7 October 2002

Getting your Chief Executive Involved (and the rest of the organisation) in the IEG process

By Bob Breakey, eGovernment Manager Hertfordshire County Council

In local authorities up and down the country, minds are presently focused on producing IEG2 statements. The Chief Executive's (and members') support for the process is clearly critical. Without it, the fundamental changes that need to happen for councils and their citizens to reap the full benefits of "e" will be much harder to bring about.

In Hertfordshire County Council, the Chief Executive - Bill Ogley, has been more than on board from the start. Indeed, on his arrival in Hertfordshire, he launched a wide-ranging programme of organisational and cultural change before the term "e-government" became common parlance. A whole organisation review called "Herts Connect" was launched in 1997 aimed at improving connections between the council and its citizens, its partners and also between staff in the different departments. "e" was very much a part of this programme. E-government is now used as a vehicle for driving ambitious change programmes throughout the organisation to deliver more customer-focused services.

Bill's starting point was simple - he began by asking the question "how could services be improved?" The fundamental changes that followed, including the integration of Social Services and Education (the first council in the country to do so) and re-aligning services around the citizen were all focused on improving services built upon sound business cases. In 2002, five years after Herts Connect was conceived, everyday changes within the organisation are now common place.

Herts Connect ensured that Hertfordshire was already well down the road towards achieving its 2005 targets and the Chief Executive has continued to lead and influence the improvements in services that have been delivered. Clearly, a change programme of this scope needs senior managers, staff and members on board as well, so, how has this been achieved in Hertfordshire?

From the outset, the drive of the political leadership was empowering for the managerial leadership of the council and a strong working relationship and shared vision between the Leader and the Chief Executive was critical to success. Strong emphasis was placed on delegating responsibility to managers so that elusive quality "leadership" through ownership of responsibility was spread across the organisation.

The role of the e-champion has proved valuable in this context and HCC took the time and effort to define the role and responsibilities of an e-champion and then nominated senior people (normally at Assistant Director level) to perform this role and to play an influential part in managing the programme of change. A Director (of Community Information) was appointed to be directly responsible for the change process and to act as lead officer e-champion.

While it is always useful to be able to identify those responsible when targets or deadlines are not met, HCC feels that the e-champion role should be an altogether more positive experience. Senior staff will be happier performing this role if they don't feel that the whole weight of responsibility for transforming the council has been passed to them.

However, these senior staff are in a unique position to be able to push things forward and address obstacles and barriers to change. In Hertfordshire, they are expected to:

	·	Champion all aspects of the e-government change agenda at their management team meetings and challenge existing practices and culture
	·	Promote e-government at every opportunity
	·	Ensure that their department uses the Customer Services Centre and web (and other e-access channels) effectively
	·	Promote the concept of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) and encourage this to happen around the key processes in each department
	·	Address staff training needs and assess how ready staff are for delivering services electronically or in partnership with other agencies (e-skills). In addition, to feed back where it's not happening
	·	Highlight internal change management issues and work to remove barriers to change
	·	Approve their respective department's performance, plans and activities with the e-government manager for the IEG statements
	·	Develop e-delivery with external partners
	·	Bring forward business cases for new investment
	·	Attend national and regional e-champion network events

The role played by members is, as was mentioned above, also crucial. Fortunately, in the e-government context, the political leadership in Hertfordshire County Council has been prepared to take risks while focusing on the experience of the customer. Politically brave decisions were taken in the early days, such as the integration of Social Services and Education, and the emphasis on telephone and web contact to complement traditional face to face contact giving citizens more choice and flexibility.

A members' e-government panel oversees the implementation and monitoring of the "Gateway" (the Customer Services Centre, web site and digital television service) as well as the overall implementation of e-Government across the county council. The panel members effectively track progress towards 2005 challenging and encouraging where appropriate. The Cabinet member e-champion attends the panel meetings and so member, officer and cabinet focuses are all combined in one forum.

Is Hertfordshire substantially different to other authorities? Perhaps the most significant thing that has enabled Hertfordshire County Council to sustain the momentum since 1997 is that staff at all levels within the organisation have the same vision. With the help of the e-champions (officers and members) this has permeated throughout the organisation. The importance of collective involvement and bottom-up planning cannot be underestimated.

By challenging professional practices along with the "silo" culture, processes have been re-engineered based on necessity or cost-effectiveness.

A large proportion of the county council's IEG2 will describe the innovative partnership project involving the other local authorities in Hertfordshire funded by Local Government Online. Citizens will soon be able to access a whole range of public services through whichever access channel they choose - a "one stop shop with many doors." Importantly, they won't have to decide which tier of council provides the service they need. In future, they will receive the same service whichever point in the wider Hertfordshire network of council information points, kiosks, web sites, or call centres they choose to contact.

The Chief Executive's approach is relatively relaxed and he strives to be personally visible and accessible to council staff. This approach neatly characterises the council's wider approach to change: the emphasis has been to deliver real service improvements, rather than to create a story around the work being done. Improving services, sound business cases, business as usual!!