Investigating the figures behind the facts - The future of policing in Scotland - the one force model

"The projected long-term savings under a new structure are up to £154m a year, every year." (Scottish Government Spokesman quoted in Scotsman, 26 July)

I recently read some newspaper articles about the current political debate on merging Scotland's regional police forces into a single force. One figure kept on being quoted (without reference) and grabbed my attention. The £154m annual savings that would come from this change. Where did this figure come from?

The figure appears to come from the document: "Sustainable Policing Project, Phase Two Report: Options for Reform" (March 2011). This report presents an estimate of potential savings (p.55) which totals £153.9m.

But this figure is not the potential savings from restructuring from the current regional forces into one force: the table shows, to quote: "estimated efficiency potential within the various functions of policing if the Target Operating Model were to be adopted". The "Target Operating Model" is a model for operation which is independent of whether the force is 8 forces, regional forces or one force. To quote, "The majority of these efficiencies are achievable irrespective of structure" (p. 68).

£154m is the estimated savings that could come from other changes to the way that the police forces operate. Some of these savings are quoted as potentially taking up to five years to realise. "Efficiencies were calculated and validated using benchmark data" (p. 54) "from other forces (England and Wales) public and private sector (Industry Standard)", "by considering the potential impact of established and well tested levers, for example: management de-layering, process engineering, shared service economy of scale".

The quality of this report is very poor and the savings take no account of the cost of implementing change. Cosla is quoted (by Scotsman) as saying that a Scottish Government business case, "shows that Scotland would have to spend a whopping £230m (equivalent to 7,600 police officers] in start up and restructuring costs for a single force." I haven't been able to find this document, but it is quite possible that this is just the cost of merging to a single force and not the cost of implementing the "Target Operating Model". Remember, it is the Target Operating Model that is quoted as delivering the savings, not the change to a single force.

I am not interested in politics. I am interested in effective public services.

If the SNP are quoting £154m savings as justification for a single police force in Scotland then they are either badly mislead or badly misleading.

I sincerely hope that those with the power to influence this decision get their facts straight before they make a very costly mistake.

I am disappointed that the media in Scotland seem so keen to present political dispute that they have failed in their job of uncovering the true facts behind the story.

Reactions to the Christie report on future delivery of public services in Scotland (or "why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing")

Yesterday saw the publishing of the Scottish Government report "Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Services" chaired by Dr Campbell Christie. Despite presenting a radically different way of delivering public services, it has met with repeated media criticism that the report says nothing new or actionable. Damning with faint praise, the SNP Finance Minister, John Swinney, in a Newsnight television interview, indicated that the proposals were broadly in line with what the government was already doing.

So is this report 100 pages of predictable "Motherhood and apple pie" or is there some substance? If there is substance to this report, then why is the media unable to see it and why are contributors to the report uneasy to back it wholeheartedly?

Lacking substance?

It's clear why many people see this report as lacking substance. It doesn't provide specific steps on moving forward like saying that region X should merge it's 5 frontline services (1,2,3,4 & 5) into a single coordinated user facing service by May 2012.

But the reality is that this report was not commissioned to do this, nor did it have the capacity to get into that level of detail. Politicians know that the media like this kind of bite-size proposition and they are good at delivering them. We should think twice about criticising a report of this quality, depth and coverage for failing to feed the media.

The report presents and argues the case for long term focused strategies for delivering public services. These strategies may not appear radical on paper but the fundamental issue is that these are strategies that are completely different from what is happening today.

It doesn't matter that these individual proposal seem obvious. There is a reality gap between what most people see as obvious and what happens in practice every day. It is a scary truth that a large number of the people who deliver our public services are either working with systems that prevent them from doing the job they want and need to do, or are so isolated from the underlying purpose that they cannot see why they are failing to deliver value.

I shouldn't need to explain these things, because the report actually says them very well. But there is clearly a need to explain how this report will make a difference.

Making a difference

If the proposals and implications of this report are delivered then we will see a massive change in the delivery of our public services. The changes, whilst following common themes, will differ from region to region and service to service. They will be driven by the needs of the communities they serve and those needs vary dramatically across the country.

