FOR the past five and a half years, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister — now the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) — has created a local authority ICT spend-fest totalling some £15 billion. This so-called Local e-Government Programme devised to transform town-hall services and make available an array of electronic customer access channels has, in reality, failed to deliver very much in the way of tangible benefits because of how it’s encouraged authorities to deploy ICT and because residents’ interest in dealing with councils online has proved depressingly low.
Examples of genuine local innovation and foresight do exist — at Derby a corporate-wide strategic ICT infrastructure has enabled that council to revolutionise the way it does business, yielding dramatic cost savings and more effective customer service. Such instances, however, have been in spite of, not because of, the DCLG programme.
ICT in most councils has, as a result, been mainly tactical in nature — used as a means of improving existing processes and ways of working rather than enabling systemic change. Think of Rover’s Longbridge plant, which employed more people to make almost exactly a third the number of cars Nissan’s Sunderland factory produced and you get an idea of how more effective processes can get things done more efficiently and at lower cost. What the commercial world has learnt applies equally to the public sector: financial and other gains are possible if methods are completely re-thought rather than existing ones merely e-enabled.
Next to Whitehall though, town-hall ICT spending pales almost into insignificance, with the Government by its own admission splashing out a cool £14 billion a year on the stuff. Lately, however — usually behind closed doors — civil servants have begun acknowledging that their approach to procurement has been unintelligent and that things have to change. Their answer has been a Transformational Government Strategy which has at its heart an agenda of departments sharing facilities and costs of service provision — with local authorities as potential key frontline partners.
But to make this a reality you need to think strategically, with the creation of ICT systems enabling the automated linking of customer service operations to the business functions that lie behind them, so obviating the need for the vast, bureaucratic machinery characteristic of government. Only by integrating technically and organisationally will public bodies be in a position to share the cost and facilities required to deliver services.
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Already a common identity for citizens across the whole public sector is being discussed and to this end ministers are saying that the sharing of personal data between public bodies is permissible for efficient administration. This infuriates the privacy lobby, but if the electorate wants and expects a leaner yet more productive service, the sharing of such data is fundamental.
For all the grand talk of shared services and common identities being bandied about at high level, the tactical solutions deployed by councils at the behest of the DCLG may actually preclude such a plan. It is to be hoped that those with responsibility are now waking up to this fact and readying themselves for the genuinely radical transformation so desperately needed across the UK’s public sector.
Ian Dunmore is the editorial director of PSF, www.publicsectorforums.co.uk