Thursday 6 August 2009

Last Friday I spent a full day with the Wiltshire Employment Support Team (WEST) - part of the Department of Community Services. This service enables people with learning difficulties amongst others to seek, obtain and maintain real paid work - a real demonstration that we are involved with lives not just services. Samantha Buchanan and Graham Logan took me round to meet some of their service users and some of the employers that offer real paid work to people.

So what did I learn? Well I was really buzzing when I got home - it was inspiring to be with people with such passion, pride and expertise in their work and a real privilege to meet some of our service users all of whom share the same passion. I learned that the team make a huge impact on peoples lives - both our service users and on the lives of the people who care for them. Of course finding work is difficult in any circumstances, but in a recession it is doubly hard so it was fascinating to understand some of the techniques our staff use to address this. I was embarrassed by the fact that we as an an employer do not offer many roles like this too. So I shall be working with colleagues in the Corporate Leadership Team to identify and develop some real opportunities in this area over the next few months.

This morning we had our regular ICT Steering Team Meeting. This is where we meet at a senior level with both service staff and ICT staff to review what we are doing, how we are performing and where we need to direct more effort. It was interesting to see that since April 1, demand in terms of the number of calls being made to the ICT help desk has risen by over 40%. This is because we have 2,000 more staff and PC's on the network as well as the patch work of infrastructure, networks', domains and kit inherited from the five previous organisations. This year is one of transition for ICT as we work hard to sort out all of this to be able to deliver a single integrated high performing service. It's going to be a challenging journey!

I shall be away from the office next week on holiday so we'll talk again in a couple of weeks.

Thanks,

Carlton