A victory for transparency...and a warning for public sector procurement?

"Organisations tend to be less stupid when they know the public can see how stupid they are." - Nick Booth, Podnosh

Four years ago I was part of an HMG team trying to persuade 43,000 UK public sector organisations to save vast sums of money through buying collaboratively.   Our crusade wasn't exactly an enormous success: simply because back in 2007 saving money wasn't even in the top fifty list of Government priorities. A less sexy agenda it's hard to imagine: back then, noone really gave a fig how money was being spent in the nooks and crannies of the wider public sector: not the media, nor the public, nor local authorities and nor even, frankly, our own Treasury ministers.

Fast forward four years past the financial crisis, the MPs expenses scandal, a general election and Eric Pickles.  Saving money  - or at least, spending money responsibly and accountably - is now top of everyone's agenda. And with the help of the Coalition Government's transparency and open data policy and the huge power of new social media tools and platforms, it has never been easier for the curious or the crusading to find out how much is being spent, and what on.   Today, an ordinary member of the public probably has access to more and better spend information than a senior civil servant sitting in the Office of Government Commerce would have done just a year or two ago.

Whether or not this new transparency is a good thing, however, all depends on who you are and what kind of procurement crimes you may have committed in the last few years.  

As the London Borough of Barnet Council recently discovered...when a group of dogged local "citizen" bloggers managed to unearth evidence  - through FOI requests and Companies House searches - of Barnet Council's rather dodgy "relationship" with a security firm called MetPro (now out of business).  Last week the findings of an internal audit were announced:  including the troubling revelation that the council had spent £1.3 million with MetPro with no tendering exercise, no written contract or SLA, no formal authorisation, no proper invoicing... thus violating just about every CPR that Barnet had.  


Cue some serious questions about Barnet's finance, audit and procurement processes, and some serious embarrassment for the cabinet and senior officers of this so-called "flagship council: especially so given Barnet is one of the councils planning mass outsourcing of services imminently. 

My hunch is that there are two reasons this happened. One, Barnet's service teams and procurement teams aren't talking to each other.  Two, Barnet's procurement team made classic mistakes that could easily have been avoided with a proper central contracts register (which Barnet doesn't have) and some basic supplier intelligence homework (which many local authorities skip through "lack of time"). Barnet didn't do even the most basic of checks before engaging MetPro: financial, criminal, health and safety, nada.  Noone ever picked up that services procured locally with 3 different MetPro trading names were actually all with the same vendor. And corporate procurement only kept a list of the top ten vendor names by spend for each category, not all vendors over tender limits

In the bigger picture, however, this is a wake up call for procurement everywhere. Organisations need to be constantly vigilant that their procurement processess are both A) appropriate and B) being followed - because if they are not, someone else is going to point it out for them, potentially causing huge damage to corporate, political and personal reputations.  There are many communities of developers and digital activists making huge progress cleaning, sorting and making sense of the spend data tsunami coming out of central and local government: such as LinkedGov and Openly Local . For journalists (whether professional or citizen), this stuff is a hundred Christmases come at once. Ominously for Barnet,  the call has already gone out via Twitter for more developers, researchers and digital campaigners to help examine the rest of the council's spending to see if there are any more MetPros on the books.

And just in case you're reading this blog from an ivory tower in the private sector, thanking your lucky stars no FOI requests will be coming your way, think again.  As outsourcing of public services accelerates, the Government is clearly hoping that greater transparency will protect the public against poor value, ill thought through contracts with private sector firms (PFI, anyone?) It is only a matter of time (one more Southern Cross?) before transparency requirements are extended in some shape or form to private firms which provide public services.



PS The final irony of the Barnet case is that one of the duties MetPro performed for Barnet was secretly (or so they thought) filming residents who attended council meetings, and monitoring the blogs of those who wrote about them.  If MetPro had not been as inept and Keystone Cop-pish in their efforts as Barnet were in commissioning them, this particular procurement crime might never have come to light.

If you build it, they won't necessarily come

I’ve been meaning for a while to write something on a subject dear to all procurement managers’ hearts:  how to use the wonders of social media to exchange gossip – sorry, valuable market and supplier intelligence – with peers and colleagues in reasonable privacy and security.

And I still am planning to write about that – it’s just going to have to wait for next time.  Because this week I want to pick up on Steve Hall’s recent Procurement Leaders blog, in which he got straight to it and argued that social media isn’t catching on in Procurementsville because it’s pretty useless to non-marketers.

