It is clear that some councils are already well down the road to becoming a true council of the future, while others are still stuck with the mindset that savings means cuts in service, random cuts in staffing, and concerted publicity about how difficult it all is for them. Only this morning my local paper carries headlines about the services which the local council plans to cut - yet this is in a council where internal inefficiencies remain untackled, and where the opportunities for achieving the benefits of self-service delivery over the web are ignored.

Regular IT Health Checks and penetration testing are necessary to protect your network, website and individual devices against external and internal threats. Compliance and good governance aside, however, penetration testing can often come up with surprising results. Socitm Consulting's IT security partners, Encription Ltd, have been performing â?~top of the treeâ?T quality penetration testing for several years, and have uncovered some alarming cases.

A green ICT strategy needs an overall sustainability agenda, says Terry Street, green ICT procurement product manager, Socitm Consulting.

All over the country, new schools are being built under the Building Schools for the Future initiative. Several of my colleagues advise LEAs on their BSF programmes, and they frequently comment on the irony that new schools typically have extensive air conditioning, necessary in part to carry away the heat generated by all the new computer equipment.

Socitm Consulting had its best year ever at the annual Socitm Conference in Edinburgh. With the highest foot-fall on the Consulting stand of any previous conference, there was always a crowd of people around our various offerings. And this year we had more than ever on display - from our Council of the Future "jigsaw", to our material on the professionalism in IT agenda and the Aspire product, not forgetting our many briefings and learning opportunities.

Socitm Consulting has been awarded certification under the Accredit UK quality standard run by The National Computing Centre. Accredit UK is a mark of quality for the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry and identifies businesses that will deliver ICT solutions to a high standard.

Socitm Consulting has compiled a list of speakers and potential topics as an aid to Socitm Regional secretaries to find suitable agenda material for their regional meetings.

This document has been produced by Socitm Consulting to provide an insight into the evolving requirements for social services information systems and information sharing between health and social care.

It highlights the direction that such systems will need to travel over the next 2-5 years to support the growing vision of a modern and transformed social care service.

The more staff using computers, the more days that can be lost to work-related back pain and repetitive strain injuries. Plus there’s a huge admin overhead in carrying out statutory risk assessment and health & safety training for each computer user. 

The Chancellor’s pre budget statement (and those of the opposition) leaves no doubt that difficult financial times will be experienced by the UK public sector over the next few years. These challenges should be a major spur to all public sector organisations to commit to ICT-enabled transformation of services. In turn this will place the ICT service under an even sharper focus. It will also put even greater pressure on the rest of the organisation to use ICT services much more effectively to achieve such a transformation.