Government IT Profession Annual Conference

For those of you who are also public-sector IT professionals, you may be interested in attending the Government IT Profession Annual Conference which is being held from 30th to 31st October 2008.  Here is an excerpt from their e-mail invitation (available to those that subscribe via the cio.gov.uk website):

The conference will take place in Leeds, West Yorkshire, at the QueensHotel, which is next to Leeds railway station. The event will start with registration at 10:00 on Thursday 30 October, and finish at 14:30 on Friday 31 October. The conference will reinforce professionalism in the
way the government delivers technology and modern services. Workshop subjects will include citizen-centred services, IT skills analysis, an update on SFIA version 4, plus sessions aimed at CIOs and Heads of IT, Competency Groups and Implementation Leaders building the public-sector-wide IT profession community.

For further information visit: http://www.cio.gov.uk/itprofession/annual_conference

SFIA v4 Update - have your say

ITIL refresh... Prince 2 refresh... let's add another one to the list with SFIA (Skills for the Information Age)! This just in today from e-skills:

This is to let you know that consultation has now begun on the development of version 4 of the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). IT professionals, their employers and those responsible for their education and training are invited to participate by visiting ...

http://sfia.textmatters.com/

Everyone who has an interest in IT skills can comment on the existing skills definitions and make suggestions for new content. If you need any guidance on what is needed, you can see some notes on the SFIA web site at ...

http://www.sfia.org.uk/cgi-bin/wms.pl/1711

... and there is a link from there to the Update site.

SFIA provides the most widely-accepted definitions of IT skills and is now used by more than 1,000 organisations to produce job descriptions and role profiles, support resource planning, and improve business effectiveness. It has been translated into Chinese and Japanese.

Quote: "The great strength of SFIA is that it is based on actual best practice in the workplace. Users can therefore be confident that it provides a tried and tested solution to their IT skills management needs."

The consultation will run through to September and SFIA version 4 is due to be released before the end of 2008.

Where next for transformational government?

I've been re-reading some information on Transformational Government as it's now two years since the original strategy was published back in November 2005. Amongst implementation and progress papers I found a really interesting one in the Work Foundation's 'Public Services & ICT' series entitled: 'Where next for transformational government?' by Alexandra Jones and Laura Williams. It's dated September 2006 but the content is still very relevant to where I work over a year on. After giving some background it details the challenges that we continue to face:

• Lack of link between project and organisation's key strategic priorities
  
• Lack of clear senior management (and ministerial) ownership and leadership
  
• Lack of effective stakeholder engagement
  
• Lack of skills and proven approach to project and risk management
  
  • Scope Creep
    
  • Unrealistic Timescales
    
  • Perfection tomorrow rather than compromise today
    
  • Not enough attention paid to risk profiles
  
  
• Lack of understanding of and contact with supply industry and senior levels
  
  • Avoid over-design of the procurement specification
    
  • Create genuine partnerships
    
  • Be realistic about risk transfer
    
  • More honesty from suppliers
  
  
• Evaluation of proposals driven by initial price rather than long-term value
  
  • Business benefits should be the real measure of success
    
  • Not just time and cost
  
  
• Too little attention to chunking project into manageable steps
  
  • More projects need rigorous piloting
    
  • Lack of Communication between policymakers and deliverers, and IT managers and senior managers
  
  
• Inadequate resources and skills to deliver the total delivery portfolio

And conversely, it also highlights what makes a successful project (nothing really new here):

• Clear and realistic business strategy with ICT as enabler
  
  • Keep it simple
    
    • Simplify transactions
      
    • Incentivise cheaper options
      
    • Different solutions for different services
      
    • Design services around customers
      
    • Do a pilot
      
    • Have a safety net
  
  
• Processes redesigned to be more effective
  
• Leaders engaged in project and visibility committed to success
  
• Change management strategy engaging staff
  
• Investment in capacity of staff
  
• Customer segmentation - Understanding different customer needs
  
• Good relationships with suppliers
  
• Risks identified and managed

The report finishes with 10 recommendations. I won't detail them here though, go and have a look for yourself. It's actually a really good report (unlike some I've read).

