John’s Idea

Capital Ambition, the Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership for London, is developing what I think is a really exciting and ground breaking efficiency peer challenge programme.  The IDeA of course pioneered the concept of peer review but this programme, which is being activity supported by the IDeA, breaks new ground.

Encouraging peer working is a central feature of the IDeA mission and perhaps more than anything else the Agency is known for its peer reviews.  Essentially this involves politicians and managers from around local government reviewing the performance of individual councils against a benchmark which relates to overall or specific service performance.  The IDeA manages the process, including the development of the various benchmarks, recruitment of peers and the management of the specific peer review engagements.  The enduring success of the approach and its progressive adoption by other parts of public sector, is a testament to the value of review by sympathetic and informed colleague practitioners.  The intensity of the reviews themselves untaps a resource, perhaps based on mutuality and a sense of shared responsibility, not available to the more traditional consultancy approach to performance review.

Capital Ambition have taken the concept of mutuality a step further and, in the efficiency space, this means all London boroughs agreeing to have an efficiency challenge over the period of a year.  Mutuality also means senior officers volunteering themselves for peer “duty” over the period of the programme.  This is a Capital Ambition initiated and managed programme but given its potential for use elsewhere the IDeA is supporting it as much as it can.

Its important to note that Capital Ambition are calling the peer engagements “challenges” and not “reviews”.  This aim is to be challenging with peers being even tougher than they would be in a peer review.  Rather than help each other identify areas for performance improvement the aspiration of the peer challenge is help councils, as part of their efficiency programme, deliver real cashable savings.

The challenge, and the aim of real cashable savings, means that a different sort of benchmark is needed.  Working with the Society of London Treasurers a “notepad” has been developed which identifies each key area of spend, defines the sort of practice they would expect to see in that area and the metrics associated with that practice.  Before each challenge London councils will assess their performance against the notepad (”the self-assessment”) and this self assessment will then be unpicked (in a friendly way) by peers in the challenge engagement.

The programme is groundbreaking in a number of ways but its the potential around notepad which is particularly exciting for me.  To be contemporary all benchmarks have to be maintained (otherwise we are benchmarking yesterday’s practice) and although the Society of London Treasurers provide the ideal starting point, the aim of Capital Ambition, working with the IDeA, is to turn the notepad into a really dynamic tool which will be constantly refreshed.  The requirement for constant practitioner based refresh takes the initiative right into the heart of the IDeA’s evolving approach to knowledge management strategy particularly the COP initiative.

Partly based on the Capital Ambition concept the IDeA has been able to secure funds from the CLG for an efficiency knowledge hub and we are now working together to understand how we can make the notepad the dynamic centre piece of that hub.  The most obvious input will be the challenges themselves each of which will provide a reality check on its existing value and new practice.  As well as defining best practice engagement through the peer community the notepad/hub should provide a basis for developing next practice and innovation.  This could involve, for example, the identification of a common obstacle and some sort of shared endeavor to overcome this obstacle.  The shared endeavor could be a common investment or it could be agreement to seek a regulatory change or a cost saving change in procedure by a government department.

A key feature of the opportunity provided by the Capital Ambition Efficiency Challenge is its scale.  A significant group of similar councils are having the same challenge in a fairly tight time frame.  The scale makes the maintenance of a dynamic benchmark worthwhile and generates the potential for a really rapid development of ideas (a buzz!).  While no one wants to run before they can walk there seems the obvious potential to enhance the value of the programme as a whole by adopting it in other parts of the country.

The new community of practice (COP) based approach to knowledge management is providing the IDeA with a radical stimulus, forcing us to rethink the delivery approach to a number of our core programmes.  A good example is the Beacons Scheme.
 
The Beacons Scheme is now 10 years old and its impact on local government improvement has been significant and quantifiable.  It is however tired in format and interest in it from councils is declining.  While the objectives of the scheme remain relevant; identifying and sharing best practice, the methods used now feel outdated and slow.  The process is linear and involves agreeing improvement themes, developing best practice criteria, inviting bids, evaluating bids, awarding beacons status and then sharing the practice.  It is therefore long winded and expensive both to participate in and administer. 
 
So how do we re-envirogate the scheme and deliver the original objectives more efficiently?
 
What we are proposing is literally a Beacons Scheme “revolution”.  We intend  to completely flip the current process on its head with “shared learning” at the start rather than finish .  To achieve this we intend to make “communities of practice” the central feature of the new scheme.
 
