Adobe UK Enterprise Blog

Then you should check out the latest Adobe webinar taking place tomorrow.

Will Open Standards allow the public sector to join up service delivery? What standards are key? And how will they be decided? All questions that will discussed.

As ever, we will be streaming the debate live and we will be inviting you, our audience, to submit questions to the panel, so do get involved.

Our panel of experts will be:

• Bill McCluggage, Deputy Government CIO and Director of ICT Strategy & Policy at the Cabinet Office
• Mark Brett, Policy & Programme Manager at Socitm
• Marc Straat, Adobe’s European Head of Standards
• Helen Olsen, Managing Editor, UKauthorITy and IT in Use magazine

To access the webinar you will need to register in advance, and we recommend logging in three or four minutes before we’re due to start. Click here to sign up.

@AdobeEnterprise will also be tweeting live from the webinar and you can follow and participate in the conversation on Twitter using the hash tag #AdobeGovLive.

Thursday, 12th May 2011 at 2 pm (45 minute programme)

Tomorrow we’re excited to be hosting 45 minutes of engaging insight into how new developments in technology offer simpler ways to transact – and streaming the debate live to your computer.

Public services are moving inexorably online, and the UK population becoming ever more digitally savvy. The panel will be discussing how best to take advantage of new tech developments in order to meet the needs of both the organisation and its customers.

On the panel will be:

• Glyn Evans, Socitm President, Corporate Director of Business Change at Birmingham City Council and CIO Council member
• Peter Bole, Director of ICT at Kent County Council
• Alan Banks, Managing Director, Adobe UK
• Helen Olsen, Managing Editor, ITU and UKauthorITy

You’ll need to register in advance to access the webinar, and we recommend logging in three or four minutes before we’re due to start – click here to sign-up.

During the programme, which will be broadcast live over the internet using Adobe Connect, we will be asking the audience to participate in polls to gain their views. You will also be able to submit questions to the panel during the interview but due to the volumes we are not able to take all live submissions.

@AdobeEnterprise will also be tweeting live from the webinars and you can follow and participate in the conversation on Twitter using the hash tag #AdobeGovLive.

We’re very excited to say that today (Thursday, 14th April) there will be not one, but two Adobe Government webinars taking place. The topics up for discussion are “ID and Authentication”, followed by “Designing and Delivering Intuitive Online Processes and Service Transactions”

Full details of the expert panellists copied below. As ever you need to register in advance to access the webinar – click here and sign-up.

Thursday 14th April 12pm – ID and authentication:

Panellists include Dane Wright, IT Strategy Manager, London Borough of Brent (Mydex pilot and gov gateway) and Gilles Polin, Head of Government Solutions, Adobe

Thursday 14th April 2.30pm – Designing and Delivering Intuitive Online Processes and Service Transactions (Web Experience Management)

Panellists include: Graham Walker, Government Director for the UK Digital Champion; Dr Lorna Peters, Connect Digitally, Dept of Education and Hertfordshire; and Gilles Polin, Head of Government Solutions, Adobe.

@AdobeEnterprise will also be tweeting live from the webinars and you can follow and participate in the conversation on Twitter using the hash tag #AdobeGovLive.

Thanks to everyone that joined us for the recent Adobe government webinars with ITU Live. It was another really interesting debate. It’s great to see a panel of eminent experts from the industry who are also so “hands-on” in shaping the future of government IT, expressing their opinions in an open and challenging forum.

The topic was Cloud Computing and sparked a lively discussion about the barriers to innovation that are created by the public sector procurement process. A full video of the webinar is available here please do take the time watch.

I’ve also pulled out a few bullets below from the session which I thought were particularly insightful. Do feel free to add your own thoughts about this via the comments section within this blog. We always keen to hear what you have to say.

• Liam Maxwell, IT specialist and Conservative councillor at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, argued that government needs to focus its attention on transparency, personal identity and cross-platform in the cloud to reduce IT spend in local government. A pioneer in his own constituency Liam is championing cloud computing with a view to moving most of Windsor and Maidenhead’s IT into the cloud within the next three years – a bold ambition to say the least.
• Liam states that one of the key things about localism and the localisation of services is that “it should be possible for someone to set up a trestle table in the town centre and open a government office providing services where and as they are needed”. I agree that cloud technology is certainly an enabler for that vision.
• He was also discusses that the public sector can do ‘Better for Less’ – a sentiment which Mark O’Neill, CIO at the Department of Communities & Local Government, and lead on the government’s new ‘skunk-works’, also felt.
• Mark explained how he believes the Comprehensive Spending Review has become a catalyst enabling local and central government to “rethink the business model”, and that this is an opportunity which comes along very rarely in IT.
• Alan Banks, MD for Adobe, completed the panel. Alan brought an IT vendors perspective to the proceedings. Alan commented that, “the model for government IT is changing and there will be no more monolithic IT projects.” He also led the panel in a discussion about the need for open standards and innovation. This a topic also close to Liam Maxwell’s heart, who said that a staggering £51m saving could be achieved by moving to an open document format within government.

