A year of work in progress – day 43

Day 43 – 4 March 2014

I seem to mention Digital Durham all of the time and so I should.  It is important to the region, not just the County and takes up a fair chunk of my time.  It’s so important that it isn’t even on my ten things to achieve this year.  There is no choice, it has to be achieved.

If you remember our aim is to provide, or at least have provided superfast broadband to every single business, home and community across the county.  We are making good progress but there is a long way to go.

We are working with our colleagues in Gateshead, Sunderland and the five Tees Valley authorities across two local enterprise partnerships (no mean achievement in itself) yet there are two authorities that are not yet engaged with the broadband agenda.   So this morning Tony (two LEPs) Thompson and I visited South Tyneside to see if there was any help we could give.  With our programme abutting their area there are some cross border issues to be addressed.  We got a good reception and agreed some ways forward before any formal decision be made.

Before that I met with a colleague from Coventry City Council who happens to live in this neck of the woods.  (Don’t ask, it’s a long story!)  They are looking to replace their telephony system and wanted to draw upon our (good) experiences.  Of course we talked about Local Government review and Unified Communications.  This is something that I use every day and confess that I couldn’t work in the way that I do without it.  But if you are not a user then you just don’t get it and so it’s a hard sell to people outside of ICT that is unless you are fairly young and grew up on MSN.  I’m not but my daughters did. 

As he works locally on a Friday we agreed to meet up again.

Remember that BSF report I wrote on Friday?  This afternoon I got the opportunity to present it to School’s Capital Programme Board.  I only stayed for my agenda item and I talked about how we are planning to develop the service to meet the ever changing needs of the schools.  The pace of change in ICT within the educational sector is very rapid and so a balance needs to be struck between the need to provide stable and reliable ICT with the need to be more agile and responsive.  No problem there then.  I had a few interesting questions and got out unscathed.

I then went to Newcastle to meet with my mate and counterpart Jim.

Learning points for today:   The beard is still the talk of the town; You need to be careful not to talk yourself out of a sale and; I need to be clear about who’s writing a report before getting involved.

Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – Four good meetings and a report finally put to bed.