These proposals are based around service delivery and organisational change that have been tried and tested. If you need evidence then search the internet for some of the books or online video presentations of John Seddon whose company "Vanguard" has become synonymous with the practice of 'Systems thinking' in the UK public sector. Like him or loathe him, John Seddon has applied these principles throughout the UK and collected the evidence to demonstrate the results.

If you want something even more radical but closely aligned to this reports proposals of reducing organisational complexity, get your hands on the BBC Wales series, "Ban the Boss" and the work of Paul Thomas. His truly radical and fairly risky work in the public sector in Wales claims up to 300% increases in productivity. Yet, on paper his strategy of reducing "managers" could so easily be criticised as being nothing new and could, so easily be implemented in a way that delivers a disaster rather than reduced cost and improved service.

The problem

The problem is that most people who read this report have no idea how to implement the changes. These changes might as well be written in a foreign language or complex scientific notation.

Despite being in English, the language of much of the proposals of this report is the language of organisations, systems, complexity and change. This language draws us in to a false sense of understanding with terms that seem to make sense yet hold vast meaning beyond common usage.

Page seven of the report makes cursory reference to "failure demand" which is explained as "demand which could have been avoided by earlier preventative measures." That sounds so obvious and yet the topic of 'failure demand' is the subject of whole chapters if not whole books. It is neither an obvious concept nor one that is well understood or applied either in the public or private sector.

In other words, this report contains big ideas that are compressed into succinct and specialist language that should be fully understood by those who need to implement the proposals but could so easily be missed by the general public or journalists or indeed politicians.

Actions

So, how can these ideas be turned into action? The secret sounds simple. They need to be implemented by people who understand the ideas.

Changing organisations is not something everyone gets taught about at secondary school. Even those with management degrees will be lucky to have received any guidance at all on how to restructure organisations to reduce complexity. Yet, unless something radical happens, this report will be digested and actioned by people who have no specialist knowledge or experience in organisational change and systems thinking.

The Christie report is a radical report. But it's proposals will have little effect unless the government can find and appoint a large enough group of skilled individuals who have the capacity to assess regional issues and turn them into practical proposals. Those individuals need to be given the authority to ask questions and initiate change.

Conclusions

In summary:

• There is no point in trying to turn this into a standardised and centrally driven policy of change across Scotland. It needs to be driven at a local level.

• It has to be implemented by individuals who have been selected because they fully understand the organisational issues being presented not because they are "solid and reliable people who have delivered good reports in the past". This also excludes appointing a group of "management consultants" from some "safe" big brand consultancy.

• By delivering these policies locally the government benefits from spreading its risk. Not every plan will go according to plan. Some of the people chosen to drive change locally will not live up to expectations. But only fudging the facts or avoiding the issues will avoid this and the cost of doing nothing is far, far too high.

• If the government acted quickly they could have a handful of specialists in place by the end of August 2011. Acting locally with central backing they could provide the skills and energy to start delivering the first steps of change immediately.

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Postscript

There is clearly a large overlap in Scope between the Christie report and the last week's McClelland report on the ICT Infrastructure of the Public Sector. If the government is going to deliver joined up services then the proposals of these reports should be joined up too.

Response to Strategic Principles of McClelland Report "Review of ICT Infrastructure in the Public Sector in Scotland"

Apologies in advance for the length of this post. The post consists of the 12 proposed strategic principles of the McClelland Report with comments after each one.

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Direct comments and responses to the 12 Proposed Strategic Principles of the "Review of ICT Infrastructure in the Public Sector in Scotland":

"Although 'information management' is a core activity it is not essential to operate totally self-sufficient local information processing, support and development."

This statement on its own is irrefutable and I would be surprised if any public sector body was truly "totally self-sufficient". However, the implication of this 'strategic principal' within the McClelland report strongly argues the case against local 'in-house' knowledge. And the reduction of local in-house knowledge is a dangerous proposition that does need to be evaluated very seriously in each context.

In short, removal of or outsourcing of local ICT knowledge disempowers the local body from making choices or innovating around the use of technology and process. Given that innovation efficiencies come from local users this is paradoxically a recipe for inefficiency and waste.

