Compass, a management consulting company, has acted like an independent actuary to Lancashire, measuring the organization's IT spending and performance. "Their role is to measure performance and to advise, but they do not supply other services," Brown says of why Lancashire is happy working with the UK-based organization. "You don't ask Oracle what database to use!"

Compass regularly compares Lancashire ICT services with those in the financial sector in the UK, Germany and Canada. Financial companies are used as the bellwether because they are "cited as requiring exceptional availability and reliability," a spokesperson for Compass says. Compass measures the performance by operational procedures of the organization because these are independent of the industrial sector or location. "An internal benchmark is of limited value. The value comes from an external perspective and comparison across sectors and even countries," Dickens says.

Lancashire has now had a seven-year relationship with Compass, which continues as a rolling contract. Last year Compass carried out an analysis of the desktop support provided by the Lancashire ICT team. As well as using Compass, Lancashire uses Socitm to measure its services against other local authorities.

Looking back to the very first analysis of its services Compass carried out, Dickens says they, as was expected, discovered weaknesses. "It showed us where we needed to improve, and we learnt those lessons."

Using the information on how it measured up, the ICT team created a dashboard so that all staff members can see the department's performance. The dashboard, on an intranet page, shows the 24 key performance indicators for the ICT department and draws on 80 metrics.

Lancashire County Council ICT has three key priorities: customer access through self-service; face-to-face and telephone contact; efficiency; and information security.

Internally the ICT department produces a service catalogue of what it provides to the organization, including application hosting, customer service desk, networks, mobile, professional services and desktop support. It not only tells the organization the services on offer, but how to reduce ICT costs. As well as helping departments reduce their individual costs, Brown and Dickens have reduced the authority's ICT costs, standardizing PCs and desktops through an e-auction that saved US$1.5 million. Brown points out that these are the results you can show to your financial director and not only show a saving, but also an improvement in service.

Local authorities are under increasing pressure to be greener, as part of their social responsibility. Again, the duo, both long-termers at the authority, have grasped the nettle. Printers have been reduced from 40 to four in the Preston HQ, each is networked and requires the user to swipe their log in card to print. This has reduced the cost of staff ordering their own printer cartridges and the amount of printing. "It alters behavior: people used to default to color, which is two-thirds dearer. Now people default to double-sided greyscale," Dickens says.

Part of the success story at Lancashire is down to the system that Brown and Dickens operate within. The Lancashire authority has fixed elections, every four years, with the next one coming in May 2009. "Whoever gets in power produces a corporate strategy for the next term," Dickens explains. "We produce an IT strategy that flows into that corporate strategy." The UK Labour party has dominated control of the authority in recent years, but things could be about to change.

Turning its reputation for drastic cuts to public services on its head, the Conservative party is saying that if it won power in Lancashire it would spend more than the incumbent authority.

Whichever party runs the north western county, Brown and Dickens are busy with a business transformation project that will keep them focused until 2011. Currently the authority has offices throughout Lancashire, but this will be transformed to three important service hubs in the North, East and South of the county, which will provide the citizens with access to Lancashire services. Already the ICT team has enabled a webcam based call center service for citizens to talk face-to-face, but remotely, with Lancashire council staff. Self-service through the internet has also been a major priority, both to reduce costs and to improve access to their services. "Ninety-eight percent of the county population live two miles from a library," Dickens says.