This week Adobe will be hosting a live webinar debate discussing the role of shared services and the cloud in the public sector. The webinar will take place at 2pm, Thursday 3 February 2011 (for 45 minutes).

The panel is made of leading figures from technology and the public sector (see below) and will be moderated by Helen Olsen editor of Local Government IT in Use and www.ukauthority.com

• Mark O’Neill, CIO, Knowledge Management, IT & Working Environment at Department of Communities & Local Government/Department of Media, Culture and Sport
• Liam Maxwell, IT specialist and Conservative Councillor at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (Lead author on Conservative think tank paper: Better for Less)
• Alan Banks, MD Adobe UK

During the programme, which will be broadcast live over the internet using Adobe Connect, we will be asking the audience to participate in polls to gain their views. You can also submit questions in advance of the interviews for an ‘Any Questions’ section at the end.

Click here to register to watch the interview live. You will be sent the live link the morning of the webinar and click here to submit a question to the panel.

Hope you enjoy the webinar!

On Wednesday I joined, as a panelist, a live debate on whether web and video conferencing could help the public sector save money.

Public sector cuts are, as we all know, high on the political agenda, and only last month the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, published online details of all his department’s spending over £500. Over £1.5m was spent on travel and hotel accommodation including £635,000 on taxis and cars. For me, web and video conferencing can make a real dent in these costs.

Appropriately, the debate was broadcast live on the web using Adobe Connect, Adobe’s web conferencing technology. We ran a number of live audience polls during the event which showed broad belief that web conferencing could help the public sector cut travel costs (92% said yes), training costs (100%) and carbon emissions (100%). Perhaps more tellingly, less than 10% cited cost as the main obstacle to wider adoption but 75% cited cultural issues.

Best practice advice from the panelists for obtaining end-user buy in for adopting web conferencing was as follows:

Joel Smith, Head of IS at The Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA), the key was making the adoption of video conferencing over the web an evolution not a revolution:

• FERA started with an audio conference and presenter controlled slides
• Then moved users on to an audio conference and shared workspace where they could work on the same document together
• Before moving to full video conferencing

Andy Jones, Senior Learning Consultant at Thomson Reuters it has been a focus on ensuring a great first time experience of web and video conferencing for new users, whether it’s eLearning or a virtual team meeting, by:

• Training presenters, team leaders and trainers on how best to use web / video conferencing
• Keeping sessions short initially
• Providing an interactive experience for learning that includes live questions and virtual break out rooms
• Making sure whoever is leading a session takes time to plan it properly

From my perspective I’d add two further points:

• The importance of finding an internal champion to evangelise and encourage use of web and video conferencing
• The need to continually measure the benefits of web and video conferencing to the organisation. Highlighting the travel costs saved, the carbon emissions avoided and, most importantly, the levels of engagement and satisfaction among employees. There’s a great plug-in for Adobe Connect called Footprints that can help.

We covered a lot of really interesting areas during the debate, from costs and return on investment examples to deployment options, I’ll post more details in due course along with a link to replay of the debate, but in the meantime I’m interested to hear what you think.

Will Cawthorne, Connect Evangelist, Adobe UK

Earlier this month Alan Banks, managing director for Adobe UK, got together with a number of top players from three of the Governments ‘super-sites’ to discuss the role that online government will play in helping to address the public spending budget cuts.

The discussion entitled Government websites, budget cuts and public services involved, in addition to Alan, David Dinsdale, programme director at businesslink; Guy Ker, publishing director, Directgov; Bob Gann, head of strategy at NHS Choices; and was hosted by Helen Olsen, editor of Local Government IT in Use (LGITU).

The group explored the implications of the Government’s review of its website domain and whether online citizen and business self service can help the public sector continue to deliver high quality services in the face of unprecedented budget cuts.

It was streamed live through LGITU Live with viewers encouraged to vote on a series of questions posed throughout the debate. The poll showed that viewers unanimously agreed that online services can maintain public sector service quality whilst at the same time reducing costs. Although, the role of an online brand as an essential element in delivering cost effective online services or as a way to encourage a sense of place and community was more divisive. More details of the poll can be found here.

A summary of the discussion can be viewed below, and we’d love to hear what you think.