The Society of IT Management has called for an increase in council spending on IT, despite the prospect of tightening finances.
The public-sector IT organisation has made the case for new investment to coincide with the publication of its IT Trends in Local Government 2008-09 report. It said it will help councils to deliver "more with less".
Speaking at the launch, leader of Bracknell Forest BC Paul Bettison said: "I believe that IT has answers for many of the ills we will suffer. If you have the vision and can carry colleagues with you to put money into something, you can get the rewards of reductions in cost, improvements in service delivery and raising the local authority green agenda."
The survey for the report received responses from about 220 local authorities and took place during the summer. Its author John Serle acknowledged that this was before the full extent of the economic downturn became clear, and said councils will have to respond to the prospect of a sharp cut in public spending as well as the social pressures of a recession.
He pointed to the fact that the last economic downturn coincided with the start of the e-government programme and an injection of cash, which enabled councils to exceed efficiency targets. But the report shows that councils are currently reluctant to borrow to finance IT schemes, that pooling of budgets and service sharing has not yet taken off, and staff provide the largest cost for the sector.
The report suggests a need for a greater focus on using IT to monitor and manage the business. This requires a greater involvement of the IT function in service planning and development: organisations that use IT as a strategic resource rather than as a utility achieve better performance ratings than those that do not. But it also indicates that IT chiefs have been losing some influence in council boardrooms.
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"We are seeing a downgrading of the IT function in public authorities," Serle said. "There was an advance, but for a while now it has been in decline, in how much the IT director participates in planning and policy."
The report also shows that security and privacy of information has leapt to the top of the agenda in all organisations, largely in response to high-profile cases of data loss over the past year or so. Also, organisations are working on a wide range of initiatives to deliver short-term tactical cost savings and schemes that will fundamentally change how services are delivered.
Serle said: "There remain some big opportunities for ICT to transform local public services. The things that were easy to do have been done. Organisations will need to be bold and ambitious with their use of technology in the next few years. Some of the new emerging technologies can be exploited to transform local public services, delivering better, more cost-effective customer service."
Talkback
With the advent of the computer age and the binning of punched cards and the like, headlines loudly heralded the advent of the paperless age, everything would be done by the computers and fewer typists and clerical staff would be needed. The theory was fine but failed to factor in the human manager element. It was not in the interests of managers to downsize their departments - thheir importance (and salary) would shrink accordingly.
So as IT personnel were recruited to implement the IT, there was a much slower and much smaller reduction in other staff. The ease and simplicity of IT and printers enabled managers (who in the main were not au fait with electronic filing and retrieval) to get everything printed out and filed, copies of documents were distributed without thought.
While Socitm is right in principle to call for IT spending to be increased they should also be calling for a comparable reduction of clerical/administrative staff, and a further reduction in paper output by opening IT access to more. In theory a council that provides a broadband link to every home should be able to communicate with all it's citizens electronically through computers or, with a modem adapter, the modern digital TV.
Socitm must make it's case well and must show how the increased spend can be funded without ANY increase in taxation. It must further show that it will result in appreciable savings.