Rosy put this video together for a visit to Prodrive, I think it is fabulous, talking to her tonight she has several more on her website http://www.rosydesign.co.uk/Rosy_Burke.html

I tweeted about this in June when I first came across it.

After several months discussing with the various parties involved the first issue of e-Chartam hit the Thames Valley District Society part of icaew.com.

Various District Societies (DS) publish similar newsletters and some are printed and posted and some are available for download on their own areas of icaew.com/regions. The Thames Valley also have a printed magazine that will next hit your post boxes in early May.

The common factor is that all the societies have trouble providing news to all their members. The newsletter was announced in Stoppress as one of the few methods the DS has of telling members it exists. The opening rate on this sign posting news email that started as something akin to e-Chartam is now very low with a subsequent issue on click throughs to the articles. I believe the Institute’s web experts advise that the size and format of Stoppress is the optimum for reader’s opening it.

The Institute has issues with being able to email small PDF’s to their members. The belief is that many members will be unhappy if they received the full PDF in their inbox. In the past I believe this was the case but with the advent of reasonable broadband and the fact that Outlook will now allow you to review a PDF in the preview window I find I am receiving more and more optimised PDF’s in my inbox. The big ones (multi-megabytes) are still links on web sites. I would be interested in your views.

Equally with the advent of the Members Preference Centre I believe the old issue of too much “spam” email from the Institute is now over, perhaps you are still on old affiliate marketing mailing lists but these are easily dealt with as no one wants to upset possible customers and the unsubscribe button will usually work.

Readers and friends will know I have been involved in Institute communications to District Society members for some time and since the demise of the centrally funded printed newsletter (News Review) I have felt that members deserve more information on what is happening locally and would welcome your views as to how you like to receive that information.

Readers might know I spent some time developing a blog for a UK firm of Chartered Accountants, Kevin Beare & Co, I have nothing to do with the excellent content, just the creation of the blog in WordPress based on their PracticeWeb main website.

However, Paul Beare, the editor of the blog following his excellent content has been awarded for his efforts and now blogs for for the US AccountingWeb website under the name “The UK Voice”

Paul adores tea – however he is not your "typical Brit". He despises bad customer service, does not come from either Oxford, or Cambridge – has good teeth, and speaks eloquently.  He represents a UK accounting firm that concentrates on helping US companies enter the UK and succeed! Paul provides general UK tax, accounting and cultural insights in a light-hearted and practical way. He is, The UK Voice.

If you need help with this type of development including content then please use the contact page.

I have just read Nigel Hastilows excellent summary on Advantage West Midlands demise and replacement by LEPS (here on ICAEW ION community site)

One thing  that Nigel’s summary shows is that the organisations wanting to create their own LEPs will have their own agendas and they will all have their own physical boundaries.

Being someone who has lived on the edge of the RDA’s since their creation I am now concerned more by the fact that the LEP’s might not reach all the parts they need to and that we will have a new generation of self inflicted “Not Spots” like we do with broadband.

The ICAEW have put together some good ideas regarding what to do next after the demise of the RDA’s.

See their press release on the ICAEW website Business support: ideas for the future 

The wait and see approach as to what aspects of support are retained in the centre has a great deal to be said for it. The LEPs could be toothless by the time the Coalition has retained all the juicy bits.

If you want a shiny PDF of the article use the contact page and I will email one.

Earlier in the month the Cabinet Office released a press release about the cost of some information web sites run by UK Government departments – see the release “Clamp down on Government websites to save millions” on the Cabinet Office Site.

A report published today by the Central Office for Information (COI) found that across government £94 million has been spent on the construction and set up and running costs of just 46 websites and £32 million on staff costs for those sites in 2009-10. The most expensive websites are:

• uktradeinvest.gov.uk which costs £11.78* per visit; and
• businesslink.gov.uk which costs £2.15 per visit.

Before we lose some of these sites perhaps we should have more information than just the headline grabbing cost per visit.

HOW MUCH REVENUE DID THE PUBLIC GENERATE FROM THE INFORMATION PER CLICK?