At the end of the day skills and knowledge need to be located as close to where they are needed as possible. If local bodies need local skills to make efficient use of ICT and process then the skills need to be there.

"The number of data centres and associated support should be minimised."

Yes.

"The shared hosting of common applications delivers ICT savings and central and regional plans open up ICT and other shared business process service opportunities. The existing clusters of nearly common applications should be built upon by selecting the best single application implementation and associated business processes and then from there achieve a reconciling of and agreement on common business processes so that the number of separately hosted instances can be rationalised and reduced."

The first sentence here is fine and good. Shared hosting of common applications is good and coordination at the regional level to encourage or even mandate the use of shared common applications may well be the right thing to do. Moving staff from using Microsoft Office to using OpenOffice.org would be a classic example of appropriate mandated change as long as all genuine technical data exchange issues had been addressed in advance. Of course such a change has a change management cost which must be costed.

However, as soon as there is talk of trying to merge 'nearly common' applications or business processes the line has almost certainly gone too far.

It is true that organisations may have different processes and procedures for historical reasons and there may be no reason for them to be different. If the end users who are familiar with everyday use of such systems recognise this, even reluctantly, then there is probably a strong argument for merging the processes as long as the costings recognise that there may be a significant 'investment' cost associated with implementing that change process.

Unfortunately one of the commonest reasons for so-called IT disasters in the public sector is the attempt to merge processes that seem (at a distance) to be the same, but are (on close examination) different for good reason. Often the historical reason why different organisations do things differently is that there is something genuinely different about what they do!

Changes in processes are often introduced locally as innovations to reduce cost and increase efficiency. Good reasons why changes in processes can bring local efficiencies include: co-location with other services; the shape of buildings and how long it takes to carry out tasks; office design; shared vs person printers; shared vs personal terminals/computers; and security implications of public access to buildings on logon procedures.

There is nothing worse on staff moral or fundamentally stupid than forcing staff to change a locally efficient process to an inefficient one in order to conform to a standard way of working!

"A framework of oversight and governance for each part of the public sector and at an overarching national level is critical."

Yes, but it should not add layers of bureaucracy or oversee ICT in isolation from other issues which are always interconnected.

However, there must be mechanisms in place to allow innovation from the users. In other words, there must be an open communication channel from users to those who can instigate change.

"Co-ordination of interaction with the ICT industry within each sector and at a national level is essential and will be beneficial."

Yes. There is opportunity for procurement savings by ensuring co-ordinated interaction with suppliers and service providers. It is essential that public bodies have skilled ICT representatives involved in those interactions to ensure that best value is being obtained. There may be a case for involving SMEs as independent ICT advisors in these situations as SMEs tend to be more aware of technological change than public sector ICT departments or large private sector suppliers.

"Relationships with suppliers should have a stronger partnership element."

What does this mean? Many historical suggestions of strong partnerships with the private sector have become costly and anti-competitive relationships which have benefitted the suppliers at the expense of the public sector.

The public sector needs to establish relationships with suppliers that leave the buyer with ongoing control and choice. One of the best ways of doing this would be to ensure that all software development for the public-sector was based on open standards, publicly owned and open-sourced from day one. This would put the supplier under appropriate public scrutiny and enable a poorly performing supplier to be swapped out in favour of an alternative supplier if required.

"It should not be a given that investment in and ownership of ICT assets and capability such as systems development is the norm and all avenues including investment avoidance and transaction / usage based charging should be pursued."

Scotland has a particularly poor history of choosing to do its own thing when something perfectly good is already available to purchase 'off the shelf'. This 'not invented here' syndrome is something that needs to be rectified particularly in the primary and secondary education sector where recognition of Scotland's different education system has to be balanced with a recognition of its similarities.

The rapid growth in cloud based services or 'apps' also means that there are large areas of ICT usage which could be satisfied by 'transaction / usage based charging' models.

However, where systems are developed specifically for the public sector it is very dangerous to do so under an agreement that gives ownership to the supplier and leaves the public paying on a transaction / usage basis. Any system developed specifically for the public sector should be owned by the public.

