Friday 30 October 2009

And the weeks keep steaming by. As my 8 year old son keeps reminding me, it's nearly Christmas! We wrote his Christmas letter last night, his enthusiasm for which may have something to do with the fact that Playstation are about to release F1 2009 with Jenson in it for the PSP. He's a massive fan! Actually I have a copy too... it's very relaxing I find.

This week started with John Noeken, Cabinet member for Resources and I leaving my house at 4.45 in the morning for a quick blat down to Truro in Cornwall. We had to be there by 9 where we met their Cabinet and Chief Executive to discuss their plans for potentially adopting SAP or a similar Enterprise Resource Planning product to join up their finance, HR, procurement and payroll systems. It was a good day, and good to exchange ideas and views about the way forward in local government with respect to efficiency and cost reduction, especially as Cornwall went unitary at the same time as we did. They face many of the same challenges as we do. They will be visiting our shared service team to see how it all works.

I chaired the ICT Steering group yesterday. This group brings together all of the departmental customers and ICT itself. We review the current programme of work being delivered across the organisation (20+ projects at the moment including migrating 5 separate email systems onto a single system - due to complete in mid-November). We make any associated decisions required to ensure these programmes are delivered successfully. We also look at cross cutting issues emerging, such as asset management (who has all the kit, where it is and any changes we might need to make to this), security, developments required by the services to comply with government direction on service delivery. This latter point is particularly important in the services for children and your people at present, with the various organisational safeguarding reports released by Ofsted over the last 6 months requiring a tightening of security around key work processes. The team have delivered an incredible amount of work over the past few months and progress is going very well. Thank you to all those involved in this.

And another thank you to the payroll and shared service teams. They successfully went live last week with the payroll on SAP for Police, Fire and Probation services. This required a tremendous effort and was exceptionally well handled.

Thanks for reading. Talk again next week, and enjoy your Christmas shopping!

Carlton