IT is vital for better public services

Those in the IT industry who work with the public sector may be forgiven for being quietly amused at the irony of the Operational Efficiency Programme (OEP) calling for significant efficiency savings in back-office functions and IT projects, at a time when the political world is being berated by the public for a clear lack of understanding of what it means to be responsible with their personal parliamentary budgets.

Whether you laugh, cry or shout at our MPs’ indiscretions, these are serious times for the public finances and the OEP seeks to address that problem. Now, more than ever, taxpayers need to be confident that government spending delivers value. It is right that the government is seeking ways to reduce the burden on the taxpayer in these difficult times, but there is a danger that politicians will view the target figure of £7.2bn saved as a harbinger for future blanket cuts.

This would be a blunt tool in the effort to reduce spending across the public sector, and a narrow focus on cuts in IT spending would risk missing the surgeon’s scalpel approach that IT delivers.

Like the private sector, ministers should use technology to cut operational costs and improve services. The government should use technology to enable fundamental and strategic business change in public services, to reduce bureaucracy and to improve front-line staff support. Money saved through IT efficiency should be recycled to deliver greater efficiency in government operations –­ such as by putting more public services online.

Worcestershire County Council, for example, has saved the taxpayer about £1.4m a year by implementing a shared services hub. The service provides a network of customer centres throughout Worcestershire, where members of the public can go to get advice on any issue, regardless of which local authority it relates to. The centres handle about 70,000 enquiries each month, 80 per cent of which are resolved at the first attempt.

In another example, the Office of Government Commerce has recently delivered £10.5m of savings by pooling the IT requirements of a number of public sector organisations and inviting suppliers to auction their offer online through the innovative eAuction platform.

Considerable savings should be possible over time as the government renews or reviews existing contracts and simplifies the way it buys IT. Departments need to collaborate much more to ensure there is standardisation and that solutions can be reused. But this will require active and continuing support by ministers and senior civil servants to push for simplicity, to avoid the over-engineering of procurements and specifications, and to break down departmental and organisational barriers.

Those in charge of projects need to be better selected and better skilled, and chief information officers need to be empowered to choose proven standard solutions to meet common needs.

Technology can reduce the costs of running public services through efficiency savings. But it is also the main driver for developing modern public services. The primacy of technology to public life will only become more prevalent and this must be reflected in government thinking.

We will continue to work closely with government and industry to identify ways to strip out costs, to reduce the time and complexity of procurement and to increase the success of IT-enabled change programmes. The technology industry exists to enable its customers to do a better job, be more efficient and save them money ­ – this goes for the public sector too. But simply cutting IT budgets is not the answer. IT is vital for better public services that cost the taxpayer less.

John Higgins is director general of Intellect, the trade association for the UK IT industry. Read the blog at http://intellect.computing.co.uk