Councils look to IT to drive efficiency

As public sector budgets fall, efficiency and IT-enabled shared services are major growth areas for local authorities. Steve Palmer, vice president of Socitm, the professional association for public sector IT management, talked to Computing about the challenges ahead.

What are the current priorities for local authority IT?

The Treasury’s three-year budgets for every local authority are expected to be announced within the next two to three months.

Year on year, things are increasingly financially tight. There is a constant need to do more for less and we need to use technology to increase efficiency.

Key themes going forward are shared services, partnership working, business and service transformation and integration. Local authorities already do shared services through external hosting via formal contracts. But the concept can also be applied to frontline services ­ to things such as shared procurement of adult social care.

What is the main challenge?

Professionalism is the central concern at the moment. Central government did not have a chief information officer until two to three years ago so there has not been a focal point for core skills development.

In local government, we have made progress, and IT structures are further advanced, but we still need to pull together to meet the challenges of allying technology with services. We do work with central government on professionalism but large central government departments and local authorities have different factors affecting them, which must be appreciated.

What can most help public sector IT?

Government organisations need to engage better with the supplier community. We should not keep suppliers at arms length because we cannot deliver services without the private sector to do the coding and the box-building. But we have to be able to show our business objectives so that suppliers can provide the right technology.

What are Socitm’s areas of focus in the coming months?

Social computing and Web 2.0 technologies are raising new issues for local authorities.

Schoolchildren communicate in ways we do not fully understand and we need to achieve better democratic engagement with the 13 to 17-year-old ‘real-time generation’. That means questioning the way we structure electronic services and channels to see if they will stand the test of time.

But it will present challenges. Social networking and Web 2.0 technologies do not respect traditional geographic boundaries, which are the focus of today’s governance structures. Instead, collaborative boundaries are loose, so the focus will move from control to interaction and engagement.

Other key areas are the changing workplace, incorporating mobile and flexible working, and green computing. Local government is a heavy user of IT and we are just scratching the surface of what we can do as an industry regarding going green.