Two £38k Haringey Council Jobs Advertised for Haringey People

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on March 15, 2013 at 9:14

Hi Seema - sorry about the tech - the idea is to give residents a menu of choices when they're logged in to Haringey.gov.uk.  If you pay your electricity or gas online, it's like that - when you log in you get a range of choices.

I have mentioned it to a few people. I've been a consultant to large organisations for a while and guess that it's a strategic issue. Had no contact with them but I guess:

1) The IT department do not want to be beholden to the users when they employ a senior management layer to 'direct'.  

They're happy to run a paid survey every few years (I got £15 in vouchers for completing a 15 minute random one last year), providing they conduct it themselves and the results are secret, but they won't form a 'user group'.

If they were accountable to the users, they'd have residents influencing their agenda. As far as I can see, Council Officers in general want the protective layer of the politician between them and us, so that they can get on with the job without the time-consuming distraction of dealing directly with customers who all have different views, some of them decidedly loony.

2) They do not want to be examined and found lacking.

Within central government and further afield, there is a drive for 'open data' - after all, everything the govt knows about us belongs to us. Bit like a bank where it's our money on deposit, it's our data they fiddle with and we have a right to access it and know what they do with it.  

In the world of IT I inhabit, there is an 'open source' philosophy that has led to wide availability of free software (part of the 'gift' economy). In the beginning of widespread internet use, for instance, companies sold browsers like Internet Explorer for a few quid a copy. Now they're free and the 'open source' ones dominate because it's better to have a lot of 'eyes on the prize' than keep it all commercial.  

Councils all over the world, particularly in Europe, use many excellent free software packages to deliver services - Haringey does not as far as I know. It saves money not having to pay for software licences, but the real investment over the years has been in the training and experience officers have undertaken and they're the bugbear.

Whole systems depend on paid software.  So, for instance, if you were using Microsoft Word and your department had designed the letterhead and 100 other templates using it, set up a mailmerge system and had recently got into creating web pages, would you change to the free Open Office, which looks and feels very similar, will never cost you any money and is more powerful? People hate change!

How does an IT department deliver when they can't afford more employees? They hire private companies and use paid software packages, which ends up costing the same or often much more in money and time as going 'open source'.

The dip in productivity during the changeover risks a hailstorm if you work in an environment where short-term targets are insisted on so you stick with the 'old' way. You keep paying the software licence fees as usual. The consultants are great at seeing your vulnerability so encourage and endorse you to carry on in a 'chargeable' way - they want an income too and frighten you with a range of 'risks'. It eventually might lead to less consultancy and that's a risk too.

Look at the maps of Haringey LBH provide - awful, backward, almost unusable, a law unto themsleves. Prevents us rather than enables.  The whole sorry offer is mired in the sort of thinking that represents a culture that is hard to change.

Yet it did change - you used to have to go up there and look at them in person.  The triumph is in getting a centralised set of data - there are still departments not using them, so they're running several incompatible mapping systems. Like many large organisations  particularly those dominated by men in my experience, there are 'fiefdoms' that resist central control so, even if they wanted to, they find it very hard to get some departments to change.

How can they get out of this trap?  Crowdsource - use the strength and depth of our creativity and imagination to implement a mutually agreed range of services. It's possible to change things rapidly - we're used to it weather-wise :)

The 'crowd' are better and more resourceful than the solitary 'walled garden' departments but do not flourish if kept in the dark and fed manure (so-called 'mushroom' management).

A problem is that it's very easy for me to sound off, knowing few details of the reality and drawing on experience gained elsewhere. I can't afford to help the Council more than a little, can you? It's generally the well-off, middle class who volunteer and they end up feathering their own nests at the expense of the poor, don't they?  So, if LBH did move towards recognising the value inherent in us, we'd get excited then fade away, leaving the disadvantaged not much better off, wouldn't we?

Sorry for the verbosity - I like writing this stuff -helps clear my thoughts...

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Permalink Reply by Seema Chandwani on March 15, 2013 at 3:19

Apparently Haringey People has taken on board some of the improvements spoken about.... has anyone read a copy? 

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