Tuesday 18 October 2011

My apologies for blogging a little late this week. I was out of the office late last week at Microsoft’s HQ in Reading. The building was very impressive – as you might expect – show casing how thoughtful building design coupled with new technology linked to a change in people’s behaviour (some call this culture) can deliver a modern, flexible, productive yet low cost operation. Exciting as this is the direction that we’re moving in quickly with the hub elements of the transformation programme. We discussed and agreed some radical actions around how we get many of our applications into the “Cloud” and how we deliver tangible service benefits to our external customers quickly over the coming months. Watch this space.

I had a good meeting with the property team last week also. We reviewed the initial thinking around moving to a new operating model for the service, encompassing all of the elements of the transformation programme. The service needs to be designed around the needs of its customers – both external and internal as well as striking the right balance between commissioning services from others and providing direct services where it represents best value to Wiltshire. This is exciting and innovative – the team are doing a great job.

Today I shall be in Browfort all day. I have a short meeting with one of the Corporate Directors from B&NES first thing to explore opportunities for sharing some services. Very initial discussions with no specific services in mind yet. Value will be the key determinant; if we can improve performance whilst reducing costs it’s sensible to share. If we can’t we won’t.

Cabinet starts at 10am with a full agenda and then we’re straight into informal meetings with Cabinet for the rest of the day around capital assets and general discussions around the business plan and budget for next year and key council contracts. I always enjoys these meetings with politicians – it’s why I came into local government from the private sector!

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Thanks for reading and talk again next week.

Carlton