As a senior executive or Board member it is obviously impossible to know everything that is going on in your organisation – but how can you be as sure as you can that your phone hacking moment is not around the corner?  Having that confidence relies upon active management of the organisation’s culture.  Culture, like products, people, technology, brand and infrastructure, is core to what makes a business tick, and yet few businesses understand what drives it and how it is impacting on performance. Still fewer think and plan for how improving their culture will help improve performance. 

What happens when you do plan for and manage a good culture?  Our work with our partners Walking The Talk (www.walkingthetalk.com) has taught us that active culture management links directly to improved results and lower business risks.  Customers (often at the receiving end of poor cultures) will remain loyal, good people will choose to come and work for you and the employees you value will be more likely to stay.   We see a very strong correlation between long-term corporate success stories and close attention to culture – just ask executives in organisations like GE and Virgin.

Put like this, it all seems so obvious, and yet there are still very few businesses who see planning and managing culture as a key building block to corporate success.  This is probably because it is too easy to see it as something soft and intangible – but in reality, like anything else, it can be understood, changed, and managed as an integral part of running the business.

So let’s start with what culture is.  The definition we use with WTT is that culture is the patterns of behaviour, by people and systems, that are encouraged or discouraged over time. It’s the messages we send through what we do, how we work, how we organise ourselves and a host of other symbolic ways, all of which say something about what is valued, what is important and what people must do to fit in, be accepted, be rewarded and be promoted.  It’s not what people say – it’s what they do.    It’s the ‘walk’ as well as the ‘talk’.

Culture starts with leaders – if we don’t walk the talk then we cannot expect anyone else to.    This can often mean we have to change – and as how we behave is so driven by how we feel and what we believe it is at this level that we need to start.   WTT’s model HAVE/DO/BE helps us understand how this works.

It is common for businesses to focus on what they HAVE – or want to have, without really paying attention to what they DO and how this impacts results.  Still less do they have a real grasp of what the organisation wants to BE – and yet intuitively we know that in any organisation, behaviour (and loyalty) is driven by what people believe and value, how they feel and what level of consciousness and awareness they have about the culture and their working environment.

Through 20 years of work in the field of culture change, WTT have identified six cultural archetypes – achievement, customer centric, innovation, greater good, one team, people first.  It would be an odd organisation that didn’t have elements of all of these, but one or two archetypes are usually the real drivers – and leaders need to think carefully about which ones they want to encourage to improve performance and reduce risk.    This can be depicted graphically:

Culture can be consciously influenced and changed – it is about assessing what you have now, defining what you want to change it to and understanding the levers to do so. These are usually a combination of how the top team thinks and behaves (always crucial), people development, workplace design, process & performance management, and internal and external relationships and communication.    This understanding enables culture to be planned and managed, underpinned by appropriate mechanisms to measure what is achieved.  We do it for all the other cornerstones of business success – technology, infrastructure, people, brand.  It is high time that it became the norm to do it for culture as well.

So, could the News Corp story have been different? Of course it could.  News Corp seems to been driven by one clear and overriding mantra: get the story, whatever the cost – a clear example of a culture focussed on achievement to the detriment of people or the greater good.    Senior managers – and non-Executive Directors – could have developed the tools and processes to understand the costs and risk of operating such an unbalanced culture.  They could have used this understanding to ensure that, whilst keeping ahead of the newspaper market they also changed the way they worked – for example in how senior people provided role model behaviour, the style and content of communication and the way in which performance was managed and rewarded.

Ignite, a change and innovation consultancy based in London, helps its clients to achieve breakthroughs in improving performance and resolving challenging business issues.  Ignite works in partnership with Walking the Talk to enable clients to develop and sustain cultures that secure improved business outcomes and reduced risk.

To explore how to transform the management and planning of culture in your organisation contact Tim Connolly (07860 585242) or Megan Meredith (07429 184350) at Ignite –  timconnolly@ignite.org.uk

• A retrospective on what 2010 brought – the events, mishaps and surprises.
• A look forward to 2011 – predictions and forecasts of what will take the world by storm and what, specifically, CIOs will need to be able to grapple with.

We’re well into 2011 now, so here’s our take on what we think the year has in store for senior IT executives, but with a twist.  We aren’t technologists; our focus is on what it takes to extract value from technology , and what we believe 2011 will bring is an increasingly loud and clear call for CIOs to go beyond project delivery and ‘keeping the lights on’ – into the whole arena of business value.  We see more and more evidence that senior management teams are waking up to the fact that delivering technology projects to time and budget is only part of the story.  More and more emphasis is rightly being placed on what you need to do to get value from the system long after the project team has gone away.