"Citizen services and data should be seamless and integrated across public sector and should specially address the needs of the elderly, sick and other vulnerable groups which cross organisational boundaries."

It shouldn't be necessary to warn of the mistakes of projects as recent as the NHS National Project for IT. But history shows that the public sector has repeated these mistakes over and over again.

We must not embark on producing any "seamlessly integrated" system across the public sector.

The recognised way to address this need is to establish well defined data standards and protocols for transacting data between systems. Wherever possible these standards should be open standards because we should not be re-inventing them and we should be trying to benefit from re-use of systems that already exist.

Thankfully the NHS in Scotland has largely taken this approach already.

"Most of the required ICT capability is specialised by sector yet there are vital national dimensions and cross-sector imperatives."

Yes and open standards for data sharing should be a big part of the mechanism for addressing this.

"Order of merit should be to first re-use, then buy and build only as a last resort. Existing initiatives and exemplars should be built upon and have their capabilities extended through free sharing with others."

Free sharing could be transformational on the public sector. But this should, wherever possible, be public sharing not just sharing privately between organisations.

Firstly, unless software used by the public sector is made publicly visible and accessible, organisations will find it hard, if not impossible to identify the opportunities for re-use.

Secondly, only through public sharing will the public sector benefit from the untapped resources of SMEs and crowd sourced public individuals.

Open sourcing public sector software massively lowers the barriers for competition from SMEs as it enables them to compete with incumbent providers and enables them to pro-actively offer services tailored specifically to the technical needs of the public sector.

"New technologies and concepts be pursued especially where they can reduce investment and support other efficiency and sustainability goals."

This is a good goal but the original 'strategies' above would all but prevent innovation and the use of new technologies.

"The negative impacts of and positive opportunities from effective ICT on the environment should be addressed and pursued."

Thankfully a focus on cost reduction in ICT tends to naturally deliver environmentally beneficial outcomes.

Shared ICT services are a recipe for holding back change

Today I've been reading John McClelland's report, "Review of ICT Infrastructure in the Public Sector in Scotland". Published by the Scottish government today, the work was started in 2010 at the request of the Scottish Government Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Sustainable Growth.

There's plenty to comment about in this report but I'll focus very briefly on one important point. But first a quote from the report:

"Shared deployment of ICT will reduce ICT cost and deliver savings in costs within individual public sector bodies. However, it can also, by being shared, provide a platform for additional efficiency and savings across multiple public bodies. The establishment of shared hosted information systems, commonly used across multiple organisations makes it very much easier to also share the resources and skills needed to operate other business processes. In this way shared ICT deployment unlocks the gate to shared services opportunities in other operations and processes." (section 4.2)

It is true that the sharing of flexible and completely industry standard infrastructure can help to reduce costs and reduce duplication.

Beyond that, organisations are not the same. So the sharing of services is not about sharing the same thing it's about making organisations work the same way whether it makes sense at the local level or it does not. The cost of making this massive organisational change may completely outweigh any apparent short term savings in ICT procurement. The long term process inefficiencies of forcing different organisations to work in the same way may introduce costs that also outweigh any ICT maintenance savings moving forward.

In short, there can be no assumption that shared deployment of ICT will reduce ICT cost.

The biggest problem

But the biggest problem with shared services seems to be the least understood:

Sharing services in the ways commonly understood in the public sector, lead to tight process dependencies between already huge government organisations. These dependencies, instead of helping to deliver change, actually act to constrain future change.

To put it simply. If you force two organisations to use the same core processes and the same central ICT system, then any future changes in process must be implemented in both organisations at the same time.

Government IT - central government and misunderstanding efficiencies of scale

Last week, the Commons Select Committee on the Use of IT interviewed Local and Central Government departments and the largest supplier to government which also was the only large supplier willing to take part as a ‘public’ witness. This week they questioned the government minister but I haven’t got round to watching that yet as the video stream requires me to watch in real time and be physically in front of a computer with the appropriate plugins installed. I would have preferred to be able to watch it at double time on the bus!

The local government representatives, though they may not be representative, largely demonstrated an understanding and engagement with issues even if, in one case, they found it hard to express that in ways that could be understood by the committee.

