Podcast series: what is your organisation’s accessible
tech maturity level?
Lucy: Ok and welcome to this latest instalment of the business disability forums podcast
series, I’m Lucy Ruck the technology taskforce manager and today I have the pleasure of
speaking to David Caldwell the IT accessible team manager at Barclays, hello David.
David: Hey Lucy.
Lucy: So we thought it we would be good today to focus on one of the tools we use within
the Technology Taskforce, with the support of its partners, which is the accessibility
maturity model or the AMM for short, cause otherwise it’s just a bit of a mouthful.
Rather then you listening to me talk about it David and I will have a bit of a chat to give you
some of the background to it and pass on some of the best practise on how they go about
using it. So as with all of our podcasts we really want to hear from you, so we would really
appreciate your feedback if you would like to email us at
[email protected] or you can call us at our London offices on 0207
403 3020 or tweet as at twitter handle @disabilitysmart, so David I’ve got some questions
shall we get started.
David: Yeah bring it on.
Lucy: excellent right so I know that you know all about the AMM and what it is and how it
works but could you tell us a bit about it, how it was developed and how you came to be
involved.
David: Yeah sure so the AMM or the Accessibility Maturity Model is a tool that’s been
designed to help organisations assess their current level of accessibility maturity and it
also helps them identify areas that they need to do more work in.
In essence its designed to answer the age old question, what does good look like. It was
originally developed by the technology taskforce in 2008 by members, with support of
members such as Lloyds and EWP and HMRC but in 2016 we took a fresh look at AMM to
see how it could be better aligned to another tool the Accessibility Technology Charter
(ATC) and to make it a tool for organisations to use to help them track their progress
against that charter as well.
Lucy: excellent so we’ve touched on the charter there so could you tell me a little bit more
about what the charter is and how does the AMM link to that.
David: so the charter which launched in 2011,
Lucy: you know what David I am loving the stats there that’s marvellous,
David: Thanks Lucy, so the charter sets out ten commitments around good practise in ICT
which organisations can sign up to, as the AMM was created before the charter there was
a bit of a mismatch between the checkpoints in the charter and the items in the AMM so
we decided to align them closer together, the AMM became a tool to help organisations to
track and monitor themselves against their commitments but also to give them a sense of
what the commitments around the ATC really are and we are seeing members use the
AMM a lot more since we aligned it closer to the charter because that’s what they have
signed up to deliver and to commit to.
Lucy: It’s just more practical a bit more interlinked they complement each other nicely,
excellent so could you tell us a bit about how Barclays use the AMM, maybe a bit of history
around that, how you came to use it, how you are using it now maybe and just fill us in on
that.
David: Yeah sure so I think historically we’ve used it as a tool because it is part of our
commitments under the Accessible Technology Charter but since the changes we are
using it a lot more proactively and we are using it as a leadership engagement tool,
leaders love a good Capability Maturity Model and this is no different, it helps them to see
where the organisations doing well and where we need more focus, so recently we’ve
changed the model, we’ve updated it, we’ve adopted an approach that we like to call an
SME review, so essentially Barclays has a centre of excellence team and we are best
placed we think to know about accessibility in the broadest terms across the organisation
so what we do as a team is we come together and independently rate ourselves against
each other ten areas of the AMM then we pool together all of our ratings and come up with
an average rating which we discuss and we debate and sometimes it can get a little
heated and sometimes we identify areas that people don’t know enough about in the team,
so not only is it a great tool for our team to be able to attract the maturity across the whole
organisation it also helps us to understand which bits of projects other members of the
team need to be pulled in on.
Lucy: Ok so you’ve talked about the maturity model and the 10 points in the charter, within
that I always think of it as in a grid formation so along the left hand side you have the
charter points one to ten across the top you have one to five one being poor and five being
best practice, I suspect the scores ranging for different taskforce members within that
could you tell us a bit of what the scores look like, what people might expect when they
first start completing these AMM.
David: So if I’m honest what people should expect is for their scores to be low, generally
what we see being in the taskforce is a bit of fear that having a high score means you’re
doing badly but all it means is that maybe your focus isn’t quite right or you’re doing some
great things but they are a bit scatter gun, the way that the model works you are quite right
that it works from one to five and as you progress through those areas your maturity
increases so one being you are not doing much two means you have process in place but
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it’s not quite being rolled out, three is the process is starting to work with four and five
being the high performing areas, so what we see is people moving quite quickly through
the charter points so areas at the top one two and three tend to be where people
accelerate quite quickly but ones further down which look at procurement and showing
best practise tend to take a little longer because they are harder for organisations to
deliver so actually the best way to think about it is if you start at the top left and you finish
in the bottom right moving progressively across all of that will help keep things moving.
