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Charity and public sectors must work together on IT, says workshop

IT | Gareth Jones | 20 May 2010

There needs to be a fuller exchange of information between local government and civil society organisations on IT issues in order to improve the delivery of public services, according to a workshop held at the Socitm Spring Conference.

Co-ordinated by Socitm board member David Clayden (pictured), discussions found that charity IT staff need to be involved in these exchanges, yet they often did not even have the contact details for their counterparts in the local authority.

“There’s an awful lot of service delivery now by external agencies and they’re a bit left out of the whole government network,” Clayden told Civil Society.

“For example, the new PSN (Public Sector Network) is a government secure network. Actually there’s an awful lot services delivered by the third sector and they’re not in the family.”

An online survey prior to the event had found that the most important factors for successful collaboration were open communication, trust between leadership, operational managers and front line staff, engagement at strategic level and a mutual understanding of the scope of the shared work.

However, while trust was often present, the other factors were not. Attendees from both the public sector and charities made a number of observations, including:

• Charities often have a small IT function, and skills levels as well as capacity are not always equal to those in local government
• If information were to be shared, there were concerns about the level of security that should be applied to it, with charities perceived to be “relatively naïve” in this regard
• A number of local authorities are already providing IT services to charities, such as helpdesks, networks and internet access
• There is a need to manage expectations of the benefits of joint working, as while they exist, they need to be agreed and worked for.

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