Do you see these challenges for you and your organisation (if you work in government anyway!)?

Chartered IT Professional? What do they know anyway?

This is the question that the British Computer Society are seeking to answer. Are an IT professional and have thoughts on the charter mark for the IT profession? Or perhaps you are simply curious about the 'Body of Knowledge' that all Chartered IT Professionals will be expected to demonstrate.

Currently is is split into 'Knowledge and Understanding' and 'Skills'. They will structure into topics towards the end of the consultation to make it easier to navigate. I've started to add my penny worth... from what I can see so far it seems to be too detailed at all levels. However, I've only just skimmed the surface.

Head over to the website and have your say.

BCS Service Management Specialist Group Event

Apologies for the lack of posts last week. Just when I thought I had the habit as well!

Last Monday I went into London to an event run by the BCS Service Management Specialist Group as the title of the event piqued my interest: 'IT Service Management, ITIL, ISEB and the BCS '. The group does what it says on the tin. It gets together to discuss and share best practice in Service Management which is MORE than ITIL. Events are normally every month or so at the London BCS offices. If you are interested in joining visit the BCS SMSG website and let them know where you came from ;)

There were nine of us in attendance including the presenter Carol Hulm, Special Project Manager at the BCS.

The main topics of her presentation were:
- ISEB qualification framework evolution
- ITIL v3
- Book launch on 11th May of 'World Class IT Service Delivery' by Peter Wheatcroft
- IT Professionalism

Over the next few blog entries I will address coverage of each of these areas in turn. There were some great questions and answers particularly around ITIL examinations going forward and other ITSM offerings that ISEB may include going forward.

Before leaving I felt compelled to point out that the ProfIT website leaves a lot to be desired and that in my view the BCS professionalism pages were better. Hopefully this will be fed back and we may see some improvement (just call me an optimist!).

IT Profession Update

It's been awhile since I posted about the work of the ProfIT Alliance (partly because things have been a little quiet on the public front). For those who have not heard of the alliance before it is formed of the BCS, e-skills UK, Intellect, and the NCC. They started working together with the primary of creating an IT Profession that is recognised as such in the way that accountants and surveyors are.

In the past week the e-skills sector council published the all new 'IT Profession Competency Model'. The fundamental idea is to recognise areas of specialism in which people can progress without necessarily having to move into management as is normally the case (certainly where I work). There are some staff who really deserve to be renumerated for their level of specialism and currently the only way to achieve this is to apply for a management role for which, in most of these cases, they are not suited. Providing options has got to be a good thing in my book.

For some background read the 'Validating the IT Professionalism Model' report and browse the 'Creating the IT Profession' section on the BCS website.

ISEB upgrade their qualification framework

I´m on holiday at the moment, so apologies for the lack of posts. They´ll commence again from Tuesday 3rd October.

I heard something at a conference a few months ago about the need to upgrade the BCS ISEB IT qualifications framework to support the acceptance of IT as a profession in the truest sense of the word.

On page 21 of this month´s IT Now magazine there is a short explanation of the changes. It aligns other qualifications along the Foundation / Practitionar / Manager´s theme for certifications that we are already familiar with for ITIL. You can download the new ISEB Framework from their website.

Where's the profIT?

I really should have written about the ProfIT conference immediately so this may be old news to some of you.

On Monday 8th May 2006 I attended the Prof IT conference in London. The tagline: 'Building a World Leading IT Capability'. Not world-class, but world-leading.

My interest in the event stemmed from a desire to see IT become a recognised profession in the same way that say, accountancy is. I've heard people talk about IT staff as a 'protected species' but without perhaps the understanding of why we may be protected and what it is we actually deliver to the business. I don't want to be a member of a protected species; I want to be recognised and valued as a professional (but that's another blog entry).