Lucy: and with all these things it’s not that a neat and practical ‘you’re in this box and jump
neatly to the next one’ some of these things you overlap to a couple of boxes almost if you
like can’t you? So we talked before about half scores in that and it’s been quite useful I
think for people hasn’t it?
David : It is and we introduced half scores more formally as part of the refresh and
encouraged people to use half scores to recognise that they are doing some good work to
show progress, there is nothing worse than sitting at a score for months and years
because actually the bit to get to a full score is just that little too difficult that little half score
really helps companies feel the momentum moving in their organisations.
Lucy: Ok so we have called about how Barclays has used the AMM, we have also run this
a couple of times with the wider technology taskforce team could you tell us a little about
that and how they have found that experience.
David: Yeah so there is, we have done it twice now we did it in 2016 and again in 2017 we
bring together taskforce members as a group to come up with a taskforce average and in
that way we do it as an SME review it’s the leaders in that room who do it, what we have
seen through conversation with the taskforce members is that there is some other ways of
doing it that we recognised and we created a best practice guide that talks in detail about
the different approaches, so the other ones we found and there is bound to be more the
list is defiantly not exhausted, so we have the SME review which is what we talked through
a moment ago which involves a centre of excellence team or a group of people who know
accessibility really well coming up with the score for the organisation who are best placed
to do that.
The second way is a committee review which is similar to the SME review but in that
situation you pull together people across the organisation who are best placed so you
might bring in head of sourcing or you might bring in head of facilities depending on your
organisation and in the committee you discuss and review what you all think and come to
a collective consensuses.
Then the final way is the most formal approach where you use that similar approach but
you find people in the organisation in the best place like the head of sourcing and they
review and submit the score a bit more like a benchmarking exercise where you are taking
feedback from across the organisation and what we tend to find is that organisations that
are new to the AMM use that approach because it’s the most formal approach but it helps
them find champions across the organisation which is a key part of the AMM itself.
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Lucy: Yes of course, so we’ve talked about the resources we have got on the taskforce
website and its useful to say that if you go to the BDF website there is links to the
Technology Taskforce pages then if you click on to the Technology Taskforce charter it
then gives you them 10 points, if you go into them 10 points we are building up a library of
resources to really help guild people and I also remember a member of the taskforce
saying to me ‘this is the stuff I wish I’d have known when I started off doing this
accessibility stuff’ and I think that’s what it is, its common sense practical guidance and I
think we have about 15 guides and 10 to 12 case studies which includes cases from
Barclays as well your core principles links to the YouTube stuff you have done recently
and so on, so it’s an ever-growing library resource I think for us.
So there are 10 points on the AMM, I think we had already touched on this a little bit but
am I best to try and aim myself, see where I am, to score myself and work out I’ve set my
targets of where I want to get to or do I just do two or three at once? You talked about
starting in the top left and working down what other approaches or how would you really
recommend to really make sure this works cause what we want is to try and give people
the best practise guidance those keys to success on making this achievable.
David: So I think probably the best thing to do is to do the whole thing, to score yourself
that way you’ll know where you’re doing really well and where you need some
improvement and the tool will give you some guidance on what you need to do to get each
score, it’s probably then worth at that point sitting down and working out what’s the stuff
we can do now and what is the stuff that will take some time and focusing on the stuff you
can do now. I have not met an organisation yet that doesn’t value progress and that quick
wins isn’t something that they want to do, finding those things that you could say get you
from a one to a two.
There’s three simple things that I can do so let’s do that now because that’ll help show
progress and help with conversations with my CIO or the person in charge of technology in
my organisation to really help them sort of buy in to what you’re doing and maybe then
they’ll release some money to be able to do other things or give you some extra resources
and in the world of accessibility those things are really important.
Lucy: And I think its proving you’ve actually achieved something to show its worth then get
on and do some next things, it’s like a project plan almost isn’t it? What makes it
achievable?
David: I think it’s also worth pointing out this is not something people can do overnight this
takes years and what we’ve found actually from conversations with members and we’ve
experienced it ourselves sometimes, you go backwards, sometimes you might be at a four
and something happens to the organisations, something changes and you go back down
to a three or even two.