Central government departments

The representation from the central government departments gave me considerable cause for concern. If I were responsible for their current projects I would be asking lots of questions. Here are a number of the comments that rang warning bells:

1. 60% of the current project is being done in an agile way, the other 40% (core infrastructure) is not.
2. “legacy systems are not suitable for agile”
3. The advantage of using an existing supplier is that you can re-use skills and people and existing knowledge.

For clarity, I should explain why these rang warning bells:

1. One of the key benefits of agile is the ability to deliver a very early release of a product ‘end-to-end’ within a short time-scale. The act of doing this de-risks a project immensely and the act of failing to do this is a much less expensive way of discovering that something is wrong! You can’t deliver an end-to-end early release if the core infrastructure is not part of the system. So, there may be apparently valid reasons why this project cannot be 100% agile, but those reasons, or the decisions made in response are a sign of a problem.

2. It simply isn’t true that legacy systems aren’t suited to agile management / development techniques. In many respects, renewing (‘refactoring’) legacy systems is a task that benefits hugely from the principles of agile. In particular, agile provides skills and techniques for reducing the cost of change and one of the big problems with legacy systems is their cost of change. So, this quote, from one of the key leaders in the public sector, tells me that they simply do not understand what ‘agile’ means or can do.

3. Continuity is clearly a great way of retaining knowledge and skill. I think government should be doing a lot more to retain skill and I think procurement practices tend to enforce the throwing away of knowledge and skill, ultimately at the expense of the public who pay for everything. But you cannot, on the one hand claim to be running a procurement process that is even handed and at the same time argue that re-using the same supplier enables you to re-use skills, people and existing knowledge.

Integration, centralisation and efficiencies of scale

Anyway! All of these evidence sessions to date have thrown up enough material to write a book which is why it’s taken me another week to write anything coherent.

But, I’ve been saved because this week I reached page 57 of the “Written Evidence” document - the submission of Andrew Hardie which very effectively expresses my views on almost everything. To be honest, this is quite disconcerting at first, but also very encouraging as writing has never been my strong-point! To quote one of his points which I agree with wholeheartedly but which is a point made by few if any of the other contributers:

Perhaps, the greatest fallacy in both government and private sector ICT systems implementation is that greater systems integration is the answer. It isn’t. The more tightly you couple ICT (or, indeed, any) systems together, the greater the speed, range and impact of problems and side-effects become and the harder it is to change the resulting monolithic systems, precisely at the time when ever greater agility is needed.

There is a constant push to standardise systems in government to obtain ‘efficiencies of scale’ through more efficient procurement or through the wide use of identical software. This push for standardisation and efficiency almost always results in a decision to roll out a massive IT project. The conversation appears to go something like this:

A: We mustn’t have any more huge IT projects that cost too much and go wrong.

B: I totally agree.

A: Okay, so how are we going to reduce costs in IT projects.

B: Well, we are aware that there are lots of departments re-inventing the wheel with different IT systems that do fundamentally the same thing. We need to standardise the systems they are using and cut the outrageous costs of this duplication which is caused principally by a failure of communication between departments. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing!

A: Yes, I totally agree. It’s shocking!

B: Okay, so lets set up a project to consolidate all the systems together into one standard system.

A: Fine. Go ahead!

Yes, in the course of a few sentences they have moved from deciding not to have a huge IT project to setting up a new one, yet the flaw in the argument seems hard for government to spot!

There are all sorts of costs of complexity associated with interactions with people. Very rarely do multiple departments actually do the same thing. When you try to bring everything they do together into one system you typically end up with a system that is far too complex or a system that doesn’t meet the needs of the people you are producing it for.

The fundamental flaw in the argument above is the belief that different departments are actually doing precisely the same thing. In reality, if you talk to the users, you will find lots of differences in need and use and common practice. If you want to make the users more efficient at doing their work then you need the system to be tailored to their need not imposed on them from above.

The more complex flaw is that they criticise the departments for not communicating without recognising the additional cost and complexity introduced by requiring departments to communicate with each other! Failure to communicate is a cheap argument that is almost guaranteed to be accepted as grounds for criticism. But communication takes time and we almost universally suffer from too many meetings and not enough doing.