Mark O'Conor
The new government IT strategy, recently announced by the Cabinet Office, which aims at saving £3.2bn a year from 2013-14, will drastically affect senior managers in how they look to achieve operational improvement and cost-efficiency savings.
Senior public managers' main challenge, especially given this difficult economic climate, will lie in broadening their perspective instead of focusing on delivering services for the benefit of individual departments. In particular, there will be a greater focus on adopting shared services and new technologies such as cloud computing.
At the heart of the new strategy is the observation that the most efficient method of achieving governmental savings is the sharing of resources and the buying of standard services which will span across a number of different governmental departments. To this end, cooperation among a wide range of governmental bodies and cultures will be key.
From a procurement perspective, senior managers will need to take into account the European Commission's procurement rules , which require all public bodies to hold fair and open competition when seeking to acquire new services.
Full disclosure
Andrew Dyson
This means that full disclosure of the new service requirements must be planned and advertised from the outset. Procurement processes on a cross governmental basis will therefore require each different department to work collectively towards a clear stated goal.
Another challenge lies in creating contractual commercial relationships between different governmental organisations. Unlike the private sector, where companies would sign a clear agreement setting out risks and responsibilities, public sector agreements have not historically seen the need for such measures.
Establishing clear roles and responsibilities in terms of risk and funding to achieve common goals and respecting these arrangements will be absolutely critical to long term success.
There is significant scope for rationalisation of government databases and data centres. The potential to make such a huge impact on financial and energy efficiencies is an important argument supporting a move to the cloud computing model.
In the short term, unused data storage capacity will result in data centre consolidation to produce efficiency savings and reduce electricity consumption. The latter will enable the government to meet the new requirements of the Climate Change Act/Carbon Reduction Commitment.
Senior managers must "get on board" with the new paradigm. Although still to be confirmed, it is likely that the Cabinet Office will mandate cloud-style procurement, pay as you go licensing and collaborative procurement. Government managers will have to write, or work with, widely drafted OJEU's for public contracts which specify explicitly SaaS (software as a service) and cloud services, and which provide for procurement of technology for and on behalf of other government users.
Although not insurmountable, the challenges that the government's IT strategy present in terms of achieving economic savings through shared services and cloud computing will have to be overcome. Looking at where different departments can work collaboratively rather than thinking in terms of their own individual agendas will be a major upheaval for many senior managers.
Mark O'Conor and Andrew Dyson are partners at law firm DLA Piper
