The ‘you’ in the thinklist questions is deliberately ambiguous: it can be applied to individual practice, to practice within the team or to senior management teams looking at organisation-wide functions, or even to the whole organisation. There are no ‘pat’ answers; rather, the questions are designed to encourage engagement with the issues.

Chapter One

• • What resources (time, energy, money) do you invest in ICT?

• • Has this gone up, down, or stayed the same over the past five years?

• • What has been positive about this? What has been negative?

Chapter Two

• • How important is information in the provision of your services?

• • The 1998 Data Protection Act is frequently misunderstood. What are the main principles underlying the Act (see www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk)? Should you change your practice?

• • What is the range of mechanisms to protect children, and adults, from exposure to offensive material and potential dangers of abuse on the Internet?

Chapter Three

• • What knowledge does your work require you to have?

• • Categorise this knowledge: is it tacit or explicit, informal or formal?

• • Is this how it should be?

Chapter Four

• • What are your main flows of information?

• • Do you have an information management strategy?

• • What might this mean for the three ‘C’s: content, channel, communication?

Chapter Five

• • What is your information chain? Where are the breaks and duplications?

• • What is the information chain between your front office and back office; between your workplace and partner agencies; over your agency and your partner agencies?

• • How could this be improved?

Chapter Six

• • The funding of ICT: what model are you experiencing?

• • How inclusive is your ICT planning, development and delivery?

• • Do you have an ICT strategy?

Chapter Seven

• • In accessing information from your workplace, what barriers do people face?

• • Do you act as an information intermediary?

• • Could you do this better?

Chapter Eight

• • How is e-government affecting you?

• • Where would your service users be on the curve of normal distribution? Is this changing?

• • Is the content you provide actually what people want?

Chapter Nine

• • How might you draw on ICT-enabled support groups, campaign groups and community nets in delivering your work objectives?

• • How might your work involve a range of media in delivering your work objectives (for example, film, sound, imagery)?

• • What would the entitlement card mean for your work?