Steve Lamey gave the opening presentation at the Government UK IT Summit yesterday. He had a twenty minute slot and several times that amount of material, so reading his powerpoint was rather like trying to recognise faces in a passing express train. So here are some pretty random fragments:
- HMRC sends out 160 million letters a year. Only 65% get through (though from something he said later, I think he might mean that 35% get returned undelivered, which is not the same thing). Those numbers have taken three months to discover.
- It receives 48 million inbound calls, which sounds reasonably precise, but was then qualified as the central estimate of a range falling between 30 and 60 million.
- Of the 30 million self-assessment returns received each year, 13 million have to be re-processed.
- They are probably missing £30-50 billion a year in revenue not collected
- His mission statement for Information Management Services – their PSD-equivalent – is
Enable improved business processes
which is rather pithier than ours, but also reflects Lamey’s responsibility for the process improvement of PAYE and SA.
- Steve described five principles:
- [Automated] work process
- Turning data into knowledge
- Capturing data at source
- Real time decision making
- Standardised and commoditised
(the square brackets round the first verb are because the speed of delivery was such that I am struggling to decipher my notes – neither ‘anecdotal’ nor ‘ante-natal’ seem quite right in the context)
- He put a lot of stress on finding the ‘killer KPIs’ – the ones which shine unexpected light on performance. Example: data entry for SA returns runs at 11 per person per day – as opposed to the 30 to 40 Steve thinks it should be
- Purpose of the IT function (to go with the mission statement above):
- Deliver high quality services
- Strategic IT planning
- Stimulate business improvement