With the economic downturn causing companies to tighten budgets, the public sector is becoming a key focus for vendors targeting the big IT spenders.

Juan Domenech is group chief executive of consulting giant Accenture’s public service operating group. He has been in the role since August this year, with overall responsibility for the company’s public sector work in 27 different countries. He talked to Computing about the challenges facing public sector IT leaders.

How is the marketplace changing in the public sector globally?

It has always been a changing environment but today the speed of change is particularly rampant because of the economic crisis. Even in the current fiscal crisis, governments can’t stop providing services.

On average, in the past six months taxes have been reduced by five per cent while demand for services has increased dramatically. We may well be in a period where governments will have to transform themselves whether they want to or not.

Why is this only happening now?

When you have a crisis in government you can raise taxes and cut costs, but surely the answer is to increase the efficiency of collection of existing taxes.

You need to reduce the cost of back-office support functions without jeopardising the future of the public sector agencies. All this turmoil is a great opportunity for public sector bodies to look at themselves and start putting in changes that have been needed since the early 1990s but have never been put in place because everything was going well.

Where do you begin reforming the public sector?

We are spending time with groups of citizens through our Global Citizens Forum to understand how they perceive government and how they would like to interact with it. We created the Institute for Public Service Value in 2005 which engages with clients to find out what value means in the public sector. If you Google “public administration value” you will receive millions of hits. Everyone is talking about it but no one is defining what it means.

That is what we want to do for police, defence and health services and we want to work out how to measure it, so they can understand whether they are progressing in providing more value.

What role does technology play?

It is not easy to convince agencies to work together. Today there is technology that helps people manage databases virtually. Traditionally, the tax agency holds the database and others have to access it through them and they don’t like it.

Today we can hold the databases virtually so everyone can continue to hold their own data. But when a citizen goes to one agency, they can create a view of all their data across all the agencies virtually. So it is using technology to overcome the historical barriers between agencies. They have done this very effectively in New York but it required new data privacy legislation.

What other effects will the financial crisis have?

More government collaboration is happening, and the need to interconnect nations from a taxation, economic or immigration standpoint is growing. This interconnected theme is something we will see growing in the next few years.

Is it difficult to get continuity when you have to work within the parameters of the political cycle?

Every year is an election year somewhere across the 27 countries where we work. Six months before an election, everything slows down. Then it takes six months to ramp up again. You have three stable years and then an election.

In the UK you have one of the most sophisticated civil services in the world which provides good continuity in projects. If you analyse where discontinuity occurs, you will find that it happens when a programme has become a political one.

The underlying programmes survive changes in administration because the civil service keeps them going. Then you have the bells and whistles that every new regime creates. These are the ones that are axed as a political reaction.