Bromley Councillors’ Policy Forum
Last Saturday, a colleague and I had the privilege to participate in a weekend event held by the London Borough of Bromley for serving councillors and council executives. The event was a policy forum involving all elected councillors, council officers and partner agencies in sharing ideas and developing strategies to help Bromley achieve the objectives laid out in their Bromley 2020 vision to build a better borough.
We had been invited to deliver a workshop on Technology for Collaboration and Community Engagement for over 60 councillors and council officers first thing on Saturday morning. I am not sure what the councillors got out of the session but I do know it was a revelation to me. When you exist inside the ‘cocoon’ that is IT you convince yourself that there is no problem that IT cannot contribute to solving. Stepping outside the world of IT into the real world you quickly realise that it is not that simple.
When faced with such diverse challenges as delivering better value for money for council tax payers, coping with an ever-increasing aging population and understanding how to improve the overall quality of life for citizens in the borough (to name but a few of the challenging topics discussed on the day) you quickly realise that proving how IT can help in any respect is a major challenge in itself. Did we answer all the questions raised? Certainly not. However, we did come away with at least two definite learnings:
- We need to work harder on working out how IT really does enable local authorities to deliver on their objectives across the diverse needs of their citizens.
- Councillors and council officers suffer from a unjustifiable ‘bad press’ – they are dedicated public sector professionals who are doing their damnedest to improve the quality of life for their citizens and are deeply concerned about how to engage more people in the democratic process and getting involved with improving their communities.
If your local authority is thinking of holding similar policy forums or visioning sessions we would very much like to participate. I promise you, we do not ‘sell product’ but aim to focus more on showing what can be done with technology to improve areas of council operation, to communicate with all age groups and communities and to encourage greater involvement through edemocracy. Just send an email to lrg@microsoft.com and we shall be in touch.
Posted by Ian