IT SOLUTIONS
Getting IT right
As the government moves to become more sustainable, information and communications technology is going to play a larger part, not only in our economy but also in the very way in which government operates. For this to happen, the right environment must be created to allow ICT innovation to flourish. Public Sector Executive asked John Higgins how the government should go about this
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t is widely believed that to enable society to continue to prosper at its current rate without causing huge amounts of damage to our planet, we must drastically change our behaviour. This means using ICT to find more cost effective and environmentally friendly solutions to our everyday business needs.
There are three areas where the new government needs to focus on ICT, according to John Higgins, director general of Intellect.
“One is to reduce the cost of public services, the second is to look at ICT as the engine of a modern economy and the third is to use ICT to reduce Britain’s carbon footprint.
“With regards to using ICT to provide better and cheaper public services, I feel that there is the opportunity to use ICT as a tool to take costs out, whilst also delivering better quality services. There are lots of examples of this happening and I think that there needs to be a pan government assessment into how ICT could help to deliver those services more effectively.
“At the moment there seems to be a tendency for people to focus on reducing the cost of ICT itself, which is important, but is still part of a much wider picture. Looking back to the chancellor’s debate many months ago, when they were asked about making efficiency savings they talked about efficiency in IT projects, which is an understandable response in the run up to an
54 pse John Higgins
election. But the reality is that no-one invests in IT projects just for the sake of spending money. They do it to cut costs and deliver benefits.
“So what Intellect would like to see is a more aggressive use of ICT by the government, whilst it also makes sure that any money it spends on ICT is targeted correctly and is achieving the very best value for money.”
As a way of reducing public spending the government is also looking to move as many services as possible to an online medium. However, given that the recently enacted Digital Economy Bill includes plans to cut off individuals who break copyright rules, there could be problems ahead.
“I don’t believe that there will be a large number of people cut off at all, but I do see that there is a dilemma when the government is going to take away from people the mechanism which they use to access public services.”
According to John, this discrepancy and a number of
other problems means that the new government’s work had only just begun sorting the issues of ICT use.
“The new government needs to examine the ICT strategy put in place by the last government and continue to drive through some of the bigger pieces of work which have already begun such as data centre consolidation, G-Clouds and public sector networks. There has been a lot of effort put into looking at how that can be achieved and those in industry, who have been personally involved in these projects, see now as the time just to get on with it. This involves getting some cross departmental rationalisation and biting some bullets.
“After all, the plans are reasonably well set out in the last government’s strategy and it is now time to press on with those.”
One area where the last government was judged to have performed particularly badly was data protection, with the media picking up regular examples of where public sector workers
had been careless with various collections of data.
“The basic issue here is that people in government, along with the industries which supply them with their ICT equipment, need to realise that data has value and by this I mean that we need to foster a culture which values data. As simple and straightforward as this sounds, I do not feel that this has been the case before.
“This suggests a need for a degree of education or training to reinforce those points and Intellect has been working with the last government to get that training rolled out, both in government and the industries which supply them. These training programmes were set up under a joint board between industry and government, which itself was set up following seven reviews of data handling, the pinnacle being one carried out by Sir Gus O’Donnell.
“Following these reviews a set of plans was put in place to educate and change the culture around data protection. There are technologies which can be employed to keep data safe but it is having the right culture within government which really matters.”
The need for this change in culture was made more apparent recently following the new powers which have been given to the Information Commissioner’s Office to fine organisations which break data protection up to £500,000.
Sep/Oct 10
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