Jos Creese, chair of the Local Government Chief Information Officers' Council, has said effeciency rather than customer choice with drive the future of services due to spending cuts.
"IT will be under the cosh if we fail to deliver the kind of improvements and efficiencies that organisations will demand over the next three to five years," said Creese, who is also head of IT at Hampshire county council. He was speaking at the Kable Delivering Efficiencies in Public Sector IT conference.
He expressed a belief that to deliver efficiencies organisations will need to tolerate some things going wrong and less choice for customers, and that it council IT teams will need the support of members to push through the necessary changes.
"In about two years when the budget is not balancing we will need a tough debate on the priorities led by members," he said. "I would like to see members directly involved in transformation programmes; there is a need for them to understand the mechanics of the problems, to see why we have to take tough decisions."
In a critical perspective on IT, Creese said that while there are still perceptions that much of the public sector is concerned with protecting budgets and territory rather than services, that there is a resistance to sharing and realising savings, that organisations are slow and bureaucratic, and there is not enough transparency or prioritisation. It requires a change in approach away from a focus on using IT towards applying it in a transformation.
"IT is sometimes seen as a magic bullet, but a lot of this is not a technology problem, it is a business process and change problem," he said.
Creese identified a number of measures he said could take organisations in the right direction. They include an increased emphasis on partnerships and shared services, a move towards lean operations, the development of robust business cases for change, a willingness to challenge silos and better risk management.
"If organisations are not prepared to manage risk differently it will not be possible," he said.
This article appeared in GC News
