Fresh (?) from a CRM Experience Sharing Workshop in Newcastle I’m surprised at the lack of knowledge in the local government community about the future of the national projects. (Or perhaps, what future?).

While there may have been all sorts of problems with some of the projects, and some aspects of others, the concept itself was a good one. Get local authorities working together on shared solutions. This has produced some successes. As much as anything, it has encouraged a learning curve about technologies and their impact on organisations, interactions and transactions. A lot of people in local government now know a lot more about the capabilities of technologies. I don’t think this would have happened on the same scale without the national projects.

Some of examples from today’s workshop were almost apocraphyl, had they not been true. In one case, a central government department refusing to provide joint service with a local authority because of ‘the risk factor’ (?).

There will be many other examples like this. How this ties up is this - the national projects were a step in the right direction - technologies can be used to centralise information in core databases and so on, and then the same technologies can be used to distribute that information to many people, using different devices and across geographically large areas. It makes sense for local authorities to procure a lot of systems jointly - the Staffordshire CRM, the Durham CRM procurement and implementation are both examples of this.

But how much is there a political will to support this type of joint procurement from national government? It will be interesting to see how the announcement that the e will be dropped (drop an e?) from ‘e-government’ will be interpreted by local authorities.

At the very least it would be helpful for the ODPM to make an official announcement (if they know the detail) on what the future of the national projects will, or will not be.

One final point - and this is by no means a criticism of the local authorities involved today - but not one of the councils represented had done any usability testing on their websites with either citizens or staff.