Socitm Blog

But that's exactly what I'm hoping Socitm members (and in fact anyone reading this) will do. Please use the comment facility at the end of this piece, or email president@socitm.net to share your thoughts on:

1. The future role of ICT in delivering local public services 
 
2. Where ICT has been most effective in transforming services in your council to data and where will it be so in future
 
3. The main challenges for local government ICT generally as well as in your council

4. Relationships with suppliers of services and outsourcing contracts in the next 3-5 years

My personal view is that the current crisis may represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us, the CIOs, to lead our organisations to build a more mature and ultimately successful approach to public sector IT.

But doing so will be very hard - with very little of it about technology. What it will be about is culture change, outcomes focussed management, staff empowerment and customer needs.

IT departments will need to change dramatically, becoming much less to do with making things and much more about facilitating change and driving efficiency.  In the best performing organisations, IT will become a power house of innovation and modernisation - not simply a support service.

That means moving out of the technology focussed comfort zone. IT won't just be expected to talk in the language of the business, it will become a major part of the business, expected to take risks and responsibility for improvement. The CIO must be a trusted agent of change, not letting technology lead change but harnessing technology to reform how we design and deliver services from the inside out.

As we move beyond business process improvement enabled by IT, the issue over poor value from information will have to be addressed.  This will become a pressing priority for IT if it is to deliver significant productivity and efficiency improvements but it will be hard to turn some of this into cashable savings. It also moves IT still further from the 'T' towards the 'I'.

However, one area of technology which will remain a high focus is security and authentication. This is arguably going to remain the biggest technical hurdle ahead.  Without a universal cost-public sector solution to authentication, - and opportunities exist for low cost, federated models of ID and authentication - many areas of information sharing and team integration will prove impossible.

New technologies which are common outside work will be adopted within our organisations.  The fear of social networking, for example, will be exorcised and these new tools are likely to become dominant communication mechanisms competing with and replacing current levels of email.

IT business continuity will become more important, and organisations that are currently skating on thin ice with their business continuity and IT disaster recovery, including schools, will have to re-think their business model and make suitable provision. Driving without insurance is not acceptable, neither is running a public service without business continuity.  This will further promote shared services and integration across the public sector with more cost efficient and subtle methods of providing IT business continuity than simply outsourcing data centres to the private sector as we have in the past.

IT will be at the heart of other profound changes. The concept of the desktop and for that matter an office will disappear.  Technology will support a "mobile briefcase", and typically people will be using their own equipment to access information and networks, not equipment provided by their organisation. They may go to an 'office', but not the dedicated office base of the past.

People will choose what technology they want to use and buy it themselves - most of us already have our own phones and PCs, (and cars!) so why do we need our employer to duplicate this? This will save money on equipment and support costs and give employees more choice.

Reusable transactions based around shared processes will dominate software priorities.  Public service organisations will have to agree on a standard ways of doing things to cut costs, and this will be the incentive to create a single incidence of major software licences (eg. Lagan, ORACLE, SAP, IBM etc.) and drive down IT costs. 

Web self service will, of course, become the norm and the default channel for service delivery - the web as a 'bolt on' to existing and traditional ways of delivering service is not sustainable.

That in turn will force a fundamental shift in channels of delivery, service design and the way in which the customer for services (and the citizen - they are different) will expect to see services presented. True end-to-end self service will be essential if back office overheads are to be removed - the temptation to retain manual 'checks and balances' will be resisted as the costs become more critical than the risks.

Joint ventures between public service organisations will accelerate shared services.  Many of the current barriers -  regulation, bureaucracy, political and others - will need to be overcome in the interests of efficiency and improved public services. Many public service organisations will be forced to make rapid changes in this direction just to remain solvent, let alone to deliver joined up service delivery.

However, traditional outsource contracts of the past are in many cases not fit for purpose.  They have failed to be sufficiently flexible, low cost or transformational. In the same vein, most traditional contracts for IT are 20 years passed their sell by date. We will need a fundamental re-think if a greater flexibility and added value from IT investment is to be achieved. The tired 'client/contractor' model just won't stand up.

The number of IT service centres across the public sector must fall dramatically - computer rooms, service desks, professional teams and even heads of IT.  This will not only bring about dramatic efficiencies but just as importantly, it will drive the deliverability of public service reform by making it easier to share information and to integrate teams. Whilst national consolidation will happen, the main emphasis will be local - across councils, health, public protection services and central government services delivered locally.