Now, I don’t blame the more hardened cynical brethren among you in the procurement jury for being… well, cynical about social media.  It’s new, young people like doing it, and it’s on TV all the time.  Sounds dodgy already.

But let’s look at Steve’s case for the prosecution, which is:

a) a witness (a friend who apparently knows a lot about social media) who has tried several new tools and then stopped using them after a couple of weeks because they don’t generate enough value.

b) a claim that suppliers and buyers already have adequate tools to communicate – social media doesn’t offer anything new

c) an argument that social media ROI is too hard to calculate unless it’s directly linked to sales

d) the concern that social media isn’t interesting or powerful unless it’s open to all-comers (which would make closed loop or internal-only tools pretty pointless)

(Is that a fair summary, m’lud?)

First off, the defence is quite worried about Steve’s witness – his social media friend.  You MUST have a strategy before you rush off adopting any tools.  What (and whose) problem are you trying to address? Is social media the answer to the problem? Then decide which tool would be the best solution. And finally – what’s your implementation plan? Who will participate? Do you need a facilitator, manager or moderator? How will you sell it in? What management support/internal policy do you need to encourage participation? How can you integrate it with offline and face-to-face communications? Is training required?

Without any of this, I am not altogether surprised that Steve’s friend had a rather lonely and unsatisfying experience trying out some of his new playthings.  Social media is by its nature social – you need other people to come and play. And two weeks is not nearly long enough to lure sufficient people to play with you to make it interesting – let alone to know whether it’s going to be useful.

Secondly, I am far from being sure that suppliers and buyers already have adequate tools to communicate.  Just ask any supplier who’s wrestled with entering data into a screwed-up  (insert name of most hated software here) RFP template whose fields are completely inappropriate for his industry at 11pm the night before submission deadline.  Or a buyer sick of answering the same questions about the screwed up RFP template 12 times from 12 different bidders.

Or a buyer in one small part of the public sector who has no way of knowing whether anyone else in the public sector is experiencing the same problems with sourcing an item/dealing with supplier X/adapting that template.   Social media tools can offer solutions to all these common problems and more.

And how do you know if it’s working?  You’ll know.  But if you need to prove it, which often you do, ask.  Collect feedback through the social media channels themselves. Add a question to 360° CAFs and feedback surveys on communication, information accessibility and relationship quality: has it improved since the introduction of social media tools?  Look at the data, too: sign up and participation rates, both to the tools themselves and also to the initiatives, meetings, conferences, collaborative deals, white papers they promote and develop.

And there, because this is only a blog for the defence, my case must rest for now.  I’d love to know what you, the jury think.

(Some will notice I haven’t tackled Steve’s final point: can and should social media ever be private? I’ll be addressing that in my next post, I promise.)

It’s a revolution, Jim, but not as we know it; social media makes a difference

Last Friday evening,  I was at the gym, half watching CNN’s coverage of the Mubarak resignation, when a local pundit came on air tearfully to thank Mark Zuckerberg – founder of Facebook – for making the Egyptian revolution happen.

Other than our emotional Egyptian pundit, perhaps, no one else is arguing that social media was the cause of the deep public dissatisfaction in Egypt and Tunisia which ultimately forced their Presidents to step down.   (While Zuckerberg has never seemed the most modest of men, I suspect even he would feel a little sheepish about taking all the credit for that one.)  There is a little more debate over how far social media activity materially influenced the coverage of the uprisings in the traditional media such as newspapers, radio and TV…although as virtually all newspapers, radio and TV in north Africa and the Middle East are censored, and one could argue that the UK media is pretty irrelevant to the outcome, that seems a bit of a moot point.

But one thing is very clear about the last few weeks in Egypt and Tunisia.  Social media tools can play huge role in accelerating change.
-          We saw incredibly fast information sharing: real time casualty figures from streets and hospitals posted on Twitter, a set of Flickr photos showing minutes-old propaganda SMS messages sent by the Egyptian government, and hours- old YouTube video footage of the military clashing with protesters.
-          We also saw information reaching far more people.  While much was still shared by word of mouth on the streets of Tunisian and Egyptian cities, social media played a crucial role in keeping the people in remoter locations and overseas up to date on what was going on.   New stats from Chartbeat show that 71% of the huge traffic to Al Jazeera’s English language site immediately following Mubarak’s resignation announcement was coming from social media sites – the vast majority from Twitter.
-          We also saw networking and coordination taking place through social media.   Grass roots activists, who had never before met, found each other through Facebook and Twitter.  New leaders emerged, and demonstrations and protests began to be organised – far faster and more efficiently than if people had relied on leaflets, noticeboards, face to face meetings or even just phone calls and emails.
-          And it seems there was one final accelerating effect of social media during the protests: that of mobilizing ordinary people to act, by giving everyone a voice, making them feel informed and involved and crucially, not alone but part of something much bigger.