Will your IT team surprise you this year?

One of those media predictions for 2011 includes these words: “the IT group, more than other departments, understands how the company works, touching, as it does, every function…..The less you see IT by itself, the more successful we’re being.”  What a great opportunity for the IT function to demonstrate to their colleagues the role they can play in delivering benefits for the business as a whole.

Here are three ways we think the CIO or senior IT manager has an opportunity to make their presence felt in 2011.

1. Focus on benefits from the very beginning.  Most business-IT partnerships start this way, but as the pressure to deliver the project intensifies, the object of the exercise becomes meeting go-live deadlines rather than what it will take to deliver the business case.  Have a clear vision, with measures that will tell you when you’ve got there, communicate and engage people in it, and don’t compromise on what it takes to deliver them.  Running late against the plan may seem like a nightmare when you’re accountable for the plan, but facing up to the executive team or board when the completed project has failed to deliver the planned benefits is far more likely to damage the business – and your career.
2. Think like your users, and draw them into your change project.  It goes without saying that assessing and working on the impacts of change from a technology project is core to the change manager’s toolkit.  The savvy IT manager will use this approach too.  If the IT team really does know the business inside out, then it has a great opportunity to help the business understand for themselves what a new set of systems might bring them.
   This might mean that you are positioned as technology gurus, highlighting for pressed business users the ‘art of the possible’, so that you can support them to make it work in ways that will deliver value for them.  Or you might take the approach of one of the large newspaper organisations who recently implemented a new HR system for line managers.  They looked at what would promote usage of the system and designed a front-end that closely resembled the iPhone and other Apple applications.  Only by thinking like their users and actively engaging them in what would work for them, could they boost the chances of long-term value creation.
3. Surprise the business with the insights you bring.  In business, we tend to think surprises are a bad thing, but perhaps in 2011 we can turn that around.  One of the large confectionery companies in the UK has been running a major social media campaign.  Marketing, Sales and IT have been working closely together to make sure that consumers can access websites and Twitter without a hitch, building a loyal community of fans for their brands.  So far, so good – as far as business-IT partnership working is concerned.  What has been surprising is the wealth of consumer information that the IT team has been able to deliver.  For marketing and sales teams accustomed to laborious research processes, access to real-time information on what consumers are talking about, what’s valuable to them, and what they want to see, has enabled a much faster and more creative response.  Market share is rising and there’s a newfound level of respect for what each partner can bring to the common endeavour of product profile and profitability

So those are three of our top pieces of advice for the CIO keen to have an impact on the business in 2011.  At Ignite, we work with leaders in IT and across the business to focus on that common objective – building business value.

But is the process of enabling the community to do more for itself just a polite way of dressing up a service cut. At Ignite we would argue not – what is important is using the scarce resources of the council to deliver outcomes for the community.

Building the capacity of the community also needs to go hand in hand with the sensible management of expectations of what the council will do and what the community – and individuals within it – need to take responsibility for.

We recently were told about a level of dependency that had built up around antisocial behaviour on a council estate.  Minor , first time transgressions, were picked being up by the council and treated as full blown cases.  One neighbour throwing sandwiches onto a garage roof on a sunny Sunday afternoon really required a quiet conversation between neighbours rather than the full weight of the council anti-social behaviour team.  It turned out that 60% of cases could be handled at point of contact with a little advice and management of expectations rather than being turned into cases. A dependency and false expectation had developed that needed to be reversed.

But how can community capacity and a sense of responsibility be built:

• Community forums, e.g. tenancy committees , are a great way of allowing the community to self manage its affairs
• Capacity building programmes that enable this self management to thrive are an important part of the story and enable the council to get greater leverage from their resources, e.g. developing local mediation skills to unblock local disputes
• Allocation of budgets to community groups builds another layer of responsibility – even to the extent that any unused budget can be retained and invested in specific community projects.
• Community incentives to get involved are now evolving rapidly – points schemes for community participation that result in a reduction in council tax are now becoming a reality

Councils can also smooth the path for many segments of the community to access limited services and to prevent communities needing the help in the first place:

• Providing better information and self serve facilities that mean that communities do not need to access services in the first place
• Joining up with community partners, e.g. ensuring that Citizens Advice Bureaus are supported and signposted for debt advice to prevent potential homelessness cases
• Improving access, recognise constraints and using the community to share in the support of the vulnerable

There is much can be done and there is evidence to suggest that breaking the habit of dependence reaps rewards beyond the reduction in demand and associated cost savings.

