It’s been a few weeks since I last blogged so my
apologies for that. No excuses…
I’m doing a lot of work at the moment on
information governance (IG). Not the most sexy subject but very important for
an organisation this size of ours with so much personal and other data in use,
some of which should be shared and a lot of which should not be. Key areas of
IG are data protection, Freedom of Information, records and information
management, information security, information governance and data quality. We
need to review and reinvigorate our policies here and develop awareness and
training for all staff together with auditing what information we have and
sharpening up our storage, retrieval and disposal of this. You’ll be hearing a
lot more about this over the next few months.
I attended the Association of County Chief
Executives last week with colleagues where we had the opportunity to meet with
senior politicians from the new government and department of communities and
local government amongst others. Key items for discussion were the government’s
plans for devolution, the emergency budget in July and its likely impact on
county councils and sharing ideas and approaches for economic growth in our
counties. It was a refreshing opportunity to exchange thinking and make some
contacts.
Speaking of budget reductions, the big challenge we
face is managing demand coming into some of our services, particularly adult
care, children’s services, highways and waste. We will have to understand the
characteristics of the demand we face, for example customer demand we want
(such as requests for service) versus demand we don’t want (such as progress
chasing) and understand how we can reduce or eliminate the latter by
redesigning our work. There is significant budget consumed by avoidable demand.
We discussed this with Cabinet on Monday and will be conducting a significant
piece of work in this area over the coming months.
My time-trialling career is going well with four 10
mile time trials now complete. I suspect it will be some time before I
challenge Sir Bradley for his new hour record though…
Speak again soon. For
daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep
in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.
Carlton
Carlton
