Councils still doubt the power of IT

Local authorities do not share central government's faith in the power of IT to modernise their services.

That is the warning from local government body the Society of Information Technology Management (SOCITM).

Insufficient investment in IT is seen as a major factor holding back its use in local government. But probably the most important constraint on IT is a lack of understanding of the benefits it can bring.

Those were the conclusions of SOCITM's annual survey of IT trends in local government. In real terms, local government expenditure on IT will fall over the next year. A rise of just 1.2 per cent represents a fall in IT budgets, once inflation is taken into account.

However, SOCITM found that additional funding for IT projects from central government, the European Union and Lottery funds is increasing. This, coupled with declining hardware prices, means local authorities have still been able to implement IT projects.

"[Lack of] understanding and vision of what IT can do is probably the most important constraint," the report warns. More than 40 per cent of the survey's 400 respondents - made up of IT managers, policy heads and directors of social services in all local authorities - feel that their senior officers and members have an insufficient understanding of IT.

Many claimed there was a clear lack of strategic vision in the application of IT to local government. "We lack the capacity to think on a blue sky basis after years of working under a financial cloud," one county IT manager complained.

The survey also identified a rise in the use of outsourcing, with 39 per cent of local authorities outsourcing IT services, compared to 28 per cent last year. This is seen as a reaction to the Best Value initiatives, which require services to establish indicators for measuring performance.