WIREDGOV

Councils’ progress and learning on transforming the cost base and customer experience of local public services will be shared at the Socitm Spring conference taking place on 25 April in London.

The agenda is focused on the strategic capabilities and information and technology issues set out in Planting the Flag, the strategy for ICT-enabled local public services reform, produced by Socitm for the Local CIO Council.

A number of councils leading the way with transformation, including Brighton & Hove and Plymouth , will be reporting on what they are doing to exploit shared services, joint procurement, process redesign and self-service, and the impact of these reforms.

A series of roundtable discussions will provide all attendees with the opportunity to share experience from their own organisation and to learn from others on the wider list of topics covered in Planting the Flag. These include:

• G-Cloud
• CloudStore
• Public Services Networks
• Shared Services
• Agile approaches to business change
• Self-service
• Outsourcing vs insourcing
• Mobile and flexible working
• Joint procurement
• Information governance

The conference will hear from Chris Chant, the Cabinet Office Programme Director for G-Cloud, on the Government’s plans for future development of its CloudStore, launched in February. At present, the catalogue of cloud-based, pre-approved ICT services is mainly focused on infrastructure and data services typically used by central, rather than local government, so local public service managers will be keen to hear how this will be taken forward.  

Other confirmed plenary speakers for the conference are:

John Barradell, Chief Executive, Brighton & Hove City Council, who will speak on exploiting ICT

Neville Cannon, Programme Director for ICT Shared Services at Plymouth City Council, on re-designing and improving the delivery of public services through innovation and collaboration

Catherine Vaughan, Director of Finance & Resources and SE7 ICT Joint Working, Brighton & Hove City Council on join procurement & shared processes

The Socitm AGM will also be held during the conference, when the incumbent Glyn Evans will pass on his presidency to the new President, who will set out plans for the forthcoming year. 

The AGM will also consider progress in the past year and plans for the coming year, and include the election of officers for the coming year.

Limited places are available at the event, bookings may be made at www.socitm.net (follow the links in the Events section).

Further information and press passes for the event:

Vicky Sargent                        07726 601 139
Socitm Press Office               vicky.sargent@socitm.net