The seminars throughout the day explored the issues around what constitutes a profession as well as a professional, and having defined this, how to go about making it happen.

There was an impressive array of people on the guest list ranging from MDs and CEX across both private and public sectors which inspires some confidence that there is a commitment to seeing this vision become a reality. Curiously, some comments from people in the private sector suggested that they believe real change can only happen if government embraces it. They seemed particularly pleased to hear Katie Davies, Director of IT Professionalism for e-government introduce the Government's take on the SFIA framework, etc.

The highlight of the day for me personally was the motivating presentation from David Taylor, author of The Naked Leader. He hates us calling recipients of IT services 'users' which he pointed out was akin to calling them druggies and suggested we come up with something else (but such is the dependence on IT these terms that the term is rather apt in my opinion) !

The culmination of the day was the signing of the ProfIT Programme Alliance by representatives of E-Skills UK, Intellect, the National Computing Centre and British Computer Society.

Anyhow, presentations from the conference are available for download. So if you want to know how IT professionalism is progressing be sure to take a look.

If I had this a month ago!

As I was going through some papers that I got from the ProfIT conference I came across a leaflet promoting the Intellect Women in IT Forum.

If only I had looked at it before I gave the presentation at the 'Women into ICT' day! It summarises very nicely some of the key issues affecting the recruitment and retention of women in working IT today and also mentions the deliverables from their research programme, in particular:

Women in the IT industry: Phase 2 Research How to Retain Women in the IT Industry (July 2005)
Women in the IT industry: Phase 1 Research Towards a Business Case for Diversity (January 2005)

That wasn't what got me all excited though. The Intellect link led me to the hitherto unplummed depths of the E-skills UK website (and I used to think I'd had a really good browse of it too!). In a tiny corner of the careers section there is a link to a video entitled 'You can do IT too!' which, lo and behold, seeks to destroy those stereotypical perceptions of IT workers in an effort to encourage young women into the field!

What is SFIA anyway?

I've mentioned SFIA in a previous entry and thought it would be helpful if I gave a quick overview of what it is, and why we should care about it.

In July 2003, the BCS, the IEE, and IMIS formed the SFIA (Skills for the Information Age) foundation. The primary goal of this was to create a high level skills competency framework for IT professionals, much like those that already existed in other industries, as well as a standard language for talking about IT skills. Indeed, it grew in part from the BCS's ISM (Industry Standard Model) which was subsequently modified in accordance with SFIA and rebranded as SFIA+. It is SFIA+ that forms the basis of the BCS professional development product offerings. But I digress, back to the framework itself.

SFIA version 3 is at first sight a relatively simple two-dimensional matrix. There are 7 responsibility levels across the top (1 being the lowest) and 6 main categories of work down the left as follows:

Strategy and Planning
Development
Business Change
Service Provision
Procurement and management support
Ancillary Skills

Each main category incorporates sub-categories and skills. It should be noted that the placement of skills within categories can be argued (and has been). When using the matrix to assess your skills as an IT professional it is important to indicate where you have a competency regardless of which category it falls under; the categories are really a convenient matrix navigation aid and not intended to be limiting. For example, if your main role at work is that of network support this falls within the Service Provision category. However, you also have project management experience which falls under Business Change. Therefore you have skills in both areas, and that is okay. In today's environment I'd go so far as to say cultivating skills in the business change arena is to be encouraged!

Okay, so far it seems sensible enough, but how do you know if you are selecting the 'right' skill and how do you decide which level to record against it? That's where the skills definitions reference document comes in. Let's look at the example of Network support within User support on page 29.

Network support (NTAS)
The provision of network maintenance and support services. Support may be provided both to users of the systems and to service delivery functions. Support typically takes the form of investigating and resolving problems and providing information about the systems. It may also include monitoring their performance. Problems may be resolved by providing advice or training to users about the network’s functionality, correct operation or constraints, by devising work-arounds, correcting faults, or making general or site-specific modifications.

Level 2 Assists in investigation and resolution of network problems. Assists with specified maintenance procedures.