This article is the foiurth in the series of blogs written for district local authorities on “Responding to the Comprehensive Spending Review” – Follow the series…

So it is with managing change.  Engage/Engage/Engage, but not necessarily in that order.

Anyone who has attempted to manage change that does not have the support of the organisation knows that it is like pushing jelly uphill.  You can’t keep it all together and any progress seems to slip through your fingers.

The answer is to engage customers, stakeholders and people in the organisation.  It is critical to gain a consensual understanding of the challenge and the need to resolve it, access the practical experience, brainpower and ideas of people involved and to win support for making the change happen.

This is only possible through engagement; honest, open, authentic and multi-way dialogue. 

In our experience people are not daft; they recognise a real challenge, they already know what is working and not working in the current way of delivering services and they typically have a pretty good idea about how things could improve.  What they generally lack is a voice; the environment to contribute, the framework for making sense of their ideas and the confidence that their contribution is being heard and respected.

Big challenges need focus, energy and support.  Engaging those affected by any change will build that and generate a momentum that will carry you through to implementation.  Once harnessed this momentum is hard to stop and you will find advocates emerging from the most unlikely places. We were recently running a workshop redesigning a brave new future with 30 people from the “front line” in street services.  One of the participants sidled up to me and called me to account – “don’t let us down – we have really put ourselves into this – make sure it actually happens!” When a leader hears that sentiment from his workforce it can only build confidence and reinforce their determination to deliver change – in the knowledge that they are not a lone voice and have support.

We are consistently heartened to find that widespread engagement of customers, stakeholders and staff will deliver far more radical change than managers will ever come up with. When you hear – as we recently did – a customer telling us that the very thing that the managers were trying to preserve had no value then managers have no choice – they have to get on and deliver!

So, don’t be afraid of what you might hear.  It can be a revelation and unexpectedly positive. Engage/Engage/Engage; be authentic, trust in your customers, stakeholders and staff and prepare to take a year off your implementation plan.

This article is the third in the series of blogs written for district local authorities on “Responding to the Comprehensive Spending Review” – Follow the series…

 Local authorities now have an extra layer of clarity. The general consensus seems to be that at 28% the cuts are slightly less painful than the worst expectations.  What came as a nasty surprise was that the cuts are to be front loaded. Whatever the interpretation – it is time to act.

Being bold is a core value at Ignite so it is not too surprising that we encourage clients to follow the mantra. But what does it mean in practice to be bold and how do you convert the sentiment into something tangible.

We liken it to quitting your job and setting up your own business. The moment you make the decision to draw a line and part with the past is the moment when a huge burden is lifted.  Your focus immediately shifts to the design of a very different future – ideas start to flow and people around you become engaged with the creation of something special. Anyone who has done it will tell you how liberating it can be.

So it is with fundamental change.  It is really hard to keep tweaking the current model – it will drag you back and become exhausting, with no significant gain.  Better to conceive a very different model and way of working and challenge the organisation to help shape it, put it in place and make it work for the people who want to stay around and work that way.

We were recently working with a group of planning officers on a new model of working.  We posed the question. How much of your current work do you really enjoy and feel adds value to the community.  The answer was about 10%. This was a telling insight into the latent potential for a group of people to fundamentally redesign what they do around things that really add value and that really utilises their unique skills and talents.

At Ignite, we focus on how to quickly engage people in the design of radically different models of working – focussed on what the community needs and what will really energise the people working in the organisation.  What we forget is that people in public service generally have a core ethos that is about serving the community. We find that tapping into this ethos really helps people lift themselves out of the mire of the current model and focus on what is right for the community.  The implications on the organisation and people in it tend to take on a different light when this broader context is taken as the lead.

We know that being bold is not straightforward so we have developed the techniques that help convert the sentiment into tangible proposals that win the support of people in the organisation and that genuinely live up to the label – BOLD.

