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Local Government

Birmingham: a new model for city administration?

By James Smith | 10 July 2009

Glyn Evans is a man in a hurry. After 27 years of working in local government IT, he is now on the cusp of delivering the kind of transformation that has long been promised in local government, but rarely delivered.

“I think what we’re finally doing now about using technology to change organisations, we could have been doing throughout my entire career,” says Evans. “Only since getting to Birmingham do I feel that we are on the verge of success, and this is because the organisation recognises that this transformation is something it wants to do.”

The city, a past winner of the United Kingdom’s e-Government National Awards, aims to deliver £2 billion (US$3.3 billion) of benefits over the next ten years by radically shaking up how it manages its corporate services – such as procurement, business management and project management. At the same time a further £321 million (US$527 million) of benefits are to be delivered by the city’s ambitious ‘Customer First’ programme – which aims to deliver a unified approach to handling resident interactions across the 450 individual government services that the city council provides.

The obvious question is ‘how?’ The answer is through an unusual partnership with a hybrid consortium that pools private sector resources and yet keeps the council very closely involved in the delivery.

“We needed a partner for transformation to deliver these results, so I turned away from signing a technology focused contract. This led to a joint venture – ‘Service Birmingham’ – which is roughly two thirds Capita and one third Birmingham City Council,” Evans explains. “This arrangement gives us a lot more influence than a straight outsource, but perhaps more importantly it means that the council is more actively engaged as well.”

The role of Service Birmingham is to exclusively deliver all IT for the council. Key suppliers, such as SAP, Microsoft and Cisco, are directly handled by the joint venture. This frees Evans to address the organisational change aspects of the city’s plans.

Much of the financial benefits will accrue to the council by redesigning its approach to finance, procurement and project management – and through more timely and accurate information being provided to managers to monitor their resources. Here, as in its redesign of its citizen service delivery, SAP is a key partner.

Another change has been conceptual: the public sector obviously has no profit centres, only cost centres.

So the motive to save money is not the same. But by establishing Services Birmingham, the incentive to squeeze more value out of the city’s enterprise IT has been transferred.

“I think a critical success factor for us has been that we found the financial mechanism to invest in services,” Evans continues. “Previously people were focused on protecting their budgets, rather than protecting the services they were providing.”

Despite the progress to date, Evans still thinks it will take a further three years before the transformation agenda is firmly embedded.

The organisation can now see how IT can make a difference. But I always feel that I’m walking a tightrope. After all, you’re only ever one bad failure away from total failure!”

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