I wouldn’t presume to liken even the most burning corporate platform (no, not even Nokia’s) to the Tunisian or Egyptian regimes, nor the most radical internal change programme to the subsequent revolutions.  But it is impossible not to be inspired by the way we’ve all seen social media tools help to bring about previously unthinkable change so quickly, simply and cheaply.   Could it do the same in your organisation?

Social media – it’s here and it ain’t going anywhere

The man seated next to me, whose eyes were already wandering towards the buffet table even though the social media training session had only been in progress for six minutes, could contain himself no longer:

“No disrespect, but I work in PROCUREMENT!  I don’t have time for all this social media marketing nonsense,” he snapped.  “I couldn’t care less about the minutiae of teenagers’ tedious lives,  I’m quite sure they don’t want to hear about mine, and I certainly don’t want my team wasting company time on gimmicky fads – we’re hard pressed enough as it is.  Now can we please have a drink?”
“Rupert” (let’s call him), the man in question, was an intelligent, very successful head of procurement in his forties who’d had a long, tiring day and needed a beer.   I – a social media strategist – was trying to show him and his colleagues how social media can be used to help tackle real business challenges.   It wasn’t an ideal scenario.

“Rupert, I think I love you.” I replied. “You couldn’t have captured more perfectly in one sentence every myth going about social media if you’d tried.  Let me get you a cold beer, then let’s tackle these myths one by one.”

1)      Social media is all about connecting people who care about the same things that you do.  Yes, you work in procurement. But you also work for a company or organisation trying to achieve complex goals in an increasingly interconnected world, where information exchanges are now taking place through social media rather than newspapers, TV or even email.  The question should be: how can you afford to ignore or isolate your team from this critical information in a highly competitive marketplace?
2)      Social media isn’t a fad, and won’t disappear.  It is only going to become more prevalent.  Everyone your organisation recruits who is born after 1985 (known as “Millenials”), and all of your Millenial customers or service users, will have grown up with a socially-connected, digitally-oriented mind set and capability: it is as deeply ingrained as their first language.
3)      Social media is not about marketing.   Big consumer brands with big marketing budgets were among the early adopters of social media tools, networks and spaces, and still tend to grab all the headlines. But social media has a huge amount to offer disciplines like procurement in terms of more effective, more cost- and time- efficient collaboration, communication, creativity, customer service, market and supplier research.
4)      Social media ≠ “wasting time on Facebook”.   Yes, Facebook has half a billion users.  But there are many other more useful and appropriate networks and social tools that you’d probably choose ahead of Facebook to help you serve your internal customers in remote locations better, for example, or to pre-qualify potential suppliers.

PS: I’m happy to report that with a beer in his hand, and reassurance that no one was asking him to post photos of his last stag ski trip to St Anton on the company intranet, Rupert was a lot more receptive to hearing about how social media could help make his life easier.

This blog was originally written for and published on Spend Matters UK.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

 Ta- dah for the annual BCS MP Web awards - taking place, after a year long election hiatus, next month at the House of Commons.  Having (mind-bogglingly) reviewed every single MP's website, the team at the Chartered Institute of Technology have come up with a shortlist of 77 digital-political paragons.  These will be whittled down to the final list of winners by a panel consisting of Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail,  politics professor Rachel Gibson, Mark Say of Government Computing magazine and Matthew Windle of the UK Youth Parliament.   The judges say they are looking for sites which are not only navigable and accessible and ""use social media", but also "engage, excite, provide information" and "encourage two-way communication between MPs and their constituents".

My strong hunch is that this final criteria - "two-way communication" - will sort the men and women from the boys and girls.    Most MPs and councillors would be in favour of flying purple turtles if they would broadcast their name and mugshot for minimum effort and cost - and for that not-very-well-disguised-reason, many MPs have duly added Facebook bells and Flickr whistles to their web presence.  But even the most digitally-competent of our elected representatives have yet to get the message that social media is NOT just another broadcast channel to share pictures of themselves making a "royal visit" to the local school or hospital, or to boom out their strident opinions on Trident.

Social media is about having two-way conversations with people who care about the same things you do, in the (online) places where they spend time: an incredibly powerful idea with the potential to transform the very distant, opaque and slightly cynical relationship that most people have with their MP.  Sadly, for the vast majority of MPs, the prospect of opening doors to these conversations is still a  horrifying one, which is a great shame for themselves, their constituents, and democracy.   For that reason I hope this year's BCS winners won't be the usual suspect celebrity bloggers, but the band of brave and few MPs who are daring to engage genuinely with us online.

