KPIs For Cities!

This is a difficult article for me to write, and I do not want, in any way, to criticise any companies, as they are often working within the scope of their contracts. But I do want the leaders of our public services to start to report back on their achievements around digital transformation, and especially in how they are supporting both social change and economic development.

If for our local government IT contracts, we are moving towards large contracts awarded to single companies, we need to have some transparency as to whether our cities are delivering good value, and are achieving their targets. A "How is our city doing?" glossy brochure at the end of the year is not enough in these changing (and challenging) times.

With London appointing a digital transformation lead for the city, and rolling-out the e-Red Book for every baby born in the city, we see a city which wants to engage its citizens and report back on its successes and where, in real-time, we can see how the city is performing [here]

Introduction

One thing I've learned about public sector contracts is that large and aggregated contracts, which are awarded to a single organisation, often don't work. This can happen because the deliverables in the project are often not specified well at the start and where innovation and risk taking is often minimised.

Our public services have been underfunded for years in terms of transformation, and are in dire need to be redesigned to be more open and to fully integrate the citizen. With new cloud-based and agile methods, we can often move quickly to change existing processes and re-design to engage with citizens in a digital manner. Even to talk about it as "IT" seems an old-fashioned term, as it is all about re-engineering processes and procedures and properly integrate the citizen.

In these days, our systems should be designed with the citizen at the core and where our public sectors can then best interact with the citizen. To not have digital interfaces for citizens for key services such as health and social care, economic development, and KPI monitoring, is something that should almost be written into the charter of being a city.

So we see the UK Government pushing forward changes in order to support smaller and more focused contracts, and where smaller companies have the opportunity to be successful in the bidding process ...

While it is a complex process to break up these large projects, the long-term ambition of the UK government is to move from large companies trying to cover every base to ones which spread the load, and where key skills can be covered by the right companies.

Giving our SMEs an equal chance

And so, in Scotland, we see the great work of CivTech pushing forward with innovation and supporting the growth of smaller (and eager) businesses. They have been breaking down the barriers that existing within the public sector, and pushing innovation to the fore. Our infrastructure, too, through Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Funding Council funding, is there to encourage our small businesses to engage with the public sector, and thus drive innovation.

Our future will not be built by large companies, it will be built by smart people doing things differently. With the increasing power of large US-based Cloud service providers, we need to watch that we do not crash our own economy by not supporting our best talent to disruptive and innovate new ideas. The days when governments could control large companies are rapidly fading with the Cloud seeing little in the way of physical borders.

Generally, if they can deliver to the citizen, I have nothing against large companies winning big contracts within the public sector. Okay, to build a bridge that it what you do, but to cover all the complexities of digital transformation, a single contract will struggle to support change. I do not believe that we should just go ahead and create large contracts which go to a single company. It is also not healthy to depend on a single contract to cover all the requirements. If a single company wins all of the contracts, that is fine, but we need to move away from the idea that one company can cover every base in IT.

We need skills in security, cloud engineering, app development, database integration, Web development, networking, risk management, ... and so many things, and to say that a single company can lead in all these areas is going back to the times when IBM ruled computing - and before the PC came along.

Single contacts

So today I read that, even after questions have been raised in Edinburgh, that Glasgow has awarded a single contract to a large company for their digital services

Has Glasgow been reading a different rule book to others? I thought there was generally large contracts supported by a single company were often not a good thing. Or have they made the decision because it is easier to have a single large contract than having to sit down and decide where they want to transform their support for their citizens?

A quote from the new deal says:

From world-class digital learning in our schools, to protecting the health of our most vulnerable citizens – we need to innovate and be ready to embrace opportunities to use technology creatively to deliver for the city. 

Conclusions

As a citizen of Edinburgh, I have hardly seen any change in my interaction with the Council - I appreciate I may not be their focus - and I see little in the form of change to make the city a leading digital city in the world.

The City Deal, I hope, could bring change, but we are starting from a fairly weak base. I see little in the form of reporting back on how the existing deal is helping the city, but this may be a lack of reporting.

Where are the KPIs? Where are the investments to make the lives of our citizens better? I appreciate I may be missing lots of great stories about how Edinburgh is supporting the engagement of its citizens, and how our kids are now better supported in school. If our leaders reported back on the success of the funding it would help.

So can we have KPIs for large contracts?

Here is my scorecard:

• Citizen integration? [eg defining future targets in key areas of engagement and monitor closely].
• Engaging with SMEs? [eg award 30% of all the work to SMEs].
• Supporting innovation? [eg key problem statements defined, and delivery tracked against these, with evaluation of success].
• Productivity reporting [eg define key metrics in improving processes - eg number of consultations, number of issues tracked, etc].
• Education and dissemination [eg improved awareness, training, etc, within the organisation].
• Improved skills development [eg integration to develop and embed new skills in the organisation].

Our cities cannot just sign a contract, and then tell the company to get on with it. They need to define - up-font - what the key challenges are, and then need to closely monitor the success of these. They need to provide the leadership required to address social change and economic development. IT is not about fixing PCs or network connections anymore, it's all about using digital methods to improve processes and procedures, and to do things in a smarter way.

----- and finally ...

Dear Glasgow,

I am not a citizen of your city ... but I love your city, and love the way that you are changing. Can you get some KPIs for your new contract and some metrics, and report back, and help citizens see how you want to change your world, and how well you are doing? Please don't waste one pound of this investment, and let's look back in 10 years time, as see a world-leading digital city which we can take pride in its achievements in digital transformation.