Level 3 Identifies and resolves network problems following agreed procedures. Uses network management software and tools to collect agreed performance statistics. Carries out agreed network maintenance tasks.

Level 4 Maintains the network support process and checks that all requests for support are dealt with according to agreed procedures. Uses network management software and tools to investigate problems, collect performance statistics and create reports.

Level 5 Drafts and maintains procedures and documentation for network support. Ensures that all requests for support are dealt with according to set standards and procedures.

From this we can decide whether it is the most appropriate skill and furthermore, the appropriate level with which to assess ourselves against.

For IT professionals, this framework is an excellent tool to help identify your strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement, i.e. peform a gap analysis. However, I'd go a step further and say that IT professionals should join the British Computer Society and make use of the Career Developer facility using SFIA+ which has much more depth. More on that in another blog entry.

For employers, once your staff have completed an assessment you then have an accurate skills database which is a plus point for auditors and Investors in People assessments! However, far more use is the fact that should someone leave the organisation, you now have the information at your fingertips to decide which of their skills you wish to hire back in, or make the decision that actually you need someone with another skill set.

Long-term I see the terminology used in SFIA forming the basis of job adverts. As it becomes the recognised standard for the industry by the IT professionals themselves; recruitment can be streamlined as candidates will have a clearer idea of what the job entails before making an application, and employers will have a clearer idea of what they are actually looking for. A definite improvement over the current situation.

The emerald city that is the BCS London Office

I arrived at the London office of the British Computer Society (BCS) in Southampton street a little early so plucked up the courage to mingle a little.

First I spoke with a guy who was not actually there for the forum, but an oral exam for one of his programme management certifications. Over the past year he's certified in Prince 2, MSP, and APM - busy busy! He said that the Prince 2 exam wasn't that hard as it was open book and that as long as you understand the concepts and overall process it's fine - food for thought (but then it sounds like he has a LOT of experience unlike me!). I was curious as to the sudden need for accreditations and he explained the he works for a large telecommunications company and it is the customers to whom they are increasingly providing ICT services that are the real driver. In today's private sector marketplace there is a real need to demonstrate the professionalism of their staff through accreditations. This interested me because it is one of the very themes that the government is beginning to accept. Perhaps we aren't that far behind the private sector after all...

I also bumped into a lady I met at the Government IT roadshow 2 weeks ago. It turns out she works for a county council, so it will be interesting to see how they progress as I suspect we will face many similar issues with implementation/culture change.

Anyhow, the forum itself focused on the differences between SFIA v2 and v3 and how these changes have been implemented in the BCS products. I was particularly pleased that they spent some time talking about the Government IT profession model based upon SFIA v3 and how SFIA+ has also pulled from this and will continue to do so. I was certainly reassured that we haven't wasted our investment. If anything it has only motivated me to try and realise further benefits from it.

There was also a case study from Deloitte regarding the BCS Group Membership scheme. Fundamentally it's a fast-track way to get their staff accredited and be able to say to customers 'we are professional' and have the BCS seal of approval to show it. They've done well, but I can't see it working for us - not yet anyway.

The afternoon finished with a Professional Development Quiz. The first part was to check if we were listening, but the second half prompted some interesting discussion in our small groups based around the following areas:

3 key principles of professional development
Development against a recognised external standard
Creating a personal development plan as the start of a cycle
Monitoring and recording against the plan
Review sign-off at the end of the cycle

3 most important factors to achieve successful implementation of a professional development programme
Senior management buy-in
Treat as a project using a suitable methodology, e.g. Prince 2.
Appoint a co-ordinator / project manager who is responsible for making it happen
Communicate!

