London Regional ICT Champion

Thanks to Jackie Carey of Community First, the West Midlands new Regional ICT Champion, for flagging this story up:

Earlier this week, a Charity Finance report on Capacitybuilders draft tender for national support services said:

“ICT as a support service seems to have significantly lower levels of need/support,” Capacitybuilders added.

At first sight this goes against everything that we’ve been working for and have been hearing from stakeholders from the frontline to funders alike.

On closer investigation, it turns out the quote is lifted from unatributed responses to Capacitybuilders Destination 2014 consultation exercises carried out earlier in the year, and already in the public domain. As one anonymous witness at one of the consultation exercises says:

I attended the consultation and (as anyone else who was there will agree) the section about National Hubs primarily consisted of sticking traffic light coloured dots on a list of current and potential national support services.

The audience were mainly infrastructure organisations (from a whole range of disciplines) who were being asked (whilst balancing lunch plates!) to stick dots on what their perception of what their local groups valued. Front line groups were not (my emphasis) being asked what their actual ICT service and support needs were.

Following on from Charity Finance’s article, off-the-record feedback from Capacitybuilders suggest that although the ChangeUp landscape post April 2008 is going to radically change with less money and fewer themes, ICT is still regarded as a priority for supporting the work of frontline organisations.

We hope this remains the case, and the ICT Hub and the Regional ICT Champions have been busy ensuring that sector’s ICT needs are met at local level. If any doubt, check out the ICT Hub pages on the the Knowledgebase, Suppliers’ Directory, publications and events.

To grossly summarise the draft tender document, Capacitybuilders is proposing to:

• Replace the six ChangeUp hubs with four National Support Services on the themes of finance, performance, workforce and a new area called ‘voice’.
• Bundle ICT into the performance theme along with mergers and collaborations, communications and monitoring.

The draft tender document has this to say about the perceived ICT needs of the sector:

Capacitybuilders believes that the outstanding needs in relation to ICT are:

• For all organisations – ensuring that the ICT needs are fully integrated into the strategic planning process as a whole.

• For small, new organisations – especially those operating where skill levels and material resources are likely to exclude people involved in voluntary and community action (including social enterprise) from getting on line and accessing information, support and networks, and from running normal small office functions, and Data Protection compliance.

Therefore subsidised (grant-aided) support should be restricted to organisations which are very small and small only.

• very small organisations <£10,000 p.a.
• small organisations >£10,000 <£100,000 p.a.

Medium-sized organisations that are >100,000 to £1 million are more able themselves to resource the maintenance and gradual improvement of their systems, but can face ICT challenges, such as step-change investment in hardware, software and skills to provide new and innovative services as well as enabling them to reach audiences they previously have not been able to reach.

Work priorities could include:

• developing and promoting ICT volunteering and circuit rider initiatives as appropriate models of support for third sector orgaisations. Develop the capacity of circuit riders and provide accredited circuit rider training.
• a national ICT support franchise – low cost remote and on-site support for stand-alone computers and small networks.
• enabling (and delivering?) training and resources for specialist ICT and generic infrastructure agencies
• helping infrastructure agencies develop sustainable ICT support services including pump priming fund
• increasing the range of relevant and affordable private sector products and services
• co-producing a series of resources to help frontline and infrastructure groups ensure their ICT is accessible

As far as the London ICT Champion project goes, we’re already delivering on some of the above – such as supporting circuit rider projects, accredited training, pump priming and and working towards the rest in London ICT strategy, which will be available from all good bookshops this Autumn.

Watch this space for more news as the Capacitybuilders’ tender process shapes up.