For example.

I had to cancel my car insurance with the AA recently. I had scrapped my car in early January but had not gotten round to canceling insurance until late February. I therefore had to pay for car insurance January and February even though I no longer had a car and it had been destroyed and the information was available through DVLA systems .

I explained to the AA ‘customer service’ representative’s, I spoke to two in the end, that all they needed to do was look on the DVLA’s web site to find that my car had been destroyed. I explained to them that their claims division would have access to this information through the DVLA systems. The insurance canceling department claimed they did not have access to this information through the DVLA or any other systems and that I would have to send in proof via the post, snail mail, of the destruction of my vehicle.

This seemed to me to be increasing the AA’s revenue stream by ensuring the DVLA information was not available to its insurance canceling department. Putting obstacles in the way of my ability to reduce the amount I must pay by willfully increasing the AA’s internal business process.

• The delivery of ICT should be linked to every key manifesto (policy) commitment from the party leading into the 2010 General Election. A localism focus to be primary in all such decision making.
• The party leader should be fully briefed to lead competently on ICT issues and ICT related initiatives (including broadband for all focused initiatives)
• Current initiatives to be retained and expanded upon should include
- Cloud (G-Cloud based)
- PSN (Public Sector Network) – Infrastructure before e-enablement
- Applications Store
• Government departments / agencies / quangos (including local government / NHS / Criminal Justice and surviving regional bodies should be required to submit business plans for IT investments to an ICT Council to examine and advise on national PSN / Cloud / Shared Service opportunities locally and sub regionally.
• All government departments to prepare a Shared Service / Common Infrastructure Strategy for delivery in 2012
• A reconstituted CIO council needs to capture, disseminate and benchmark best practice across all public sector bodies
• The government should make far more use of the Local Government Association to drive through and lead and advise directly on Transformational Change and the use of ICT to assist in that change
• Transformational change should be grant assisted at local government level with RoI focused grants available to local government, local criminal justice and emergency services and the local NHS to design and invest in change programmes at a local level
• The Government should look to develop closer working relationships with representative bodies such as Intellect / Socitm / ASSIST / BCS – invite leading members of those organisations to form and manage advisory group / select committees with access to Cabinet and Junior Ministers as and when appropriate
• Support should be available to assist the UK ICT sector through and out of recession – investing in leading edge infrastructure to ensure the UK is best placed to make the most to the inevitable ‘recovery’
• The importance of the 2012 Olympics and the focus of the international community on the UK should be seen as a core driver and opportunity to place the UK in the ICT shop window to the world
• Central Government has a core role in the development and monitoring of open standards and secure interoperability – and in marketing these developments internationally as best practice for the world
• Leave local government collectively to ‘get on with it’ working within these open standards – allowing each to ‘compete’ one with the other
• Trust the people – the UK is still attempting to run a centralist style state – experience across the world shows that the maximum population where transformation is shown to be working is circa five to seven million
• A link should be established between the provision of ICT infrastructure that cuts across county / administrative boundaries and reflects instead communities of interest – driven by the locality for and on behalf of the locality.
• Technology is an enabler – it is neutral, it is a servant – big does not reflect efficiency nor a workable solution (e.g. NHS NPfIT) and needs instead to be small enough in scale to be nimble and responsive to rapidly changing ‘human’ needs.
• Technology allows / enables work to transfer from the centre to the locality with obvious green (carbon) and new ways of working potentials – plus the potential to open up areas for economic regeneration that otherwise might slip behind in this technology led second ‘industrial revolution’

+1

..and £100 million provides multitude places where people who don’t really add anything to the process can hide and push for that last mile.

I’d love to see every procurement described purely as a requirements catalog – as a challenge to the open source community. Not to discourage competition, but provide a reasonable baseline against which project budgets can be compared.

for more information on how these technologies fit it to a single unified estate please contact me.

There is no contestable alternative to the government service experience. Solve that and a lot of problems will disappear.

There are few hard to reach people: someone, somewhere, is selling them a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread. Find out how to enable that value chain. Pay Point (and others) did.