3 most important factors to sustain a successful professional development programme
Continued and visible backing from senior management
Perceived standing of scheme in organisation
Ability to motivate all participants

3 aspects where Quality Assurance can make a major contribution to effectiveness
Correct and consistent use of the SFIA+ framework
Training and monitoring of supervisors
Advice and guidance to supervisors and participants
Regular reviews of scheme operation

3 way SFIA+ should be used in planning personal development
Explore potential career paths and long term development options
Identify main skill and level to develop
Add components from other skill levels if required
Identify specific work activities, knowledge, and skills to develop over the next cycle
Review other components such as training activities, professional development activities, and qualifications

I have some notes I will type up and publish regarding the content of the presentations themselves which may be interesting to someone out there - I certainly found it useful. Until then, there's no place like home! *clicks heels*

P.S. Did I mention our team won? ;)

We're off to see the wizard...

Okay, so maybe not - but it was a nice idea.

I'm actually off to the British Computer Society Professional National Forum in London tomorrow. We use their BCS Skill Builder tool at work to identify our skill base and also to help build job descriptions. It's a little clunky but it gets the job done. To be honest we need to make more use of it than we are currently, but that's a topic for another time.

The point is that BCS Skills Manager is based on the Skills For the Information Age competency framework (known as SFIA) which has just been updated to version 3. I'm hoping that tomorrow I will find out how the BCS intend to reconcile SFIA+ v3 with the Government IT Profession Competency Framework (which is also based on SFIA v3). I'm guessing that we aren't their only customer from the public sector and I wouldn't want to see our investment wasted now that the government have finally caught up!

Wait... we're professionals?

Well it seems that the UK Government has realised that we IT folks aren't people who keep things ticking away in the basement with a set of skills that is so specialised that we are considered geeks who are unable to communicate with people (and yes - I do believe that is how the TV show IT Crowd makes us appear!).

I've been keeping an eye on the Chief Information Officer Council website for awhile now and when the opportunity arose to attend the first of their roadshows about the all new Government IT Profession I was (as always) keen to be be part of it (despite having to get up early in the morning!).

The main aim appears to be getting IT as individuals to recognise themselves as professionals with a career (in the same way that accountants do), and getting the rest of the business to realise that those who work in IT are highly skilled people who have something to offer other areas as well. Furthermore, there is the desire to get IT professionals communicating with their peers in other organisations both within the same sector and cross-sector. There are a number of strategies in place (or in development) which address how they intend to achieve this (see themes).

The roadshow format was well thought out. The main presentation clearly showed the themes they had identified, work completed so far, and where they are going. The workshop later on gave everyone an opportunity to answer various questions ranging from how we feel about the profession as it stands and the obstacles we face, to what we would like to see for the IT profession.

One of the most interesting learning points that came out of this was for me that local government appears to be worse off than central government and certain other sectors in terms of process and project management, and lack of support from upper management. Some members of our group were fortunate to have CIOs sitting on the highest board and key in making strategic decisions. For those of us from local authorities it was a very different story. We agreed that there are opportunities missed by the business due to the lack of IT representation at strategic board level. This gave rise to the question - just HOW are the team that are driving the Government IT Profession going to communicate with upper management of public sector organisations and garner their support? It was a question without a real answer. I am however confident that it will be addressed. After all, if it isn't then this will become just one more flash-in-the-pan initiative; the team and those of us at the roadshow want this to be long-lasting.

There were lots of suggestions on how to move things forward and the website was at the heart of a lot of them, i.e. we need forums. If they want us to communicate then a simple forum will get the ball rolling. Nothing yet - but I'm monitoring it!

---

On the personal development side I found the roadshow very useful. I was a little apprehensive when I walked in to find about 200+ people all dressed in well-pressed suits from the upper echelons of government, the home office, NHS, etc. However, in the group workshop I reassured myself that everything I had to say was valid and subsequently volunteered to present our group findings to every one else.

• Mistake 1: When I walked up to the front to I kept my coat on - not the most professional impact!
• Mistake 2: Although I had the open body language, used my hands, face, etc. I did notice that the longer I went on that my pace sped up a little too much and I found myself needing to breathe. Not something I usually experience - I did catch my breath and slow down.

All in all another useful learning experience and I'm proud that I put myself in the position and lived to tell the tale!