Newbie Lib Dem finance wizard, the Hampshire businessman and former Tory Mike Popham – who’s been a councillor for less than two years – has granted an interview to the Cancer.
And this owner of a software company providing services to government is keen to spend money on er, software:
“We have some great staff at the city council who are working very hard. But we don’t have the right software to allow them to do their jobs as well as they could.
“It comes down to communications, the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing. Computer systems work well, for instance, for individual departments or sections of the council.
“Problems arise when staff in another part of the authority need to know what their colleagues have been up to or are intending to do or what the latest is on services to a particular client or member of the public.
“Accessing information is piecemeal at the moment. That must be a great frustration to council staff.
Popham then tells us, “Departments need to have access to common data”. While the Cancer chips in with, “IT improvements could, however, cost several million pounds.”
Excuse me? What year is this? Popham wants to spend several million pounds buying software to access common data and improve communications at the council?
Could someone tell Mike there’s an entirely free, extremely efficient and up-to-date system for doing just this job. And it’s free. We call it the internet.
Millions on ‘solutions’ from his own company?!! What about saving millions on software by using some of the thousands of excellent free open source solutions that will do pretty much anything an impoverished communicationally challenged council might need. Perhaps council departments could inform each other of their activities by using some sort of log – accessible via a network or web perhaps, yeah – a web based log maybe – oh, hang on…
I am producing quarterly budget reports for social services on teh internets!
Dear Sir or Madam,
With regard to your comment “Could someone tell Mike there’s an entirely free, extremely efficient and up-to-date system for doing just this job. And it’s free. We call it the INTERNET.”…….
would you please note that the Council’s INTRANET will be central to some of our focus of improvement of our Council’s provision of services to the public..of course linked to the internet as it is now.
At position 43 out of 43 comparable Councils in the UK, what other “excellent, positive and suitably thoughtful” ideas do you have for improvement? Do please share!
Dear Sir or Madam,
I note your formal style. Are you a personal friend of Barbara “call me ma’m” Janke by any chance?
Might I suggest you read some of the “excellent, positive and suitably thoughtful ideas” made on this blog over the last two years and get back to me.
Do please let me know what you think!
Actually, a perfectly reasonable proposal Inks. The Local Government Act is quite clear that such information should be in the public domain.
In fact pretty much everything the council does should be.
The main exceptions being things like personal data and commercially confidential information.
Which makes you wonder why a liberal wants to set up a private internal software network with virtually the sole purpose of sharing our personal details between any and every department at the council. Isn’t that illiberal?
Is making sure that every council worker has easy access to our children’s school records a priority?
Isn’t our personal data and privacy better protected by a paper based scheme with a paper trail so we can legally protect ourselves?
TBB, you’re mixing up handling data with publishing it.
Your suggestion that all BCC’s databases and spreadsheets and word documents and email could be replaced by free web based applications is silly.
I have no inside knowledge of BCC’s IT systems but I’d imagine they have a large number of databases with varied interfaces. Some will be compatible with each other, some won’t.
For example, BCC’s commercial property department will probably have a database designed, or bought off the shelf, to manage property. They’ll probably have spreadsheets to handle reports this generates. They’ll also have spreadsheets to work around things the database doesn’t do.
Now replicate that across lots of different departments and add in data protection and business processes.
And of course they’re going to have a corporate intranet. This is not to hide information that should be public. For example, you could have a web-based staff directory application. You can’t put that on the public web.
Is this the same council that was showing off, several years back, that is was switching huge swathes of its IT onto open source alternatives?
I wonder which party made that decision?
I did say the internet in the original post not the world wide web. The internet includes non-public applications such as intranet, email etc.
The article explicitly refers to communication and information sharing:
This kind of stuff is perfectly suited to the internet.
It’s not clear what point you’re making about databases.
“Excuse me? What year is this? Popham wants to spend several million pounds buying software to access common data and improve communications at the council?”
“Could someone tell Mike there’s an entirely free, extremely efficient and up-to-date system for doing just this job. And it’s free. We call it the internet.”
“It’s not clear what point you’re making about databases.”
Because the “common data” you refer to will be stored in a variety of databases and spreadsheets. My point is your claim that the internet provides a free and easy way link all this together is silly.
It’s equivalent to saying BCC don’t need printers because pencils provide a cheap and simple way to write letters.
Can’t you share databases over the internet?
If department X has a database and department Y needs information from it, they can share the database over the internet.
Again, you’re mixing up “internet” and “world wide web”, TBB. It would be unwise, to say the least, if BCC were to expose their database servers to the internet.
Also I’m not sure what you mean by “share databases”.
I think what you’re asking is “Can’t input data into and get data out of databases through web applications?”
The answer is yes, but there has to be a web frontend to the database. This either has to be purchased or made and maintained in-house.
