IT SOLUTIONS
Will the coalition get IT right?
“I believe that the whole area of building up effective business cases for IT projects will be brought sharply into focus by this development and this can only be a good thing as procurement skills will be brought to the fore.
Moving back to the subject of spending cuts, there is a worry at the moment that the government - whilst trimming the fat from some projects which merit such treatment - is also hacking away at projects which have the potential to deliver some real progress and that cutting their funding could end up costing far more in the long run.
IT can play a key role in making our public services more cost effective. Public Sector Executive asksMartin Ferguson if he thinks the government is taking the right approach
A
part from saying that it wants to cut the amount which is
spent on IT projects in the public sector, so far the government has not been very forthcoming about the ways in which intelligent use of IT can create more efficient public services with better outcomes..
“The Coalition has focused almost exclusively on central government projects, driven by the austerity agenda and the need to demonstrate value for money,” says Martin Ferguson, head of policy at Socitm.
“There hasn’t been that much said about the local services setting - which is where a lot of Socitm’s focus is - although I expect this will begin when the results of the Comprehensive
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Spending Review are published later this month.
“The big issues which are impacting on us at the moment are the transparency agenda, including the publication of data on spending, along with the details of contracts and top salaries. Socitm is currently carrying out some work in this area at the moment, along with the Local Government Association and others, to help facilitate councils in publishing these data, whilst also considering how these data might be used positively to account for performance and to open up new service possibilities.
“Our view of this new emphasis on transparency is that in the medium to long term this will be a positive move. Few would deny that, in the current environment, being open and transparent is a ‘good thing’.
“I think that in the short term there is an inevitable concern that this is going to lead to a lot of queries to councils about what
particular items of expenditure are and this is a bridge which we’ve got to cross. This new transparency will inevitably generate the opportunity for the media to create headlines, sometimes without substance.
“I think that as part of this shift towards greater transparency, we need to see a new maturity within the media, especially around the way in which it handles public information.
“This means giving a rounded view rather than just selecting what suits them to create the headlines. Strangely it doesn’t seem to be a problem in other countries, such as Canada, where openness has a long tradition,.”
Whilst the changeover to full transparency of contracts data may prove to be a prickly one for some councils and their private sector suppliers, the expressed intention of this is to make councils more wary about their procurement as any expensive mistakes will be there for all to see.
“This is a concern which I share. It is interesting that the Total Place pilot projects generated widespread cross-party political support.
“Whilst our intelligence suggests that the new government is broadly supportive of a place- based approach - stripping out duplication, simplifying and re-designing services, and streamlining processes of service delivery - we are still waiting to see how that pans out and whether it creates a new momentum for supporting IT investment to achieve better quality services across localities.
“Meanwhile, we are working hard at the moment to communicate with government departments, including the Treasury, to provide them with examples of how councils are using IT to provide better, more joined-up services, whilst reducing overall spend and duplication.”
Sep/Oct 10
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