Imagining a connected future

December 8th, 2009 by IngridK

Feeling crafty

I love crafts. I don’t do much by way of crafts anymore at home, but I love a good workshop based on the use of brown paper and stickers and coloured bits of paper. The Blue Peter method of facilitation.

Ocasionally you get people (often senior) balking at rolling up their sleeves and gluing pictures on paper. So, it’s often best to show one you made earlier, just to set some parameters on it and show that it will be useful.

Yesterday at the 2nd meeting of the Knowledge Hub advisory group, we asked people to map how they would use the Knowledge Hub (imagining that it’s everything they wanted it to be) to satisfy their knowledge and information needs around a popular, complex LAA target. (In one case, NI 111 – first time entrants to the youth justice system and NI 39 hospital admissions due to alcohol related harm).

Never mind just finding information about those indicators themselves, you need a whole host of information – from behaviour change to influencing indicators. And ideally you’d want a network of people – inside your own organisation, within partnerships, within your community and ideally among similar professionals who were working with you – sharing the work, ideas and information.

Don’t follow this path

I didn’t want to influence people too much, so in my ‘here’s one I made earlier’ version – I concentrated on mapping what’s there now. I did an ‘off the top of my head’ map of a newly appointed performance management officer who needed to know how to improve performance management. This is an area not unfamiliar to me (as I developed much of the web resource at www.idea.gov.uk/performance) but it’s one I hadn’t worked on in a while. If you wanted to know who the top performers are in performance management, you could go and have a look at Corporate Assessment scores for CPA which gives a score for performance management – but if you wanted to know what those councils are doing in terms of managing their performance management, you might struggle. Our Partnerships and Places library does list a few performance management case studies, but there are no links from those case studies to our popular PM resource – which also contains some fairly timeless good advice about how to set targets or write a service plan. ESD toolkit has some great information about all the different national indicators and how they link together – but that doesn’t link to the Policy and Performance Community of Practice (2700 members) or the PM community (1200 members).

OK, it’s been a while since I actively worked on that area, but I had tried to make it as ‘linkety’ as possible (at least from our end). But even from the bits I could control directly – it really wasn’t that easy to navigate (or even discover) the rich variety of resources that are available that are adminstered in some part by the IDeA. Never mind all the other stuff that’s out there. I was shocked by how disconnected it all was. (We’re in the midst of a big refresh of our PM resources, so it’s not all a lost cause)

In a sense, that disconnection is something that we’re just used to – it’s a legacy of world without hyperlinks. It’s just a fact that great resources are developed through different projects over different timescales and so of course they may not always link up.

But it doesn’t have to be that way…at least not in the world of local government. We can have a better connected future…one where stories of improvement are linked and shared, one where peer validated resources are suggested to you as you search through Knowledge Hub.