For example, BCC has a planning database with a web frontend. You can access it here:
http://e2eweb.bristol.gov.uk/PublicAccess/tdc/DcApplication/application_searchform.aspx
That’ll have cost money. It looks similar to other council’s online planning pages, so chances are they’ve bought an off-the-shelf system.
So, they’ve paid council tax payers money for a system which provides a greater service to the public (I can easily look up planning applications on my street) and reduces costs (fewer callers into the planning department to look at the paper records).
BCC’s website also has a rubbish collection database:
http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/content/Environment-Planning/Rubbish-waste-and-recycling/recycling-and-rubbish-collection-day-finder.en
Again, it’s similar to those on other council sites so they’ve probably paid cash for this.
If you know of open source, free rubbish collection and planning databases post the names up here.
Now, back to the main point. Both the rubbish collection and planning databases hold a list of addresses against postcodes. Deep in the background they may be working off the same list but it’s unlikely.
There is no technical reason why I can’t enter my postcode once and then, when I look at the rubbish collection page or the planning page it already knows where I’m likely to be interested in.
Which is probably approaching what you’re getting to with databases sharing information.
But someone would have to write the code to do that, and it wouldn’t necessarily be trivial. And writing and maintaining code costs money. There’s certainly no open source free download that would solve the problem.
Whether Popham has the skills and experience to help BCC make wise, cost-effective IT decisions that improve services and reduce cost or not I have no idea.
Open source can provide most of the basic infrastructure (Linux, Apache, MySql, php, Open Office) but the cost, and it will always be in the millions, is in the applications that run on the infrastructure. There’s no free open source solution for that.
Southwest One anyone?
http://www.southwestone.org.uk/
Um, I made that distinction about two posts above.
I mean the ability to access and use a database from more than one site. BCC already do this as they have housing offices all over the city accessing the same database. They do this over the internet.
There’s little gain from trying to make databases share information or one size-fits-all central database solutions. It’s an expensive mirage and the public sector’s littered with very pricey undelivered projects like this.
That kind of thing is all about elegant management solutions that tend to deliver poor or no functionality to users.
It’s quicker, easier and cheaper to access information from separate databases and for the user to put the information together themselves.
A lot of people do this everyday at work anyway probably without even noticing.
It’s your belief that this can all be done with free open source software that’s silly, TBB.
We’re at cross purposes. I’ve not mentioned open source software. What are you talking about?
I’m saying if departments need to share information they should just look in each other’s databases for it and find it.
It’s nothing to do with open source software.
“It would be unwise, to say the least, if BCC were to expose their database servers to the internet.”
Why? We paid for the bloody things, let’s have ’em on the net.
Oh – and it was me that brought up the open source debacle. Perhaps if one council wrote an open source bin organiser then all the others could use it … and save cash eventually. No … that would be silly. Damn my stupid idea. Damn my co-operation idea.
One can’t help thinking that there must be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of local authorities around the world with very similar requirements all separately inventing the wheel at enormous cost to their local taxpayers.
Surely with such a big market it must be worth large software houses offering standardised packages at relatively modest prices, in the same way as happens for the individual PC market.
the internet is built from open source software, you can do anything with it. Proprietary software you can only do what you’re allowed to do with it by the owner under the usually very restrictive licensing conditions.
I’m seriously impressed at how, given the complete lack of techie knowledge, TBB manages to maintain this blog. Something of a tribute to wordpress I guess.
“Why? We paid for the bloody things, let’s have ‘em on the net.”
Do you really want teh geeks having an SQL log in to the council tax database? I’d bankrupt the city overnight just for shits and giggles.
Inks, no – I’m not suggesting giving people logins to an SQL database. But then you said we shouldn’t “expose” them to the internet. I’m saying why the heck not? You don’t need to give people logins but with suitable security there shouldn’t be an issue with putting those databases on the net and giving the public some kind of access that doesn’t involve logins to the backend.
I’ll try once more.
I’m not proposing any “techie” or software solution.
If BCC staff need to access common data they can do this by accessing various different databases via the internet. I don’t think there’s any argument about this.
So if the transport team need property information they get it off the property database.
It’s then down to the user to combine the property information with the transport information in the way they see fit.
In a lot of cases this would involve crosschecking one database entry with another on the screen. Or maybe setting out the information in a spreadsheet.
Popham is proposing a kind of HAL 3000-style super database, which physically combines all the databases at BCC.
It’s expensive, won’t work, isn’t needed by 99% of the workforce and would destroy the current levels of user functionality.
Chris Hutt Said:
Southwest One anyone?
http://www.southwestone.org.uk/
Bang on the money, I suspect. I know someone who works for SouthWestOne in Somerset who says that they’re fully expecting BCC to come on board (and are even provisioning for it in infrastructure proposals).
Southwest One another shining example of high ranking public sector folk lining the pockets of their nearest and dearest?
This is what happens when you give adults access to the internet. It all ends in tears.
Harsh but fair, Ella, harsh but fair…
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