Shifting Silicon

Posted by James Kirkland, Corporate Networks Manager on January 20th, 2010

IT investment and transformation seemingly go hand in hand; but the Pre-Budget Report stipulated a £500m reduction in central IT spending by 2014/15. As transformation is both official policy and an efficiency imperative given the state of the nation’s balance sheet, it would seem this cut is contradicted by a probable greater investment in new IT systems.

But all is not as it seems: the Treasury clearly believes that there is much more scope for transformation in local government as IT spending in that sector is expected to increase to over £4bn per year by 2015. If overall grant is cut dramatically, as seems probable, then IT will take up an even greater proportion of local government spending than it does now.

While the pathways of central government IT projects are paved with good intentions but battered reputations, this posited shift in IT spending to local government must not bring with it the classic set of confused motives that lay behind many IT failures: attempts to find efficiencies, improvements to the quality of service delivery and the implementation of rapidly evolving policies.

Most importantly, local leaders must be shrewd in assessing the claims made for IT as a panacea, a trap many Ministers seem to find hard to avoid. Better implementation of IT is vital to transforming services and finding efficiencies but it must be planned carefully and always with an eye on the prize of achievable and measurable benefits to the service user.

Local government has a real chance to show that it can handle complex change better than Whitehall; a chance not to be missed.


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