Christopher Head remembers Socitm founder and Surrey County Council IT head Roger Toms, how the society professionalised its conferences and Socitm Insight reports on flexible working
I first came across Socitm in 1985 when Roger Toms came back from a meeting with other founder members. I was working at Surrey at the time and Roger was the head of IT. He said, we are setting up this local government version of Gartner and we are calling it Socitm. We all joked it sounded like ‘sock it to me’ from the American comedy sketch show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in.
I had no more involvement until 1996, when Roger asked me if I would join Socitm’s conference committee to look after the audiovisual side of it, following an experience with a Barco projector. I was doing a presentation to the members in a very large auditorium in Surrey County Council, one of the big committee rooms. I decided to hire one of those Barco projectors, the big boxes with three lenses on the front and an ancient contraption by today’s standards, to project what we were showing on our computer system up onto a big screen.
I got this bit of kit installed, switched it on, and it didn’t work. Roger came past and said what’s the matter with it, I said it’s clearly not working and he said “Have you kicked it?” I said: “Of course I haven’t kicked it, it’s a delicate piece of equipment.” He said: “Kick it then.” I said: “If you want to kick it, you kick it. I’m not taking responsibility for kicking it.” Anyway, he did kick it and would you believe it, it worked. So I felt a bit crestfallen at that point.
That was typical of Roger, he was really a larger than life character. I think he was one of the principal drivers of starting Socitm, purely because of the energy he used to give to everything. He was very supportive of all of his staff, he was a great character, he would always defend us to the hilt.
He was a bit of a surprise to Surrey County Council, which was a rather pedestrian and sedate organisation when he first turned up. Roger must have been 20 or 25 years younger than any of the other chief officers and he arrived in a very high-powered sports car. In his interview, which he recounted to us later, the members asked him what he had seen at Surrey and if there was anything he hadn’t seen before. He replied: “No Mr Chairman, but not all in one place.” I worked in a service department at the time and IT at Surrey in those days was a bit of a mess – Roger was brought in to sort it out.
Fire alarms, high winds and Ken Livingstone
When Roger brought me in to Socitm’s conference committee, the conference had grown considerably and using a little projector wasn’t going to work. I tried to raise the game with a proper stage, better projection arrangements and audio so that everyone could hear what was going on. Then we started employing professional hosts for conferences, a couple of BBC presenters.
The first conference I was involved with was in Harrogate in 1996. Every spring we would do a small one-day event then we would have a two-day conference in the autumn, dovetailed around the party conference season as we would often use the same venues as the political parties. Once we were at Celtic Manor in Newport and everyone had had the usual quite-boozy evening, we went to bed, the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night and we were all outside in various pyjamas and dressing gowns. Another at Brighton had the most enormous winds so trying to get from the conference hotel to the actual conference centre was a battle, you were almost getting blown over. We organised a debate on one occasion between then Labour mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and David Davis, the shadow home secretary who competed against David Cameron in the 2005 Conservative party leadership election. It went down really well and they went on doing such debates as a pair, so we set the model for it.
Insights on disasters and flexible working
In 2000 I became professor of IT at Henley Business School, part-time with working in my own consultancy. I started preparing material for what was then called Socitm Insight, the research arm. We produced quite lengthy in-depth material. I remember one of the heads of IT in London said that her subscription to that service was worth another member of staff.
I assisted Martin Greenwood, who majored on the Better Connected reports that followed the development of online material by councils. I did other research, including a report called Better Prepared following the 2005 floods in Cumbria on being ready for disasters. Later I wrote a report in the early days of blockchain, which has since taken off with Bitcoin, on what the implications for local government IT might be. We also set up a group that looked at Best Value, a central government initiative to reduce costs in local government. Other report topics included agile development such as DSDM and Prince2, benchmarking, authentication, best value and key performance indicators, business continuity and business process management.
We wrote a report on the relationship between the chief information officer and chief executive in conjunction with Wolverhampton Business School. It was amusingly titled ‘Singing from the same hymn sheet’ – I tried to go for snappy titles but some of those got vetoed. We found that a number of chief executives wanted ICT to move from being a support service to providing more strategic advice, quoting one chief executive as asking “how can ICT modernise services rather than react to services that wish to modernise”.
We did a lot on flexible working, mainly based on Henley Business School’s Future Work Programme which advocated the concept as it would improve productivity, and happy people would probably stay in the job longer. At that time recruitment and retention was a big problem in IT for local authorities because the commercial sector was paying so much more. Surrey County Council became a bit of a pioneer in flexible working and now has very few people working in its offices, leading to it selling County Hall to a developer.
I was involved with Socitm from 1996 to 2010 and during that time it became far more professional. It stopped being just a membership group, became a company and there was an increase in what it delivered to its members. However, we had various challenges and one of these is looming again – local government reorganisation.
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