Steve Palmer recalls moving from environmental health to computing, a brush with Take That at the Belfast president’s conference and Socitm’s embrace of private sector partnerships and diversity
I worked for the London Borough of Camden in environmental health and had always been interested in the development of desktop-based computing. Computing was moving from being something that happened in a secret room within the town hall to technology that could provide more efficiency, more information and the ability to manipulate it. I got quite involved with desktop computing through my role in environmental health, did some training and then I seemed to become the head desktop-based computing user for the council’s IT department.
Camden’s IT suffered a setback in the mid-1990s and I was parachuted in to the central IT department with the council’s then head of accountancy to try to sort it out and provide more strategic direction and local accountability. My accountancy colleague left after a year and for two years or so I was acting head of IT. In 2000 I was headhunted by the London Borough of Hillingdon to be head of IT, although the job evolved, and in 2011 eventually I moved back into general management as deputy director of resident services, basically anything that wasn’t in the centre or social care.
While at Camden I learnt of what was then called the Society of London IT Managers, which was in fact the London branch of Socitm but didn’t call itself that. I joined, became secretary and eventually chairman and we formally became Socitm’s London branch. I joined Socitm’s national executive and around 2007 I was elected as a vice-president then served as president in 2009-10.
In the 1990s, compulsory competitive tendering spread from blue-collar to white-collar services including IT. Although 1997’s change of government moved us away from that, it had brought home that the private sector could add a huge amount to local authority services working in partnership, but – as a sweeping generalisation – most of us saw the involvement of the private sector as a threat. Contracts tended to be based on inputs so they required micromanaging. We needed output-based contracts based on partnership, rather than inputs and threats.
At Hillingdon we worked in partnership with Cisco, one of the movers and shakers of the internet at that time. The elected members in the council’s cabinet were largely commercially-based, including accountants and businesspeople, so they were keen to work with the private sector and I had more of an open door than some of my colleagues elsewhere. Cisco also ran a European e-leaders forum, which for several years I co-led with the then IT director of the city of Brescia in Italy. That led to projects that crossed international boundaries, including learning from what Brescia had done with its libraries, leading to Hillingdon adding RFID chips to books.
Socitm’s national executive had a very public sector based approach but there were some very good individuals spouting the same stuff as I was, about the need to work in partnership with the private sector and commercialise our own offering. I’m not sure we knew what that looked like at the time because there was no blueprint. But the exciting thing for me for the whole of my time in IT was that there was no blueprint, you were finding ways and means of making things more efficient, with the prime thing being to focus on improving service to residents.
Rocking out in Belfast
We had never held any of Socitm’s major events in Ireland but in 2007 the incoming president Rose Crozier was head of information services at Belfast City Council so we chose to hold the conference there. We were welcomed with open arms to a fantastic event.
Each year at the conference, led by a guy from Sandwell, Mark Wheatley, there was an in-house band called Rocitm – very original. I’d played guitar badly for many, many years and I asked Mark if I could join in with a few of the numbers. It was normally on the first night of the conference and it was playing at the Europa hotel. I was due to join in for a few and on the day the conference started I’d forgotten something back at the other hotel we were using, the Hilton.
So I went back and found in the foyer, as I went up to reception to try to talk to them about something, one Jason Orange from Take That. They were playing at the Waterside in Belfast. Very pleasant chap, we had a brief exchange. My mother was always interested in what I was up to musically as well as work and was a bit of a Take That fan. I was due to ring her and thought I’d play a little joke on her. I phoned her and said: “You know I’m due to play in the Rocitm band tonight for the first time, a bit nervous about all that? I’m afraid it’s been usurped, I’ve met Jason Orange of Take That, and he said that their guitarist is unfortunately fallen ill, would I like to join in instead? So I’m going to be playing with them rather than Rocitm.” The only response I got from my mother was “that’s nice dear”.
The conference itself had a very Northern Irish theme including a ceilidh which was absolutely fantastic. We had international guests from places as far afield as New Zealand and America. I think it was a roaring success and it cemented, for the first time, the ability for us to work across all four corners of the United Kingdom. We held further conferences in Scotland and at Celtic Manor in Wales and became much more inclusive and less England-centric.
Socitm’s evolution
Socitm became much more commercially aware and there were a number of initiatives aimed at including people who had traditionally been excluded from senior positions in IT in local government, including women and ethnic minorities. We were starting to evolve into an organisation that understood that it was there for its members rather than its own self-perpetuation. With financial, private sector and university partnerships it was becoming more inclusive in every respect.
Since I retired, a frightening 10 years ago, I have watched Socitm become very diverse and focused on the right things. The work to turn the society into a charity was innovative and inspired as was the appointment of Nadira Hussain as chief executive, who I had worked alongside in London for a number of years and who knew what we needed to become. I went to my first Socitm conference in 1998 in Glasgow and the organisation now is completely unrecognisable from the one I joined. I claim no great personal credit for any of the positive changes but like to think that I played my part.
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