This article is the second in the series of blogs written for district local authorities on “Responding to the Comprehensive Spending Review” – Follow the series…

For years, it has been commonplace to refer to the triumvirate of Finance, HR and IT as the ‘back office’, a label that carries connotations of activities being conducted in the murky depths of the building, kept well out of the reach of the outside world.  Increasingly, though, this description has become less and less fitting until now, it is – or should be – plain wrong.  And nowhere is this more true than in IT.

In varying ways and with many different twists and turns, the role and position of IT has followed a broadly recognisable route in most organisations.  Historically, as technology became integral to business operations, its primary focus was on enabling those operations to be conducted in more efficient and productive ways.  As labour gave way to technology, error rates could be reduced, turnaround times improved and output increased.  That was the story for many years – and in a lot of cases, it still is.  This year’s annual “State of the CIO” survey carried out in North America by the CIO Executive Council found that a third of over 600 CIOs described their primary focus as “IT operational excellence”, rather than business and process transformation or enterprise strategy, innovation or differentiation.

The potential of technology has, of course, moved way beyond this now, as the other two thirds of CIOs in that same survey are at least beginning to acknowledge.  And not only is operational excellence only a part of the story; in a few years it may be a mere footnote.

We see two key aspects to the changing face and positioning of the IT function.  They are becoming more aligned to the strategy and focus of the business of which they are a part, and they are – dramatically, in some cases – shifting their attention from the internal workings of the business to the outside world.  These two developments tend to take place in harmony, which is why it is meaningful to plot a line from the bottom left to the top right of our matrix.

Many businesses have used technology to perform an activity or deliver a service in a fundamentally different way.  Bookshops sell their products on line, we do our banking on the internet, we renew our car tax in a few seconds from our desk rather than assembling insurance and MoT certificates and cheque book and queuing interminably at the Post Office.  This is the middle ground, still short of where technology is at its most potent – in enabling, or indeed creating, totally new business models, customer-facing propositions such as Google or last-minute.com which simply could not have existed before the right technology was in place. 

These new models are the pacesetters, where technology is as much a part of front-line activity as sales, marketing or customer service.  As the power of technology deepens and broadens, this is where IT departments are heading.  As efficiency and effectiveness increasingly become a given (no matter how tough to deliver) IT people and their leaders must ask themselves the question: “how can we best be using technology to change the way we do business?  What can we see that the opposition can’t?”  This is a question that has implications for every aspect of an IT group – how its leaders think and behave, how they engage with the wider business, how their contribution and success is measured, what skills and competencies they need.  We’ll explore all of these challenges in future posts.

At Ignite, we place enormous emphasis on helping people to break down the barriers between departments and, indeed, organisations.  We have extensive experience of supporting integrated working through changes to behaviour, process, use of information and measures of success – to name but a few major factors.  We have used this experience to help IT groups to become more closely aligned to their business colleagues and to embed understanding of how technology can contribute to business success.

Whatever the interpretation – it is time to act. Anybody waiting for more clarity in December will find that time will run out.

So will this make a difference to the way local authorities respond? As ever – It depends.  Some authorities were planning- and implementing - change that prepared them for the worst expectation.  Others were waiting to see what was in the CSR before they responded.  The front loading is likely to spur all authorities into action – either to accelerate existing plans or to figure out in the next few months how they will make potentially radical changes in order to hit budgets in 2011/12.  Many will be considering cuts in service – rather than looking hard at themselves and making the changes needed to preserve services, many will be considering previously unpalatable shared service opportunities while others will be considering radically new organisational models that fundamentally change the shape of the organisation and the way it works with the community.

If they did not have detailed plans in place then there is much to do.

Ignite has been helping authorities prepare for the worst and have identified 6 top tips for those that are still not clear what they have to do.  Over the next few weeks I will be discussing each of these tips in a series of blogs, but here are the headlines:

1. Be bold and lead; The scale of cuts is large; salami slicing is not enough and will lead inexorably to the conclusion that service cuts are inevitable – they are not!! Take a bold stance and demonstrate community leadership.
2. Engage/engage/engage; this is a time when you need your staff and the community right with you – preferably leading the way.  The scale of changes required needs an engaged and committed workforce and community, helping define the change and championing the outcomes they will deliver.
3. Enable the customer and address demand; the community can and will do more for themselves given half a chance.  Councils have historically been prone to build a level of dependency in the community that creates unnecessary work. Genuinely building community capacity and managing expectations to realistic levels can reduce demand on services and help save cost
4. Consider a fresh operating model; councils are typically organised along fairly traditional service lines, making integrated customer service hard, reinforcing organisational silos and requiring way too much management.  This can be turned on its head by considering radically different models – they are there, but they require a very different ways of managing.
5. Share/share/share; there will be many opportunities to share with other councils and to get economies of scale.  Our word of warning is to ensure operating models are aligned early to ensure you get the most from the arrangement and to ensure flexibility is maintained and that local political priorities can still be met.

