Things can only get better - take heart!

Dr Martin Read has a rallying cry for the public sector ICT professional. "Take heart," he urged at the Govt ICT 2011 Conference in London. "There are lots of bits of good practice that I have seen in the way IT has been used in the public sector. Weaknesses need to be seen in that context."

Read - part of the Cabinet Office Efficiency Reform Board - is well placed to observe both strengths and weaknesses after spending much of the past three years evaluating public sector ICT effectiveness in one form or another. While he sees the successes, he is also blunt about the shortcomings he's seen. 

"It was almost impossible to get reliable, accurate information on what the public sector spends on IT,' he noted. "If you want to know what we spend and what we spend it on, it's almost impossible. Until you have that information it's hard to make all the deductions you want to make. So in the context of is the Crown getting value for money it's hard to give answer yes."

There needs to be a major change in the way ICT programmes are managed and budgets spent. "There is a surprising lack of involvement from people running departments in projects," he lamented. "We need more involvement and have the buck stop with the guy at the top. I hope we see better review processes, a much more challenging review of projects. 

"We need to achieve a better control over what's spent. That means giving CIOs and the government CIO some teeth in terms of being able to say no. We want to be able to drive better deals with vendors to get more simplification and standardisation. We need information but also accountability of the people who are spending money so we need data against which they can be judged. 

"I'm talking about this at departmental level with the buck stopping at permanent secretary. We need to be a lot smarter about the way we deal with IT projects. There are few IT projects, there are business change projects. Big IT projects are likely to fail because there is massive change. We need to avoid big bangs and have wider availability of pilot projects."

But while there's now an age of austerity, this may end up being an enabler rather than an inhibitor. Read cited the example of one major department of state where the IT budget had gone down. This had caused the Permanent Secretary and his team to revisit first principles of what they needed and how they interacted with their suppliers. This brought down the IT spend, but didn't alienate the suppliers. "Suppliers were not asked to do the dumb things they were asked to do under the old contracts so they are taking less money from the client but making the same profit," he noted. 

The wider message is clear: "When the money runs out you can do things that weren't contemplated before," argued Read. "This environment does give us the chance to do things better. There will be some real imagination applied to driving simplification. The issue is about forcing more take up of shared services and moving to an agenda of simplification. This might not be traditional outsourcing but about bringing things together. We can get into a smarter procurement process that is much more results based."

Other benefits will come from the increasing move towards online delivery to reduce costs. "You can move from pounds down to pennies. There have been huge successes here," said Read, but struck a note of caution in relation to the 'digital divide'. "At the moment online is just another mechanism of delivery, it's not really being forced. There is a tremendous opportunity here, but we need to be smart about those who might be excluded by this. There's a fair bit of thought that needs to go into that."

Less problematic is the potential of new technologies such as Cloud Computing. "It will mean more space for smaller companies to contract with government so that they are not right down at the end of the food chain," noted Read. "There are a lot of companies out there with innovative solutions and we need to make some space in order to contract them."

Read concluded with his "Take heart!" rallying cry, conceding that many in the public sector were undoubtedly frustrated by the way things have been done. But he argued the era the public sector now finds itself in also provides an opportunity for ICT people to demonstrate one thing again: "Professionalism".