The Endgame Looms Into View: eGovernment Moves into T-Government Strategy.

Today the Connected Cumbria platform is still in its infancy. It enables just a few online transactions; for example Highway Repairs and Abandoned Vehicles. It is, perhaps, a small start, but the partnership can argue that much of the hard work has been done. There is an effective [partnership] in place, and the technological platform, [Excelsior] is already established.

In Cumbria, the goals have been to tackle exclusion and to obtain best value from the information technology market. To these two objectives, perhaps a third can now be added. Cumbria is in pole position to make decisions about how local services might be reconfigured in the light of the transformation agenda, the Lyons Report and the forthcoming White Paper.

In short: if there is radical thinking to be done about the future organisational structures of local government, Cumbria is a good place to start!

Time will reveal where the Connected Cumbria Partnership leads. For now, let's just revisit the general debate about IT and modernisation. Let's have a look at some of the reasons why the new T-Government agenda affects the whole shape of local government. Once, commentators talked about eGovernment solely in relation to access to services. Now we all see that it is fundamental to the way in which these services are actually organised, and who delivers them. This is the essence of T-Government. Indeed, it can be argued that this technology renewal is the thread that connects together seemingly diverse agendas like Choice, New Localism, Gershon and Shared Services.

The key to all of this is to understand the magic of electronic information. The magic is that you can whiz it anywhere you like. And that it costs almost nothing to do so. This means that you can begin to unlock services from their traditional Town Hall settings and deliver them in new ways, in new configurations.

Take a simple example; a client's social work record. Most likely, in your authority these records sit in filing cabinets. The social workers, meanwhile, sit next to them. When a call comes in, or some work needs doing, doubtless, almost without thinking, the social worker reaches over to retrieve the file from the cabinet.

For how much longer?

With Electronic Social Care Records and other technologies like [Digital pen and Paper], you can pipe the information to anywhere you like. Perhaps your social workers don't work from the Town Hall anymore. Perhaps they work from home. Why not? Or, if you prefer, they might work from tiny neighbourhood offices, in amongst the houses where their clients live. They might occupy an office above the local charity shop on the High Street. They can enter or retrieve information from their cars, client's houses, youth centres and elderly care homes.

Remember, the magic is that you can whiz the information anywhere you like for almost no cost.
So you might do something about New Localism by allowing your social workers to work in those tiny High Street offices that we mentioned. And you might do something about Gershon and Shared Services by, at the same time, allowing procurement functions to be more centralised, with greater economies of scale. So, when your social worker needs to book accommodation, let's say for an elderly resident, she or he is able to access an Expedia like account (or a nice, friendly call centre if you prefer), that tells the social worker what is available and where.

And you might be really, really radical and do something about Choice, by allowing your social workers to work for different agencies (charities? co-operatives? themselves?) or companies. There will doubtless be many pros and cons. The point is that the magic world of electronic information allows it to happen, if you want it to.

And what goes for social workers, of course, goes for other services too. Let's say you start piping information about housing repairs directly to the cab of your repairs truck (like the roadside rescue companies do). Your housing repairs service might get a lot more efficient and much more timely for its customers. And you might start wanting to do more radical things as well, like sending the information to the cab of a truck that belongs to a neighbouring authority, if it can offer a better response time to a particular call.

How many bases have we touched? New Localism? Choice? Gershon? Shared Services?

As part of T-Government we can begin to talk about these possibilities. And actually, once we've talked about Social Work and Housing Repairs, it becomes difficult to think of a local authority function that won't, in some way, be touched by its potential.

The endgame looms into view.