Lucy: but that could be so useful sometimes to have documented your scores and be able
to show people who maybe made the decisions that had caused that impact to actually
say as soon as that system went in my scores have changed, so it’s an incredibly useful
management tool isn’t it, gives them really good stats.
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Now I’m thinking about the scores that people have, people may be thinking the
Technology Taskforce ‘well surely everyone in the Taskforce is scoring fives on everything’
but that’s not really the case is it?
David: No its really not, I think the average score that we worked out last time was about
two and a half it may have been two point four which is interesting isn’t it?
Lucy: There was a lot of twos and threes wasn’t there and I think I always say to people
accessibility doesn’t happen by mistake we have to work at it, it’s not because people
have designed stuff to be in accessible they just haven’t considered it when they are
putting stuff together so for me it’s about getting it on the radar, having a plan of action and
how you implement it and the AMM is a really useful place to start with that.
Ok so I’m interested in wider stuff Barclays do and I realise that the AMM is only a part of
that approach to accessibility so could you give me a bit of a whistle stomp tour of other
things you are doing, you have an accessibility team that’s quite unusual in this space,
people are quite envious of that I’m sure you would like more people and more resources
but could you tell us a little bit about it in a nutshell how that came about and what the
benefits are and why it works for your team that you work within?
David: sure I think actually one of the, if not the most important thing that we ever did was
to sign up to the accessible technology charter,
Lucy: I’m so glad you said that
David: I can see it in your eyes that your glad that I said that and I think the reason that
was so important is that for us that wasn’t something we did lightly, that’s something that
we took time to think about and it’s something we take seriously because for us to sign
something public to say that we want to achieve something means we have to try and
achieve it and in all honesty the charter isn’t easy to achieve particularly for an
organisation of our size and to do that we need to have dedicated resources to do that we
can’t do it off the side of our desks and fundamentally we can’t do it with one man or in our
case one man and his dog, for those of you that know Paul, so our team has grown over
the years it started with Paul and then I joined the team and Kirk joined the team and
we’ve got Helen who obviously been around forever but our team is growing which is
fantastic we’ve sort of got two new recruits that have joined it, ones joined and the other is
joining really soon, but fundamentally what the team is there to do is to help us achieve
what we set out to do under the accessible technology charter and it’s worth noting
actually as much as we signed up to the charter a couple of months after we did that the
then chairman sir David Walker came out with a really bold statement for Barclays that we
have this ambition at the time to become the most accessible and inclusive bank. And we
changed it last year actually we updated it and our sponsor for accessibility revised that
ambition so we now have an ambition to become the most accessible and inclusive
company in the FTSE 100 and that for us is scary but it’s also brilliant because having a
separate ambition that’s something we’ve decided to do and that our business leaders
have signed up to gives us extra emphasis that it’s not that we are just trying to achieve
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this Technology Charter we want to do more, we want to show business leadership and
thought leadership in this area.
Lucy: This isn’t something that sits alone within the IT department this is across Barclays
isn’t it so it’s important to have it embedded across multiple areas within the business.
David: Yeah definitely and Ashuk(Barclays sponsor for accessibility) talks about it being,
this isn’t CSR for us or citizenship it’s not corporate responsibility, social responsibility its
fundamental for our future business success and what is nice is we actually believe that
we fundamentally believe that accessibility is not a box ticking exercise we believe it’s not
a legal exercise for us its rooted in pure commercials we see this as something that
without we are going to fail as an organisation in the future.
If you think about how banking is changing we are moving much more to a digital
organisation, we have challenger organisations like Monzo bank who are completely
digital and have a brilliant experience, what’s also being accessible and thinking about
customers’ needs that maybe because of our size we aren’t able to do so quickly but we
need to be able to show that actually we are playing in those aspects so as we move
towards a more digital bank as well as keeping our retail structure we have to think about
accessibility in every single decision we make.
Lucy: Ok thank you for that, if people want to get in touch with you they can do that via
[email protected] or via @barclaysaccess on twitter, again really interested to
hear what you think hopefully you enjoyed it and found it useful, we would like your
feedback so please do get in touch at [email protected] or you can
call us on 0207 4033020 or tweet us @disabilitysmart. So I hope you found this podcast
useful and have a better understanding of how the AMM might help you within your
business. And lastly a very big thank you to David for joining us,
David: thank you for having me.
<Podcast ends>
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