London Regional ICT champion

It’s a little known rock ‘n roll fact that – almost 36 years ago to the day – David Bowie started his 1972 ‘Spiders from Mars’ world tour in the inauspicious surroundings of the Toby Jug, Tolworth (long since gone) before going onto the rather more glamorous Carnegie Hall, New York.

Obviously, we can’t quite compete with the glamour of a Bowie world tour, but the ICT Hub has 80+ ICT events scheduled around England between January and March 2008. We report from the London ICT Champion’s very-own mini-tour.

Tuesday 22 Jan: The Jasper Carrot Suite, Birmingham City FC
It’s the first day of Champs World and we’re in Birmingham for the snappily entitled “Capacity Builders Joined Up? engaging regional and local support with the national support services” event. A short taxi ride up the Digbeth Road, a tarmac scar festering with car showrooms, tool hire warehouses and boarded up chip shops takes us to the revamped St. Andrews Stadium.

Fittingly, the event was held in Birmingham City FC’s Jasper Carrott suite – a homage to the local ‘funnyman’ – with 9 round-table discussions organised around the 9 national workstreams. Although ICT is not mentioned explicitly in the 9 workstreams, it gets a nod in #5 Marketing and Communications (lead is Media Trust) and #9 Responding to Social Change (NCVO Foresight).

Some of the messages emerging from the conversation were…

• Lots of direct questions to CBuilders about what will happen post-ICT Hub
• ICT also cropped up as a recurring theme in the “round-table” discussions of the other workstreams
• Strong support for regional projects and infrastructure – because it’s the obvious link between national projects and local delivery
• More joined up working with Big Lottery and regional funders
• John Fox (Capacity Builders’s director of strategy and policy) said they expected to make an announcement at end of January regarding national funding of ICT
• Capacity Builders regional co-ordinators will also be glad to know there was strong support in the room for giving them extra resources – to help co-ordinate workstreans at regional level – as they’re recognised as being overrun with work.

We can but hope that Capacity Builders is listening and acts on the clear messages. The official notes can be downloaded from here.

Friday 25 Jan: Prospect Hospice, Swindon
London to Swindon is quite possibly the world’s most boring train ride. We like a good train ride as much as anyone, mainly because we don’t get out enough, but the one hour ride to Swindon swept us through through a post-industrial nightmare of indentikit business parks, retail sheds and shoe box houses entirely devoid of any architectural merit. Swindon used to be a bustling railway hub, and since our last visit nearly 20 years ago, has declined into a clone town of chain stores. Welcome to the new English landscape.

This particular gig was for Help the Hospices, who received a generous commission from the ICT Hub to bring Hub resources to their 200 member organisations. Hospices have traditionally occupied a unique space between the NHS and the voluntary sector, and range in size from one part-time accountant (who hates computers and ICT) and a couple of volunteers to hospices with 150 staff spread over 5 locations and terminal services deployed. Such a diverse audience made it particularly hard to judge their ICT needs.

As far as we could see from the earlier presentations, the NHS seems to be busy hoovering up hospices and drawing them firmly into the NHS IT infrastructure. Until today, we’d never heard of N3, which is apparently Europe’s largest virtual private network. According to the blurb, N3 is part of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), a project mostly known in the press for epic mismanagement and staggering cost overruns. The cost for setting up a dedicated 10mb VPN weighs in at an eye watering £44,000. Monthly line rental, by comparison, is a measly £800. When we asked who paid for all this – because hospices are still counted as registered charities – the answer sounded like a combination of the taxpayer and any cash reserves hospices may have generated.

After we’d been helped off the floor and back into our chair, the conversation moved onto a discussion of databases. We felt on more confident ground here as databases are a perennial need in the sector, and are well served by the Knowledgebase and Suppliers Directory. However, it emerged that even here the NHS is pretty much a closed shop with 4 main players – the database a hospice procures is usually dependent on its geographical location rather than product merit. Accordingly, these database systems start at £20,000, with frequent complaints from end users that the closed shop leaves these companies little incentive to upgrade or innovate their product.

The driving force behind NPfIT is the government’s desire to centralise patient records. From what we heard at this gig, the assumption seems to be that patients do not own their data – this is NHS property and the scheme is compulsory opt-in. If patient’s wish to opt-out – and there are many legitimate reasons why one might wish to – a great deal of bureaucracy and form-filling is placed in the way. Given the government’s penchant for losing public data, what price is there on 55 million health records being hacked?

Monday 28 Jan: Telephone Helplines Association, Borough
We’re ashamed to admit it, but telephony is a glaring gap in our personal knowledge. There are some excellent articles on the Knowledgebase, but all the same telephony is rarely considered as part of a wider ICT strategy.

The technology of telephony is also rapidly evolving, with people confused by what to buy and how to future-proof their investment. For example, many people use Skype for internet phonecalls to distant relatives, but only one of the 15 people present today used it for business. Only one other person used a commercial VOIP provider. Likewise, many people were considering upgrading to digital telephone systems, but had yet to make the jump.

Telephone Helplines Association will be publishing a free to download good practice guide in March 2008.

Next week’s gigs: Whitechapel, Clapham, Sydenham