Sarah Arnott

Last week government departments published details of how they are going to meet the efficiency targets set out in the Gershon Review. And nearly all of them will rely heavily on IT.

This sudden faith in technology to turn Whitehall into the cash cow Gordon Brown so desperately needs is all very well, but it needs to be properly thought through.

The danger is that departments, with the sword of Gershon hanging over them, are just seizing on technology as the 'next big thing' without sufficient consideration of the implications or understanding of what is really involved.

Firstly there is the purely technical consideration. Despite the altogether patchy success rate, the government appears to be relying on successful IT programmes to support the crucial electoral issue of not raising taxes while still funding extra investment in public services.

But even assuming the technical implementations are broadly successful, much more serious issues around take-up and training go unmentioned.

While all departments will face these questions, how they are answered by the Department of Health (DH) and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), goes to the heart of how we, as a society, believe state education and healthcare should be provided.

In their responses to Gershon, both DH and DfES see technology as central to increased efficiency. The £6bn National Programme for NHS IT will give doctors more time with patients. And plans for electronic whiteboards and downloadable resources will help reduce teachers' workloads.

The most obvious question this raises, which has never yet been satisfactorily answered, is whether technology does actually make people more efficient or just changes what they spend their time doing.

And is the kind of efficiency technology brings actually appropriate to the provision of health and education?

The DfES statement is particularly interesting. It describes how greater use of elearning will 'free up teachers from the simple transmission of facts' and 'replace some class contact time'. Furthermore, teachers equipped with laptops and networked whiteboards will benefit from 'time freed up from lesson preparation'.

This is pretty fundamental stuff. The aims seem to be to use technology so teachers have to spend less time preparing lessons, transmitting facts and teaching classes.

At its heart, the issue is what efficiency in the education sector actually means. Before the department gets too carried away by the swingeing finger-in-the-air time savings technology can provide, it would do well to think carefully about whether they will produce happier teachers and better educational results.

Once this question has been answered, the next is about the practicality of what is planned.

The NHS National Programme is already facing serious questions about how health service staff are going to be trained to use the new systems, and who will pay for that training.

DfES makes no mention of who is going to train the country's teachers to use these laptops, whiteboards and pooled content. Let alone who is going to pay for the technical support.

A comprehensive survey of UK IT skills published last week by eSkills UK says more than a quarter of UK businesses are suffering from their staff's lack of proficiency in everyday IT skills, and it seems fair to assume those figures would be even higher in the public sector.

Jim Norton, now senior policy advisor at the Institute of Directors, author of the famous eCommerce @itsbest report for the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit in 1999, says actual technology costs should account for only half of the budget spent on any IT change programme.

Perhaps I'm being unfair and these questions have already been considered. But there is little sign of it in the post-Gershon plans. If departments think technology is the easy way to speed things up and slim themselves down, it is dangerous for both the public sector and the reputation of IT.

Because if all these wonderful plans do not deliver, it will be the technology that gets the blame.

There are astonishing advances to be made through the use of IT in delivering public services. There are enormous potential benefits in health and education. And it would be a tragedy if those were lost because ill-thought-out box-ticking gave the IT a bad name.