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The ICT Professional: Geoff Connell, Newham and Havering

Posted by admin on Mon, 06/09/2010 - 08:09
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For most people, one job trying to run the ICT for one of the most poverty-stricken boroughs in London would be enough. But for Geoff Connell, Divisional Director ICT for Newham, there's the added 'bonus' of managing the problems of the nearby borough of Havering.

“Economies of scale make it feasible and achievable,” he explains, a reasoning that rings true given Connell's proven track record in shared services, increasingly touted by CIOs as possible tactical response to the forthcoming public sector cutbacks. 

Connell is a past master, spearheading initiatives as chairman of Capital Ambition’s East London Shared Services Solutions which promotes collaborative working between East London Boroughs, with the tagline of 'London acting as London’. 
 
This East London initiative has scored some significant success, delivering  an impressive £391 million of efficiencies to date, according to the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy. And that's only the start: that figure should rise to £638 million  by 2014-15. 
 
Add to that the fact that East London boroughs should be set to benefit from massive inner city regeneration thanks to the 2012 Olympics and the £15 billion Thames Gateway project and you might think that despite the age of austerity, Newham and Havering should be pretty well set up. 
 
But say 'Newham' to the average Londoner in 2010 and the chances are they'll talk about poverty – and not without reason. With an ethnically diverse  population of over a quarter of a million people speaking over 100 different languages, Newham sadly boasts some of the worst urban poverty in the UK. 

Share and share alike
 
That said, Newham’s ICT infrastructure was in pretty good shape when Connell accepted his twin brief, winning a raft of awards for self service and consistently high customer satisfaction rating. Havering on the other hand was rather less well-positioned. “Most of its ICT was very old-fashioned, way past its sell by date, and there was no way it could deliver the transformational objectives,” says Connell.
 
When Havering lost its director of transformation and was seeking an interim director, Connell put a business proposal to the board and CEO. He argued that by investing the earmarked resource to migrate Havering to the same platform as Newham and creating the shared services umbrella under one head of IT, then economies of scale would soon deliver savings.
 
He adds: “They agreed to the plan so both boroughs are now on a single, enterprise architecture. It was a rapid upgrade journey, very rapid, but it was relatively low risk since we’d pretty much done it all before at Newham.”
 
With the looming public sector cutbacks, having an established shared services structure in place could give Newham and Havering a buffer against some of the pain that many other boroughs will lack. Certainly Connell sees joint procurement, implementation and maintenance as a critical enabler towards achieving savings across the current £20 million ICT budget.
 
“Increasingly we look at joint procurement to cut costs. If one buys, the other one uses. For instance we’ll buy our Microsoft products across both boroughs and then we get significantly higher discounts as well. The whole process is much more cost-effective,” says Connell.  “Not only is the procurement cheaper and discounts significantly higher because of banding but we have an increased ability to maintain the systems at reduced costs.
 
“I’d love to see how far we can develop the shared services agenda,” he adds, although he strikes a note of caution based on a fear of diminishing returns.  “I know that two works extremely well but five may be too many, three  may be too many since so much depends on the individual set ups and cultures. Maybe we’ll see what we’re doing here with shared services become a centre of excellence for the whole of London. We’re still in largely uncharted territories and the economies of scale are unknown.”
 
But he is certain of one thing: local government ICT is where the frontline for innovation and recovery is at the moment. “Increasingly, I get the feeling that central government IT is shutting down,” he argues. “It’s in the local authorities that we’re seeing the major, transformational thinking and investments. It’s also incredibly rewarding to get things right for local people.”