Change your ways in local govt, warns BT boss

The Managing Director of Regional Government at BT has warned that local authorities have to start procuring in different styles if they're to survive.

Chris Ainslie's comments came as part of a wider interview, in which he also spoke of the use of Cloud Computing and virtualisation among local government and devolved government.

"It is interesting local and devolved clients are all suffering from the CSR challenges from last October, which are now really starting to bite into their effective operational plans," Ainslie said. "It is interesting to see how different authorities are dealing with it."

He pointed to Suffolk County Council as one of the leading edge authorities, "where investment in services is really the name of the game," but warned there were other councils, "battening down the hatches and doing what they've always done".

Ainslie pointed to the adoption of Cloud Computing, shared services, and virtualisation as a means to both undergo business transformation and improve procurement structures for organisations in the next twelve to eighteen months.

"The macro trends I'm basing my business around is on the continued growth of business process outsourcing, probably not to the extent of the very large outsources we've seen previously," he said. "I think they will slow down to a certain extent, because people still want the capability to manage and effectively control some of those outsources. We're seeing an increase in the IT outsourcing environment, and that's absolutely predicted because of the large dependency on taking cost out of the buyer, automation, and the effective use of IT."

"Those trends are very much upwards; shared services are an absolute critical plank to delivering efficiencies on that regard." 

On the subject of procurement, Ainslie said, "I can't see councils being able to survive unless they start procuring in different styles; aggregation of demand across different councils; aggregation of category of spend."

He added government has got to change the way it procures. "It's very costly for both the public and private sectors in going through those lengthy procurement cycles. I'm still waiting to see the effects of Francis Maude trying to change the procurement engine.

"Eighteen months of client dialogue sessions is not in anybody's interests in the agenda of trying to save money."