Today I attended Newham's New Ways of Working Training for Managers, at Stratford Old Town Hall.

(This week, Newham's HR Service is the first to relocate to Building 1000. I understand all went smoothly from an ICT perspective!)


The top story in the weekly newsletter from our friends in PSF (Public Sector Forum), today, was "NI14 supplier playing field skewed by IDeA?"

This suggests the IDeA (Improvement & Development Agency) was unfairly advertising a single product to the detriment of its competitors in its official guide to National Indicator No. 14, and Socitm is implicated because of Socitm Insight's association with the product in question. We (in Socitm) were not consulted about the guide, and have some sympathy with the views PSF expressed. However, there were some factual inaccuracies in the story concerning Socitm and its Insight service, which have been addressed to PSF's Ian Dunmore. i.e.

1. Socitm Insight does not re-sell GovMetric and gets no sales or any other revenue from it.
2. What Socitm Insight has done is to package the GovMetric service with its own website take-up service and its new Channel Value Benchmarking service to provide a comprehensive offering around customer access improvement. By packaging GovMetric with our services we can signal to the marketplace that we are offering complementary, rather than competing, services.
3. Socitm Insight had very little involvement in preparation of the NI 14 guidance. A member attended one meeting on behalf of Socitm. In fact, we were surprised to see ourselves listed as a contributor.
4. Socitm Insight was as surprised as anyone else to see the GovMetric service mentioned in the way it was in the document.
5. Socitm Insight is mentioned once, in the list of contributors. The Customer Access Improvement Service - the umbrella under which Socitm is marketing the website take-up service, GovMetric and the Channel Value Benchmarking Service - is not mentioned at all.

To which I would add that Brent's e-Government Register, and Socitm's Application Software Index (which we are planning to merge) aim to list all available suppliers and solutions.

I got home at 6.30 - the first time, this year, that my being home early and good weather have coincided, so did an hour's gardening with Chris, then we dined al fresco, enjoyed a bottle of wine (breaking our resolve about not drinking mid-week) and sat outside chatting 'til late. Lovely!