We are consistently delivering cost savings of between 25-35% whilst increasing customer service levels and preserving services.  It can be done.

This article is the first in the series of blogs written for district local authorities on “Responding to the Comprehensive Spending Review” – Follow the series for more…

It would be easy to start this session on a downbeat note.  If managing change around new technology and workflow were easy, we wouldn’t be talking about it this afternoon.  I could easily start with a depressing list of what often goes wrong … and I will do that in a minute, although I shall try to do it in a positive and uplifting way.  But instead let’s start with the good news.  As a race, we humans are brilliant at adapting and responding to new technology.  We do it all the time.  Look around you, look at every aspect of your life.  We travel, communicate, entertain ourselves, feed ourselves, conduct our financial affairs, wash our clothes and dishes, protect our homes, educate our children – I could go on – using technology that has at the very least been transformed many times over in our lifetime and in some cases has enabled us to do things that previous generations would only have dreamed of.

So what works?  Why are we such willing adopters of technology change regardless, it seems of age, nationality or wealth?  At one level the answer is simple – because we can see benefits, be they tangible in terms of saving time or money, or qualitative, giving us better information, a more convenient experience, or the ability to listen to music, watch television or communicate with our friends in ways we simply couldn’t in the past.  There is something deeper here too, though, as marketeers the world over know, and that is to do with playing to our emotions.  Depending on who we are (I’m sure we’re all far too rational for it to be true of anyone in this room) we also embrace new technology because it’s popular (or cool), or because it says something about our style, taste or personality.  So in short, there are perhaps three key aspects to human beings embracing technology-driven change: we like it when we get some measurable improvement, we like it when it enables us to enjoy something totally new or incomparably better than before, and we like it when it makes us feel or look good.  What is there not to like when that is what we get?

The answer, of course, is that this often isn’t what we think we’re getting when we’re talking about technology change in business.  What might feel compelling and engaging to the company may be threatening and frightening to the individual.  The first lesson of great change management is never assume that everyone shares the same view of success.  What makes for an attractive business case in terms of better technology, slicker processes and lower costs may well sound like disruption, uncertainty and a lost job to some people in the organisation.  This isn’t to say, of course, that people in this camp are inevitably going to be opponents and blockers – often they’re not, but we have to start by looking at the change through their filter, from their point of view, and to try to ascertain what a good outcome could look like for them and factor the need to achieve that into our plans.  That’s why I would always advocate initiating an Impact of Change Assessment as early as possible.  I say ‘initiating’ because this is a dynamic analysis, one that is best kept up-to-date throughout the change journey.  And it is also why it helps to think of engaging with the impacted groups in the business as a contract: we, the business will achieve x (for example digital technology that will enhance file-sharing and enable new ways of collating and using material) and the benefit for you will be y – such as opportunities to develop new skills.  I remember a tape dispatcher in Sky talking with excitement about the opportunity that the Tapeless programme offered for him to take his career in a new direction.  Bettina Vogel will tell us about a secretary at ProSieben who reskilled as an IBM Service Delivery Manager after being outsourced.

Mentioning the change journey takes me nicely onto my second change management lesson, which is, quite simply – remember change is a journey, not just an outcome – and the journey usually outlasts the outcome.  Does that sound bizarre?  Not if you’ve lived and breathed a major change programme when you will probably have seen ‘go-live’ pass by whilst the impact on roles, jobs and culture took many months to play out – if it ever did.  But the real point about change being a journey is that not everything happens at once.  One big mistake I think is common in major technology and workflow projects is to set out on the assumption that the world has to change on the day that the technology does.  Indeed, it is often not the case nowadays that even the technology changes on a given day.  Years of painful experience of trying to co-ordinate a so-called ‘big-bang’ approach has drawn many people to the attractions of a phased approach, with old and new technology operating in parallel – not always possible, of course, but it works more often than not and it is becoming more and more the norm as the nature of technology implementations moves away from mega, wall-to-wall solutions.

