The people and the place
From the mid-1980s, Barnsley, traditionally a mining town, suffered ten years of economic decline. Not surprisingly, the focus of the Authority's community strategy has been economic regeneration. The Authority was also keen to respond to the demands of central government and the Comprehensive Performance Assessment and become an efficient, customer-focused Authority.
Barnsley's Chief Executive, Phil Coppard, felt that information technology, and in particular web and digital technology, could play a role in delivering these objectives. He developed an interest in the potential uses of digital services in the late 1990s, at a time when the technologies were far from mainstream: 'for three or four years I was regarded as a complete lunatic… with these fanciful ideas that were completely unrealistic'.
Barnsley became a partner, alongside Doncaster and Rotherham, in a research and development project examining public access to information and services across the South Yorkshire 'Coalfield Area'. The South Yorkshire Communities Online Project (SYCOP) received £726,000 of funding from HM Treasury's Invest to Save budget to test the feasibility of electronic access to services.
It was through this project that Phil Coppard met Gary Simpson. The stakeholders had recruited Gary to manage the SYCOP partnership under their leadership. The partners wanted to develop SYCOP beyond its function as a portal to council websites while building on the strong partnership working it had established. The result was e@SY Connects - an interactive hub of information and services which can be accessed through channels such as the Internet, mobile telephone, digital television and interactive kiosks. It was at this point that Sheffield officially joined the e@SY partnership, which also includes health services, the Transport Executive, emergency services, Yorkshire Forward (the Regional Development Agency) as well as voluntary organisations from across the whole region.
The innovation and the impact
e@SY Connects offers a wide range of services to the public, including:
- facilities for the payment of council tax and other direct charges
- a 24-7 GP appointment service (with a planned facility for requesting repeat prescriptions)
- a jobs service, run through JobCentre Plus, to support local people in finding employment, and a business section for local small businesses
- real-time information on atmospheric pollution, addressing the perception that certain South Yorkshire towns suffer from poor air quality which research had indicated was impacting on businesses
- a facility to raise, sign and review e-petitions to the partner authorities
- information on local events and travel in the South Yorkshire area
These services are delivered through different channels of communication. Shorter interactions, such as inquiries about refuse collection, lend themselves to contact via mobile telephone or digital television, whereas the internet best supports services requiring more information and better presentation such as the completion of requested documentation.
The e@SY Connects project has maintained a focus on social inclusion as well as high-volume transactions, and looks to attract job seekers, the elderly, the mobility impaired and the young through a variety of access routes. The focus on digital television, for example, was partly driven by a traditionally low uptake of internet-based services by local communities.
e@SY Connects exists separately from each of its parent authorities, providing an access route to their services for both citizens and businesses. Its success can be measured by the increasing numbers of local services that are using it, believing that the e@SY Connects hub delivers added value as an access point. Some of the benefits to participants are clear-cut, for example the delivery of GP services through e@SY Connects, has eased pressure on reception staff, cut the number of missed appointments and reduced pressure on hospital accident and emergency departments over weekends.
How did the innovation happen?
SYCOP started off life as a research project, assessing whether it was possible to engage with citizens through electronic means on the basis of 'life events'. This meant that users access a range of services relating to a set of needs, selecting from a range of services related to their personal circumstances rather than one service from one provider. Much of the subsequent development of the e@SY Connects project has been evolutionary and has delivered through strong partnership working, with the partners using the hub to move into areas such as mobile telephone access and digital television that they hadn't explored before.
Phil Coppard attributes much of the success of e@SY Connects to Gary Simpson's personality and working style: 'he just asks embarrassingly simple questions and challenges established wisdom', a tactic that ensures that Barnsley is 'getting into crevices that otherwise we wouldn't know about'. As well as working closely with the IT managers in each of the four authorities and other public sector bodies in South Yorkshire, Gary has also developed links into the e-Innovations programme at the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG), and contacts with technology providers.
Gary Simpson also pursued the possibility of using digital television, something which had been an aspect of the original SYCOP project but which had initially been difficult to develop. He heard about a national project on digital television and looked for ways forward through this, a connection which led to a national deal with Sky Television, NTL and Telewest and allowed them to offer additional services.
e@SY Connects has benefited from a positive attitude to partnership by the lead Authority, Barnsley. Phil Coppard is evangelical about the benefits of the Local Strategic Partnership, 'it's a bit like climbing up a mountain path in a battered old car: you're chugging along and sometimes you wonder if you're going to make it up the hill. You go round all the bends to the top and then this vista comes up in front of you… you can see across the whole spread'.
