ICT managers reduce costs while driving up user satisfaction – but at risk of losing transformational capability says latest Socitm’s benchmarking summary

Local authority ICT managers have been successful in reducing costs whilst driving up user satisfaction, says Socitm's Benchmarking services summary for 2009, published at the end of July.

But the report says that the reductions in cost - ICT spend per user has dropped by 15.75% in real terms since 2008 and by 19.3% since 2006 - are also worrying. Organisations should be maintaining or even increasing ICT spend at the current time, it says, in order to achieve larger savings through ICT facilitated developments like pervasive flexible working, shared services, application of lean thinking, and e-procurement.

The reductions in spending suggest that top management teams do not take this view, or doubt the ability of ICT to deliver. The report says this could be explained by weaknesses of ICT governance, and in particular, the reluctance of ICT leaders to focus on benefits realisation.

ICT managers must ensure that project appraisal and benefits realisation management place responsibility fairly. Blaming ICT when a service fails to get the benefits it promised from a project saps the credibility of the ICT function, militates against investment in new ICT-enabled transformational projects, and limits the organisation's ability to deliver savings without cutting front line services.

The report concludes that ICT functions must pay greater attention to project management rigour, and top management must attend to the governance regime within which the organisation selects and invests in ICT projects. Service managers must in turn take full responsibility for improving the business processes that they control and getting the best out of IT investment.

'At a time when the gap between service demand and the resources available to meet it is widening rapidly, with councils planning for back office reductions of 25%, and in many cases significantly more, ICT managers must protect their transformational capacity to support other services in making savings' says Martin Greenwood, Programme Manager for Socitm Insight, which runs the benchmarking services along with Socitm Consulting. 'Of course, political pressures dictate that ICT must take its share of the current budget cuts. But we advise the ICT function to focus its savings on its 'business as usual' capability, and to maintain or strengthen its capability to tackle transformational projects'.

Aside from these wider concerns, ICT functions have made impressive improvements in service - significant when increasing pervasiveness of ICT means that when systems are down, people often cannot do their jobs, and pressurised working environments mean that downtime results in high levels of user frustration.

The performance of outsourced services on user satisfaction is significantly worse than for those provided in-house, although outsourced services do score higher on incident resolution - possibly because in many cases payment depends on it.

Users' top issue is the hardware and software that their employers supply. They do not always understand the good reasons why corporate deployments often lag, by one or two releases, the equipment they buy for home use.

Benchmarking services summary for 2009 is available to Socitm Insight subscribers for download from the Socitm website. The report can be purchased by other for £195.

Further information

Vicky Sargent, Socitm Press Office
Tel: 07726 601 139  email: vicky.sargent@socitm.net

Martin Greenwood, Programme Manager, Socitm Insight
Tel: 01926 498703 or 07967 383755  e-mail: martin.greenwood@socitm.net