Now, the thing about a journey is that it can take in different challenges and obstacles on the way.  It helps to have some idea what these are going to be, and if you do, they become far easier to negotiate.  Travelling from London to Amsterdam yesterday, it helped enormously to know that there was sea in the way.  Knowing this rendered what would otherwise have been an obstacle irrelevant.  In the same way, we can usually anticipate resistance on our change journey.  We can be ready for it, develop strategies to ride it and respond to it, we can understand where it is coming from and acknowledge that many concerns have merit.  I cannot over-emphasise how important it is to do this.  If you want to alienate the people, don’t listen to them.  Single-mindedness may be a legitimate leadership quality, but not at the expense of denying your colleagues a voice – regardless of whether you think you’re going to want to hear what they have to say.   The honest truth is that resistance is not usually at the level of disagreeing with the overall strategic objectives of change.  It’s about how people perceive the change will affect them – a subject on which they will not only have very strong views, they may well also have highly valid opinions.  So this is my third change management lesson: be open to ideas – the very fact of listening to them will melt away a great deal of resistance.  Most people in most organisations know they don’t live in a democracy, but they also know that they have perspectives on a whole range of business situations and challenges that only they can have and that it is valuable to share.  Consensus is impossible, consultation is good – and practicing it will cultivate support, even enthusiasm, amongst people who could otherwise have been serious blockers.  There is lots of evidence that with good engagement, people impacted by change will not only accept it, they will embrace and even initiate it, even to the extent of making suggestions that will cause disruption to their own role – suggestions that would undoubtedly encounter huge resistance if imposed from outside.

Engagement can be massively helped by getting some users heavily involved in a project, a point I know John Linwood will make when he talks about managing change at the BBC.  I spoke recently to the project manager of a major business change initiative in a financial services company.  The entire project team was made up of external contractors and stakeholder engagement was a disaster.  Users had no reliable channel into the project.  By contrast, I recall a project we worked on with a telecoms company some years ago.  They had the option to outsource the management of the project to one of the global consulting firms, but decided instead to populate the team with 25 of their own people, all seconded full-time from their line roles, and with one of our consultants as the only external team member, managing the project and coaching the people.  It was a massively successful project and, just as important, it created a cadre of able project and change managers who were able to go on to run future change programmes themselves.

One of the most common failings in technology and workflow implementation programmes is poor communications and training.  What typically goes wrong here?  It is easy to see some of the answer.  Communications programmes can be stunningly unimaginative.  Email updates, management cascades and occasional ‘town hall’ meetings are predominantly one-way.  Encouraging questions by email or at the end of a presentation feels positively grudging.  Such approaches miss the point at every level – they fail to take account of preferred learning and communication styles, they give little or no sense that involvement is encouraged, and most importantly they fail to give recipients of the message any real understanding or experience of the new world into which they are moving and about which they would love to ask questions if they only knew where to start.  Change is about creating a new environment for people to work in is my fourth canon of change management and the creation cannot start too soon.  I came across a project recently – in a heavy industry sector that even in its modernised, revolutionised state is about as far removed from media as you can get – in which the head of Change Management secured budget to build a large but portable space in which a wide range of different media were used to create an experience for all staff to understand what the new technology platform would mean for them and the business in which they worked.  Both of these things are important – you have to understand the wider environment in which you’re going to be working, as well as knowing what new technology, workflow and processes are going to mean to you.  This space was assembled, operated and disassembled on all sites early in the programme so that some 10,000 people, pretty well all the workforce, went through it.  This brought alive what change was going to be like and what is was going to mean.  People could begin to understand the new environment and some of them will have started thinking about how they could use and exploit it.  If its main purpose was to generate questions, then that activity had done its job, because it meant that people in the business were in a position to have ideas about what they would be able to do differently in the future, and to seek clarification and answers based on something they had experienced and been able to think about themselves.  Communication became far more multi-channelled as a result.

I’ve talked about four big lessons about change management that I’ve learnt over the course of my career.  In the talks that follow, John Linwood will argue that although the norm is to spend the money on the technology, success is 80% about people.  Bettina Vogel will emphasise the opportunities that a potentially daunting change experience can create for the people going through it.  All the lessons I’ve shared today are to do with people – how they view success, the journey they experience, listening to their ideas and creating a new environment for them to work in.  Thank you for listening to my introduction.  Let’s move on now and find out how these lessons are borne out in the stories of the BBC and ProSieben.

