ICT is not like chocolate biscuits

So the age of austerity has begun. The ICT industry has already had to confront the reality of the moratorium on new public sector contracts but we will also have to deal with ongoing project reviews.

On top of this the Chancellor has announced that there would be a further £17 billion of savings to be found from departmental spending. That £17 billion is apparently on top of £6 billion George Osborne and David Laws (remember him) announced just after the election. The real detail of how this will work will be in the spending review in the autumn.

It is only right that government wishes to realise efficiencies in its technology spend. It is perhaps understandable that in an atmosphere of heavy cost cutting that the new government would want to hit the pause button to think about how to move forward with ICT projects.

Listening to some of the less well informed members of the coalition government you would think that they think of ICT in the same category as chocolate biscuits. If you are used to ordering chocolate biscuits for all your meetings and you find you need to save money – you might switch to a cheaper, plainer brand or more likely you would stop ordering biscuits altogether. It’s an incidental cost that is easy to cut out. What is more, chocolate biscuits do not make your meeting more productive nor did they make it more efficient. ICT on the other hand is different; you can’t just decide that you don’t need it anymore.

Intellect is working with the Cabinet Office to work through some of these issues - our members are willing to meet with their customer departments to discuss ways in which requirements can be removed or simplified and what savings can be made. At the same time we are pressing government to follow a “do it once” approach – sharing services and re-using assets.

 We are also keen to see progress on the Government ICT strategy and other cost-saving programmes which the industry and government have worked on. Moving the conversation on to discussions of how ICT could be used more effectively to enable real savings in the operational costs of public sector delivery.

I won’t pretend that it is easy to make this case to government departments preoccupied with shaving money off their operational costs but the reality is that although change programmes and technology have an upfront cost, they can deliver significant long term savings and efficiencies that could make an appreciable difference to the UK government’s structural deficit over medium to long term. Freeing front line staff for administrative burdens using technology can mean resources are used more efficiently without harming the quality of the service.

On the other hand, there are some reasons to be cheerful. Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has identified the problems around public procurement as one of his priorities. Government’s cash constrained environment will make this an imperative.

Concentrating minds on making the procurement process cheaper, more efficient and easier to manage for both officials and suppliers is long overdue.

John Higgins, director general, Intellect