced at the annual general meeting on
April 24.
Steel wants communication to these members improved. He said,
"The aim is to make us more transparent. We've been criticised for
being a bit elitist. A lot of great work is done in Socitm, but I'm
not sure that we communicate that to members very well and engage
them.
"One of the things we should do is use our membership base more
effectively. We want to see what people's specialist areas are, and
we want to see if people are prepared to speak on behalf of the
society, for example."
He wants to develop a different relationship with central
government. Socitm has already set up the Local Government CIO
Council after deciding that local government was
"under-represented" on the main government CIO council, and Steel
says he wants to see the society being more assertive.
"I'm not convinced we've been lobbying government as effectively
as we could. We need to provide a constructive challenge on behalf
of our members when necessary, and not just trot out the accepted
wisdom or dogma. We're seen as a government mouthpiece, not a
government influence," he said.
He added that he wants the society to be consulted earlier by
central government on issues that will affect local authorities. He
said, "We need to be saying to government, have you thought about
some of the practical issues that we have in delivering
projects?"
The biggest issue IT faces in the coming years is public trust
in the ability of government to share and store data electronically
- and Socitm must take a strategic role in coming up with a
solution, Steel said.
"We have really thrown away any trust we might have had. At the
moment, too much data is shared on an ad-hoc, uncontrolled basis.
Government has not done a good job in getting the systems right.
Where we have to share information, it should only be through
systems that have been designed for the purpose."
And the quickly evolving nature of IT means more big changes in
the offing. It is no longer just about running an organisation
internally, or perfecting infrastructure. It is about how this
infrastructure is used to provide good services, said Steel, and
it's about engaging the whole community using technology.
"The organisations we serve have had to change tremendously over
the past couple of years", he said. "We now have to change with
them."