The support of Councillor Alan Schofield, the member responsible for the IT portfolio, was also crucial. Alan was very much taken with the idea of customers having a single point of access and felt that using digital technologies was one way of ensuring take up of services by young people. He, in turn, ensured that the council leader was on board. In return, Alan asks that he knows of any emerging problems immediately: 'I need to know more about what's not working and what's going wrong than I do about what's working'.
What helped to get it started?
This project was not driven by demand from the community, but was picked up on because of proactive horizon scanning by Barnsley and its partners. This reflects the Authority's high ambitions and their desire that Barnsley keeps ahead of the pack.
Initial research looking at 'life events' ensured the product was user focused and meant that the hub provided added value for users. In developing the interface for the hub, the project team involved users and local voluntary organisations, using, for example, the council's citizens' panels as well its own road shows.
What helped to keep it going?
Maintaining a focus on technological developments meant that the Authority became aware, for example, of the feasibility of using mobile telephones and digital television as service delivery routes at a very early stage.
The original SYCOP project brought the councils together and identified the potential for partnership working in this area. The governance of the e@SY Connects project works on a partnership basis. One group, the South Yorkshire Public Sector e-Forum, provides strategic direction on information society issues generally, including e-government. Second, a steering group oversees the specific e@SY Connects project, and thirdly, there is a link group - the South Yorkshire e-Forum Support Group - responsible for planning and targeting. This third group has proved useful for brainstorming and developing new ideas for taking the project forward.
The flexibility of Gary's role, working to the IT managers of the four authorities, other public and voluntary sector partners, and to central government, has provided creativity and networking opportunities. His contribution as an 'innovation overhead' has meant that there is capacity for the Authority to innovate where appropriate.
What helped to share the learning?
Barnsley has hosted several visits from other local authorities, other public bodies and from European and Asian counterparts. It has also show-cased the e@SY Connects hub, something it first did as finalists for a European technology award, hosting a stand where delegates could get hands-on experience of exploring the services available.
Barnsley believes that disseminating the things it does well can be very motivational for staff, helping them feel that they are part of an organisation worth working for. This view has now spread to job applicants.
Phil Coppard also feels there is great benefit to be had from one-to-one discussions between chief executives, but feels that this only really happens where other authorities are already predisposed to new ideas: 'the people you really need to get to are the people who don't even recognise the need to change'.
Challenges along the way
Sheffield, because of constraints in the original funding scheme, was initially unable to fully participate in the project. These restraints were subsequently overcome, with commitment from Sheffield's Chief Executive, and Sheffield joined Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham to create the e@SY partnership.
Funding to maintain Gary's role has at times been hard to secure. When the Invest to Save funding for the SYCOP project expired, Phil and his colleague chief executives worked hard to pull together the required funds, engaging the regeneration body Yorkshire Forward to contribute. e@SY Connects has now become a mainstream service and team staff costs have been embedded in core budgets.
Operationally, the project originally involved touch-screen, high-speed internet kiosks across Barnsley, Rotherham and Doncaster. Only three of these have now been retained, primarily because the usage of the others was poor (although they have all now been adopted by the partners as part of their own service provision requirements). As a result the running cost burden for e@SY Connects has been substantially reduced and the partners have avoided what Chris Partridge, Barnsley's Head of Information Strategy sees as a tendency for projects 'to be overlaid with new initiatives rather than making a conscious decision to pull away'.
Next steps
The capacity established in the e@SY team gives the partners the potential of new technologies and to look for service areas that could be brought into the hub. For example, in education they have recently developed facilities which allow parents and schools to share messages, allowing parents to inform the school if children will be absent or for the school to inform parents if children will return late from a school trip.
Barnsley has a new vision for itself as a twenty-first century market town. This vision, which emerged from a wide-ranging Rethinking Barnsley exercise, involving architects, Yorkshire Forward, the CLG and the local community, under the banner Remaking Barnsley, is designed to transform the town in all its aspects. A key feature of the vision for the new Barnsley is a high profile role for ICT, both in access to services and in its future economy. 26 Barnsley, together with the other three South Yorkshire local authorities, and with support from a wide range of private, voluntary, community and public organisations, is developing a programme under the name Making IT Personal, to stimulate the take-up of digital technologies, especially among the disadvantaged and excluded. A key element of the programme is the use of information generated by information technology to drive joined-up working and service re-engineering.