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The McCue Interview: Preston City Council IT chief Peter Ryder
Wireless cities, the digital divide, real ale and a crumbling bus station...

By Andy McCue

Published: Thursday 25 August 2005

While probably more famed for being the home of the founding members of the football league, and football legend Tom Finney, the city of Preston has some other less glamorous claims to fame - the most (or should that be least) notable being that for many years it had the largest bus station in Europe.

That now decaying concrete monstrosity still dominates one end of the city and sits opposite the town hall which is home to the office of Peter Ryder, head of ICT at Preston City Council.

But Preston is currently booming on the back of being given city status five years ago, and the bus station is due to be knocked down as part of a major, multi-billion pound redevelopment that is expected to get the official green-light next month. Optimism is high all around the city and even the football team, which has spent decades in the doldrums, is now knocking on the door of the Premiership.

North London-born Ryder has made Preston his home after joining the council 20 years ago and is public sector through-and-through. A stint in Tesco's IT department as a student earning beer money pushed Ryder towards a career in IT and, after his A-levels, he joined the London Borough of Enfield as a computer trainee - though he laughs at how much things have changed since those days.

"When I got there they didn't have a computer and were just about to get one in so I was actually working on an ICT tabulating machine with a punch panel. They then got a Honeywell 200 with something like 64K of memory with a keyboard," he says.

Ryder enjoyed the problem-solving but not the hours of Cobol programming which followed and so he moved to the London Online Local Authorities (Lola), working on introducing the first online real-time IT systems into local government. Following a spell at Hillingdon Council, Ryder stepped up the ladder and out of London to become IT manager at Wyre Borough Council in Fleetwood. Then he made the switch to Preston.

As head of ICT at Preston City Council, Ryder is responsible for a surprisingly modest budget of just £1.5m for 23 IT staff who cover PC installation for 1,000 desktops over 12 sites, 40 servers, networking and IT strategy and support.

"For a long time we've not developed anything because we felt that was not the best way forward so we do buy packages and we don't play around with them too much and that has meant we can keep down the size of the ICT department," he says.

In fact, since last November Ryder has handed over the day-to-day running of the IT department to a colleague so that he can concentrate all his efforts on project managing Preston's e-Innovation programme.

One of the key strands of the programme is creating a citywide wireless infrastructure, and with more than 100 hotspots and access points Ryder claims Preston was the first wireless city, though he acknowledges that no-one is really fully there yet.

"I think Glasgow said it is the first wireless city in Scotland and it has something like five access points. We have over 100 in Preston and I don't consider us to be wireless. To all intents and purposes we were the first wireless city but even now its not true, total, blanket wireless, it's hotspots within Preston," he says.

Wireless coverage is currently done through partnerships with commercial firms and the University of Central Lancashire to cover bars, cafes and other public spaces. The council has also put hotspots into the town hall and other public buildings but Ryder believes convergence will be the key to a true wireless network.

"Technology is an issue. Is it going to be WiMax, is it going to be hotspots or any of a number of other technologies? We're putting hotspots in and doing Wi-Fi but there's mesh networking out there and WiMax, and as technologies start to converge we may have to think again and do something subtly different."

Some of the other strands of the e-Innovations programme revolve around using technology to work with community groups in order to bridge the so-called 'digital divide' and reach disenfranchised and disadvantaged citizens.

Ryder explains: "We looked at how we could take services to excluded citizens. There is this hardcore of people who are being disenfranchised from electronic services because they haven't had the opportunity to have any exposure to it. And you are talking not just the old people but some of the young kids in the deprived areas. They just haven't got the facilities."

The four areas the council is working on are adding video email capability to internet kiosks; SMS information and advice services for young people; putting community radio on the internet; and helping community groups build their own websites through a simple template-based content management system.

The council already has around 14 free internet kiosks in the city - which totalled 186,000 hits last month - and Ryder wants to add video capability to allow people to send short video messages as email attachments. He believes this will benefit both the large overseas student population who want to send messages home as well as the asylum seeker and migrant worker population for the same reason.

Ryder is also involved in wider public sector IT strategy as a vice president of local authority user group Socitm and he believes the efficiency targets set by the Gershon Review are going to be a major issue for councils over the next few years.

"The big problem for authorities - and I'm not sure they've really grappled with it yet - is the joining up across authorities. What you're talking about is sharing back-office processes. A payroll system is a payroll system is a payroll system. It doesn't matter who is running it and where from. You can have a payroll system that pays out one or 20 authorities," he says.

Despite his obvious enthusiasm for the job, one of Ryder's real passions is getting out into the countryside and when not tending his allotment he can often be found hill-walking somewhere in the Lake District. Ryder's love of real ale is also given away by the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) posters pinned up in his town hall office.

"I know more about beer and breweries than I do about IT, and I actually do occasional pub surveys for Camra in the local area where I have to report back on the quality of the beer - it's a hard job but someone has to do it," he jokes.

He's also clued up on the latest music and the Kaiser Chiefs and Scissor Sisters are currently on heavy rotation in his car but Ryder admits he's not yet been seduced by the iPod or other MP3 players.

"That's where technology and me begin to part," he says.

Back at the coal face and Ryder will be busy for the next month working to meet the deadline for the e-Innovation project.

"Then we'll take a step back, look at the cost/benefit analysis and see what we can do to make it better. We'll take those strands and incorporate them into the overall Preston City Council service delivery strategy and they will become mainstream," he says.