I recently commented to a post on the ICAEW ION ITCOUNTS website about the same report:

As with all statistics the headline is in the detail a big cost number divided by a small user number is always a big number, but over what period, equally have the websites been through a major re-write during the period all giving them a high rating,

Obviously some sites have had a lot of money spent on their pretty design (usability as well don’t forget) but we have to ascertain if the end-users of the sites have actually benefited the economy by using the information provided on the site. How would the Cabinet Office collect that information?

After all the information has to be made available, the issue is that they should not be marketing portals for government/party departments they have to be useful information for the citizens and business of the country.

I guess the policy decision was to make the information available on the internet, the civil servants (who are still in post) decided how and how much to spend of their finite resources (our tax pounds) creating the sites.

David Bailey in his Birmingham Post BusinessBlog has a very good discussion on what we all need to think about before we jump into replacing the RDA’s

After RDAs: Look before you LEP

By David Bailey on Jul 12, 10 11:10 PM in Economics

As days go by we begin to learn more about what the coalition government, now two months old, has in mind in terms of economic development across England.

Leave aside the fact that London can carry on as usual, along with Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, where there is no change to their development agencies. We’re talking of course of the English regions, or rather what replaces them.

What do we know so far?

The Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) that will replace the RDAs will, it seems, have to fund their own running costs, with LEPs bidding into a central pot of some £500 million a year (a quarter of what the RDAs had to work with).

And after Communities Secretary Eric Pickles won out in a Yes-Minister style Whitehall Turf War with Business Secretary Vince Cable, popular RDAs in The North East and West Midlands won’t after all be able to continue. They’re being scrapped, lock, stock and barrel.

As I’ve said in earlier blogs, that’s a mistake as there is much expertise in RDAs like Advantage West Midlands (AWM) which could be used to join up the work of sub-regional LEPs.

And even if a LEP’s territory actually maps that of an old RDA, sadly much of the RDAs’ former work will head back to Whitehall anyway.

…… the rest is here:

http://blogs.birminghampost.net/business/2010/07/after-rdas-look-before-you-lep.html

Should it disappear I have saved it here ……

After RDA’s look before you lep pdf

Well the first Coalition Budget scraps the RDA’s and wants “Local Enterprise Partnerships”. Lets hope these are big enough to have economies of scale and small enough to be approachable and really relate to “functional economic areas”.

Making some policies national will however mean that one primary advantage of the RDA’s will be lost, the local knowledge utilised for investment in the local economy. Who will advise the relevant Government Department that a local market town initiative in rural England is better than one in an inner city or vice versa. Market forces are good but only where there is a sufficient economy in place to allow it to happen. Seed corn investment is needed across rural and urban boundaries.

Coalition Letter to Local Authorities and Business Leaders

I wonder if the proposed meeting on 12th July between Cherwell District and South Northamptonshire Councils regarding a possible merger of their management teams will have an impact on this.

Cherwell District Council and South Northamptonshire Council consider benefits of working together.

One of my biggest gripes over the years is that I live on the border of several RDA’s – SEEDA, AVM, EMDA and SWRDA and not far from EEDA.

I really hope this “Local” idea helps the surrounding economy and doesn’t just add another set of conflicting boundaries.

As a member of the Institute’s member communications working group I would welcome your views on the revamped icaew.com website

I believe it looks crisper and fresher, but can you use it better than before?

The problem used to be that there was so much information on there that you couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

Another criticism was about needing to know your ICAEW membership number and password for some pages and not others, has this changed for what you need?

Why oh why do mobile phone contracts have to be so difficult to evaluate.

My contract is up for renewal, so far my provider has admitted to making several mistakes in the history he has pulled up making each quote he has given me next to useless. I make an enquiry about using a Blackberry and lo the cost is 5 times that given on a major providers website.

Is it so difficult to quote for five phones and a 3G broadband package, where I only want to replace 3 phones and have mobile email for two.

Now I need to do the call evaluations that I thought my supplier was doing, to ensure he has done it properly.

Phones I have been looking at range from my Nokia E61 replacement the E71, the Samsung Omnia, Blackberry Curve and a Nokia E66/6220.