So how will it work?
 
Through Local Area Agreements, and other sources of information, we now have a much better understanding about what council priorities are (see my last blog).  We know which councils are interested in which policy outcomes and these councils can then provide the basis for a COP.  By working with the COP to develop ideas about what constitutes best practice (perhaps using a wiki to develop criteria) we can build practice sharing into the process from the beginning.   While we still want to celebrate and promote best practice, awarding beacons status is an output from the process, almost a by-product, rather than the objective.  The award grant associated with beacons status could then used in a more focused way - perhaps through an “agreement” with the COP - to deliver a programme of practice sharing or even development.

The Local Government Association’s Business Strategy Review is forcing the IDeA to think hard about who it is and what it’s for.  For relief however, and for some interesting comparisons, its worth looking around at the impact of market/technology pressures on some other “knowledge” based businesses.

The Guardian is hosting a conference on the Future of Journalism which in content discusses the various pressures the business is facing and in form demonstrates the nature of the response.

Like most major newspapers the Guardian online business is starting to dominate.  With some 18 million online users (including a significant international readership) the writing is on the wall for the traditional newsprint business. Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor, anticipates that the current printing press upgrade will be last the paper makes.  Traditional circulation is falling, along with advertising revenue, as readers migrate to the internet and advertising revenue is swept up by Google.

The internet is the new channel for newspapers but the means of communicating through the internet are multi-dimensional and two-way.  Content from the Future of Journalism conference is distributed via the internet through videocasts, podcasts and blogs reflecting the media which are being developed for the rest of the paper.  For the IDeA, developing its expertise in online conferences, there are some clear examples to learn from.

The content itself was also really interesting.  From the perspective of innovation (a growing focus of work for the IDeA) the Jonathan Zittrain talk on the Saving the Web explores for me both how innovation happens and how it can be stifled.  More directly relevant for the IDeA was the contribution (and associated debate) from Arianna Huffington founder of the Huffington Post.  Citizen journalists generate the Huffington Post and apparently, made the two most decisive journalist contributions to the democratic presidential candidate campaign.  Putting aside the potential impact of these developments on the politics of local government with the IDeA’s own drive for “user” generated content is again a really interesting parallel. 

Social networking, Web 2 etc, provides a really exciting opportunity for an organisation like the IDeA. As local government’s improvement agency we exist to help the people who lead councils, and work in them, help each other to do better. In a nutshell this means helping everyone in local government share experiences and talk to each other. Web 2 was made for us!

Our Community of Practice website is our attempt to bring Web 2 into the improvement world. So far so good. The platform supports over 300 communities and with 11,000 participants already registered new registrations are growing at over 1,000 a month.

While things are moving forward the challenges are also apparent. Web 2 is painfully transparent. Unlike the traditional publishing approach associated with Web 1 you know if people are listening and participating - you can really hear the silence. As “local government” is to an extent a pre-defined “community” you can also tell whether you are hitting or missing your target participants. While the management information generated by the CoP site is brilliant, it does mean that there is not so much hype to hide behind.

So what are the challenges - loosely you can categorise them as supply and demand.

On the supply side the IDeA is trying to make Web 2 an integral part of the way we try and make improvement happen. This is challenging our existing portfolio of techniques for encouraging improvement. Of course we know that learning by doing works and that “action learning” is a really powerful way of sharing practice and encouraging change. Our approach to developing and distributing best practice however is much more traditional and developed in the context of the tools we had to do it. For example like many similiar organisations we have a prediliction for “case studies” which we research and publish (in hard as well as soft copy). Of course what we need to get to is real time experience, generated at source, which provokes real time feed back on its value from “users”.

On the demand side we have to accept that there are constraints on both the pace and extent to which people in local government will take advantage of this sort of approach. There are the general issues associated with the adoption of a new means of communication (this is my first ever blog) and there are specific issues associated with local government. In particular, lets be honest, the demographic doesn’t help. As a smug baby boomer I did feel that having similar cultural tastes meant that the generation gap I had with my parents didn’t exist with my children - given the fundamentally different approach they have to communication I’m no longer so sure. The age profile of local governments (councillors and employees) is significantly older than the population as a whole and the adopters of this style of communication in particular.

So, having taking my own personal plunge into this Web 2 pool with this my first blog, I’m hoping I can encourage other local government staff and councilors to use this medium as an additional channel for dialogue and debate, and that the transparency will serve to illustrate that we are all working towards the same goals of better government and improved services for our citizens.