My own interactive MP favourites:
Andrea Leadsom MP and Charlie Elphicke MP: clean sites by Politics Web that showcase innovative chat maps

Grant Shapps MP and Barry Gardiner MP  very unusually for MPs, have discussion forums on their websites. Shapps has vastly more traffic - partly because he makes more effort with social media (one of most followed MPs on Twitter) but mainly because his forum is at the very centre of his site and it's focused on the local community.
Alec Shelbrooke MP combines blogging and polling nicely to invite feedback on specific bills before he debates and votes
Alison McGovern MP:  has a Twitter feed on her site, and crucially, uses it to invite opinion, not just broadcast it.
Kevin Brennan MP:  puts reader comments and tweets right at the centre of his homepage
Mark Reckless MP, who manages to regularly update a dazzling array of social media sites (blogger, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Flickr), although they could be better integrated

Lynn Featherstone MP and Damian Collins MP:  just for being lifestreamers, though there could be more evidence of reader interaction on their sites.
Finally: Mark Pritchard MP, whose website isnt remotely interactive but is the most incredibly regularly updated.

The secret diary of a new media dodger, by M.P. aged 44 and a half

Just come back from a fascinating few days as a fly on the wall (watching, listening and tweeting...) at a party conference.  I went to understand how digital and social media is currently being used in the democratic process; where the government and elected representatives still need to do more work to connect and engage with people: particularly Gen Y millenials (those born after 1980); and what all this could mean in the context of the "Big Society".

Among the most encouraging things was meeting a vanguard of really savvy MPs and Assembly Members, who've managed to fund and create imaginative, informative websites incorporating bang up to date social media tools.  Even better, they are personally generating regular blogs and tweets and responding to comments, giving all their voters a better opportunity to get to know and interact with their elected representatives.  (See these two great Tory and LibDem examples!)

There are also encouraging signs from central and local government leaders of a new attitude to consulting tax payers, service users and employeees: using digital crowdsourcing tools such as Delib (used for HMT's recent Spending Challenge) and Counter Context to gather and evaluate new ideas, rather than carrying out a prescriptive box ticking exercises.    I also heard many inspiring stories from councils, companies and charities using new media to engage and motivate young people in their communities - such as ITV's www.itvfixers.com - and I think we'll see a lot more of this under the Big Society agenda.

More frustratingly are those MPs, MEPs and Councillors still stuck in the Stone Age:  either avoiding new media entirely or possibly worse still, regarding it as just another channel for broadcasting their name and opinions.  Expenses fallout is partly to blame, but is not a good enough excuse.  Greater transparency and visibility is the medicine to recover from that, not less.

Other excuses given by MPs during the week included:
the boring:  "I don't have time", "I have too many Blackberries",
the verbose:  "I can't say anything in less than 140 characters",
the narcississtic: "I won't start tweeting because if I stopped the media would demand to know why"
....and the disarmingly honest: "I'm afraid I'd get drunk and tweet something by accident".

No friends, feeling lonely?

Yes, that's a depressed and lonely looking Keanu Reeves on a park bench in NYC- and while his agents at CAA insist he's fine, June 15th marked the first annual Cheer Up Keanu Day, a truly 21st century social media phenomena (see here and here if you're curious).

But you don't have to be a Hollywood film star to feel a bit gloomy if you don't have as many friends as you think you should.  According to Sysomos, half of all Twitter users are following less than 10 "friends", while 63% have fewer than 10 followers... making for a rather lonely Twitter experience. 


I'll write about the quest of attracting followers another time,but I think for many people one of the biggest obstacles to getting started properly on Twitter is finding other people to follow - and be followed by.   The suggestion categories Twitter offers are way too vague and broad, and the search function isn't as good as it could be.  The best  - and almost only place to start - is via the Find Friends function, which looks through your email contacts list to see if anyone you know is already on Twitter. That's great for personal contacts you keep on Gmail or Yahoo, slightly less good if your contacts are all locked up on work Outlook....


The good news for budding Tweeters  - particularly those of us tweeting for business reasons - is that as of yesterday, you can now ask Twitter (via the Find Friends tab) to automatically search your LinkedIn contacts to find relevant and interesting people to follow.   

And if you're business-Tweeter and aren't deterred by my previous post about Facebook, Twitter also has an app to find out which of your Facebook friends are tweeting.

Happy friending!