Aide Memoire

You may remember that I’m an admirer of New York Times columnist, David Pogue. (In fact, now I thought of it, I’ve added a link to his Blog – “Pogue’s Posts”.) His most recent video is about a “memory tool” called “reQall”. I’ve got the world’s worst memory – especially when it comes to remembering things to do with my personal life that I need to do in the working day – make a Doctor/ Dentist appointment, book a car service, buy a present etc – so I’m giving ReQall a try.


Yesterday I met Richard Quarrell at the IOD Hub in New Broad Street, and discussed progress with the Psikey development. A new version of Psider (the tool to produce Pskey) is being produced by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at Southampton University, and will be available in a couple of weeks. The plan, then, is to test through the summer with a view to producing a production version in September. I’ll be meeting Paul Davidson and Ian Cooper, next week, and hope, with them, to identify prospective pilot sites. Richard will be at the Socitm National Spring Conference on 23rd April, which is where Richard Allan will be presenting on Government policy on reuse of information, and available to talk with interested parties about the project.


After lunch I went to 59 ½ Southwark Street for a Socitm/ Capital Ambition planning meeting, with Steve Pennant, Roland Waterhouse, David Tidey and Ray Whitehouse, for this year’s London Local Authority IT Benchmarking Survey. Many of the standard Socitm benchmark questions already align with the Authority-wide benchmark survey being developed by Capital Ambition (London’s RIEP), which is also developing a set of “Leading Practice Principles”. I suggested to Steve that CA looks at Socitm’s recent “What’s in a name?” report regarding suggested IT principles.

IT benchmarking is becoming more challenging in our converged and flexible world, and we recognised, also, the need to focus increasingly on benchmarking outcomes, rather than inputs. It was apparent that we can’t move very far in that direction this year, but agreed much of the work to be done for future years, and are looking at potential quick wins, this year, including whether we can include a Data Quality Survey based on the work led by Brent Council.


Since I’m very much concerned both with digital convergence and broadband wireless developments, this story, of Westminster City Council’s use of CCTV for traffic management, caught my interest, and will be interested to follow the outcome.