All IT Directors know that their team must demonstrate the basic ability to ‘keep the lights on’ – to deliver, day in, day out – whether that’s back office functions, management information or customer-facing technologies like websites, wikis and portals.  That’s what gives the technology team the permission to do more – and perhaps surprising – things to drive the business.

Beyond this, we think that there are three core capabilities that you need in your team whatever the shape of your business and IT portfolio:

• Business acumen – whether you are looking for process efficiencies or designing a new technology-led business model, having the vocabulary and confidence to partner with the business and make the most of every opportunity are critical.  IT needs to be an equal partner in conversations about cash flow, cost savings and revenue generation if the company is to grasp opportunities to leverage its technical and business capability.

  If you aren’t confident that every new hire has at least a modicum of business acumen, are you certain that they can advise your business partners effectively?  After all, most business people now have more than a smattering of technology know-how.

• Engage and inspire stakeholders – we see this as an essential feature of leadership at all levels.  Gartner refers to the growing need, as you move up the career ladder, of ‘social and participative capability’, and a reduction in the relative need for ‘task’ capability.  As we call on our IT functions to collaborate more frequently and at all levels with the business, then the ability to engage and inspire people in how technology and functional areas can work together better to deliver efficiencies and gain competitive advantage becomes paramount.

  Do you regard all your users as stakeholders?  Is your team capable of inspiring your stakeholders to see better ways to deploy technology in your business?

• Proactive/challenging/creative/transforming – companies that start planning the future from where they are now, will soon find that they under-achieve compared to their peers.  On the other hand, those that start with a vision of where they want to be, will be able to stretch both themselves and their colleagues to achieve much more significant goals.  IT has a huge role to play in this environment – they need to take the lead in painting a picture of the role technology could play in the organisation, whether that is through process re-design supported by mobile technology, or a more fundamental vision of how the business can serve its customers through emerging technology-enabled business models.

  How well-equipped are you to paint that picture?  Do you know who are the visionaries in your team, and how to use them alongside business colleagues to develop a stretching and challenging view of what you can achieve together?

Many IT teams don’t have all these skills or behaviours in place right now – often their CPD is tied to supporting today’s applications, or maybe tomorrow’s.  Individuals may have been tagged to liaise with a particular function such as supply chain or finance, and so they have business acumen in one area only.  An insightful CIO will look for opportunities to rotate people around, so that they can build knowledge through experience, and be given the opportunity to practise their engagement skills with new stakeholders.

At Ignite we support technology and business teams to co-design their vision and co-develop solutions and ideas to get them there.  We help to build trust and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, whether the focus is around tackling the cost base, looking for new opportunities or simply seeking to run the organisation in ways that make better use of all the available resources.  Engaging people in a set of tasks in which they must succeed and in which they have every support and encouragement to challenge the obvious, create the radically new and justify their recommendations – this is a great way to build the capability that any IT team, and its business partners, needs for success.

In successful organisations, capability, skills, behaviours don’t stand still.  Giving people the support and confidence to try new things and practise new skills with team members from a range of backgrounds – all in an exciting and challenging environment – is the real key to growth.

But is outsourcing really preferable? Will it play to the improvement of the detriment of our public services? The question is whether the time, money and resources needed to develop internal capabilities match or outstrip the time money and resources needed to outsource. Can a job ever be a job well done unless you do it yourself?

Notably there are councils that are bucking the outsourcing trend and going in the opposite direction. These councils are pumping their energy into developing their internal capabilities; aiming at transforming their organisations into centres of excellence retaining all their services in-house. The advantages of operating in this way are numerous; not only does the profit margin stay in house, but the council will also save on the costs of tendering and all the client management that goes with it.

More important, are the advantages arising from a council’s existence as a comprehensive, all-inclusive service. There are obvious advantages of having a central bank of community intelligence relevant to numerous overlapping services and of developing links between sectors. We should also not underestimate the impact of a community perception of the council as an all inclusive service. The scope for sophisticated inter-relationships also presents opportunities for shared services, whether that be in the form of shared skills, shared expertise or shared locations.

The jury is out on whether the trend towards establishing the council as a commissioner delivers the benefits it has promised or whether councils should be aiming to transform themselves into centres of excellence. But while we wait, why not push on the latter option? Perhaps councils should have more faith in themselves and their potential. Why should they not be able to manage services just as well if not better than their private sector counterparts?