[Reader-list] You've got no mail .... from www.guardian.co.uk

[Bijoyini]

You've got no mail - Do you ever feel enslaved by your
email? 
By Esther Addley. 

15 August 2002
The Guardian

David Henshaw, the chief executive of Liverpool city
council, is tickled.  It's the second time in two days
that we have spoken, having met previously in his
stately office in central Liverpool, where -
inevitably – my brand-new tape machine had failed to
record the interview. So we're repeating our
conversation, this time relying on old-fashioned
telephone and shorthand, and Henshaw is enjoying the
aptness of it all. "There's a lovely irony in all the
Guardian's fancy technology not working," he chuckles.
He is going to retell the story at the next management
meeting, he says, and perhaps even write it up for the
council newsletter. 

Everyone's going lo-tech these days in Liverpool, at
Henshaw's instigation.  Three weeks ago, the staff at
the council, all 19,500 of them, were informed of a
new workplace rule: every Wednesday, all internal
email communication would be banned. They would not be
allowed to set up meetings, forward documents or
arrange assignations in the pub by sending an email to
their colleagues. Instead they would have to relearn
forgotten skills and pick up the phone, or walk to
each other's desks, for a conversation. 

"It all started because our email traffic had doubled
in six months," he says, "and there seemed to be some
evidence that people were feeling oppressed by
technology. Email was becoming the new filing; people
were sending mails to say, 'I've passed this on to
you.' " So Henshaw decided "to have a little fun with
it". Wednesday, henceforth, was Luddite day, and the
staff, insists Henshaw, love it. The 100,000 emails
handled each day by the council's hard-pressed server
has plummeted by 70% mid-week. Henshaw says his own
Wednesday traffic has dropped from 250 to 25. 

It has been a few years since the demise of email was
first predicted, as workers began to gripe about the
increasingly silly volume of messages they were
expected to read and process each day. Many employees
now spend two or more hours a day dealing with their
mail, a third of which, according to a survey last
year, is spam - junk email - or unnecessary or just
plain nonsense. But the medium appears to be in rude
health, proliferating merrily, to the exasperation of
those who do actually like to get some work done each
day.
 
So could Liverpool have the solution? The council
insists the initiative was not primarily about easing
the workload of its staff; the intention was to make
the place more efficient for "customers". "We don't
want people using email and thinking, 'If I copy in
about 10 people then I've moved the action - it's no
longer my responsibility,' " says Pauline Owens, the
council's e-government manager. "Plus, people get into
the habit of logging on straight away, and anything
that comes through on email is dealt with first.  That
isn't what business is about." 

E-government, she explains, is about "e-enabling
services" - making as many of the council's functions
as possible accessible via the internet. Doesn't that
rather contradict the aim of reducing email traffic?
Apparently not, since emails from customers are still
allowed on Wednesdays; staff simply have to deal with
requests directly rather than leave them to fester in
an inbox or pass them on to someone else. It's part of
a wider initiative pioneered by a new department in
the council, zingily titled Team Liverpool, that
exists, it would seem, to "get things done". "This
whole team is a corporate body that sits at the centre
of the organisation to help facilitate the service
areas within the organisation. Along with e-government
you have the process of business process
re-engineering, which means looking at the process
from end to end and then e-enabling it."  

Is this really Liverpool city council - the nutcase
authority famed for the loony left and the municipal
anarchy of the Degsy Hatton era - taking the lead in
creative business practice, not to mention
unintelligible management-speak? Times have certainly
changed in Merseyside, though the transformation from
basket case to business paragon has been a brutal one.
 

After a crack team of troubleshooters were sent in to
the failing council in 1998, the number of departments
was slashed from 11 to five, and their respective
managers were forced to actually communicate with each
other.  The results of the reorganisation are
certainly impressive. In a groundbreaking scheme set
up last month, Liverpool now sells its services to
other authorities, and it has been awarded "beacon
council" status, meaning that it is a national leader
in providing certain services. Council tax, once
sky-high, has also fallen to become the seventh-lowest
in the country.

Henshaw has been named by this paper as one of the 15
most powerful people in local government; he is
certainly one of the best paid people working anywhere
in the public sector.  Having taken apart a local
authority and put it back together, Henshaw must see
tinkering with the way his staff communicate with each
other as decidedly small fry. The business process, in
the jargon of his breathless team of sharp-suited
managers, has been "re-engineered". "It's about the
organisation internally," gushes Owens, "about making
ourselves think better and work smarter." And the
sheaf of papers sitting in front of her, which looks
suspiciously like a pile of internal emails that she
has printed out?  "Um, yes, those are particular
issues my boss said I should speak to you about." Just
so long as he sent them on Tuesday.


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