Local track record
Local government generally has a very good track record in technology adoption and also in pooling and sharing expertise and intellectual property. The old LGCSB provided technical leadership and the new LGMA pulls all of the various strands together. The Local Government Reform Act and the ‘Putting People First’ agenda will combine to accelerate progress, says Tim Willoughby, chief technology officer of the LGMA and veteran ICT guru in the sector. “The mergers that are happening with fewer local authority bodies — we are amalgamating 114 town councils, for instance — are creating their own workloads but also offers many opportunities to introduce new efficiencies. A good example on a national basis is the Building Control Management System, accessible though the www.localgov.ie portal to facilitate the owners of buildings and their professional partners in conforming to the building control regulations. This gives a single form and single process no matter which local authority is concerned. Technically this is supported by a single back end, a shared service run through the LGMA for all of the authorities.”
A good example of new efficiencies on a national basis is the Building Control Management System, accessible though the www.localgov.ie portal to facilitate the owners of buildings and their professional partners in conforming to the building control regulations. This gives a single form and single process no matter which local authority is concerned. Technically this is supported by a single back end, a shared service run through the LGMA for all of the authorities, Tim Willoughby, LGMA
Another important element of the smart new BCMS, Willoughby says, is that “The whole thing, soup to nuts, is all open source. This is following a trend that has been running across the sector since 2009 when we all agreed that the licensing costs for a lot of our software resources were an excessive drag on very tight budgets.”
Through its technical work on the Non-Principal Private Residence, Household Charge and Protect Our Water schemes, LGMA has built up a substantial set of skills and services in working with local authorities at a national level of shared services. “The www.localgov.ie portal is another example in that there is a fully featured XML catalogue which all local bodies now draw on as they re-develop their own web sites.”
Primary ICT systems like email and finance are still run at a local level for the most part, Willoughby explains. “But with shared services their payroll operations are central, their planning is local but now the BCMS is national, and there is a lot of natural mixing going on. Disaster recovery, for example, is very often in coordination between neighbouring authorities. It has to be said, having no money is a wonderful incentive. We had a Canadian colleague visit a few years back whose mantra was ‘We have no money, therefore we must think!’ It is actually a great driver to be always asking ‘Is there a different way we could do this?’ At the national level, the vision is very simply shared services. First we share ICT and investment, then there would be a natural progression to sharing experience and staff also. So for example, Laois County Council is the lead authority in payroll processing nationally and we expect that the same model will work with other shared central systems.”
All of our interviewees spoke of eGovernment as a journey, with a long way to go. That is a common but nonetheless true cliché in respect of things in ICT, from personal computing to virtualisation to cloud and certainly Big Data. But technology journeys do not have a destination, just points along the way. How will we know when we have got somewhere, at least? To paraphrase what the futurologist Ray Hammond said a long time ago about e-commerce, we will know eGovernment has arrived when we drop the ‘e’.
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