Part 1
The annual Intellect-OGC Conference is now halfway through, with the morning session setting the context and landscape of the public sector. As we all know, tough economic times means that the public sector finds itself in a predicament. While budgets are getting cut and savings/efficiency being maximized, the demand for public services is increasing. Thus this year’s conference is aptly named ‘doing more for less’.

There are many interesting challenging new ideas being put forth to achieve this. From freeing up more resources for frontline staff, delivering more services online, creating more choice for citizens and engaging with them in a co-constructive way. How can we (and I say we, because we all agree that the industry and public sector need to work closely together to find new, innovative ways of working) make this happen?

Well, by making the back-office more efficient and radically changing the way it works, savings will be made and feeing up of resources can take place that allows transfer to the frontline. But the public sector will need to embrace this through a change of practice and culture (which might be the biggest hurdle). One common point made was the need for leadership from the top (ie political/ministerial) to the SRO down to the team who should be incentivised to be innovative and successful in delivering.

Some of the ways these changes can/will take place is through the various strands of the draft Government ICT Strategy, such as the G-Cloud, Public Sector Network and Data Centre consolidation and virtualization. These programmes will underpin a public sector environment that allows more flexible and simplistic working needed for this radical change to take place. Another benefit is that these programmes will deliver savings towards the OEP’s £3.2bn.

Also recognized at this morning’s session was the necessity to promote those programmes and projects that have been successful in both delivering first-class public services and saving money. We do know these good things exist, some in silo, that we can scale up to cross-sector implementation and a realization of cashable savings. But the trouble is to find the mechanism to enable this sharing and promotion of best practice to meet the many agendas. As a very energetic speaker said, ‘it could be raining savings’ by now.

Part 2
continued from part 1 above
The afternoon session of the Intellect-OGC Conference began with a session on how government is tackling the various agenda items identified earlier in the day and moved logically into how industry and government together can meet the agenda of doing more for less.

The key themes identified for this session focused on good relationships, collaborative working to create best practice, and striving to a common understanding of what outcomes we are working towards. The established supplier relationship programmes help improve the delivery of projects, skills and innovation, but can still go further. Equally, the collaborative work industry and the public sector have undertaken around improving, simplifying, and shortening the procurement process will also lead to a environment that help the public sector do more for less.

In short, there are good stories out there with guidance, tools and designs available to be picked up and used to deliver savings and greater efficiencies.

Evidential support to this was given from departmental cases as well as international demonstrations where other governments have adopted similar approaches to collaboration and processes, such as Gateway, Concept Viability, procurement tools, joint industry-public sector boards, and CAF process.

The Conference summed up with an economic outlook for the UK and Europe by the OECD, and possible means of getting out of the recession. This raised some interesting questions on where do you go with the deficit? what’s the role of government and public sector, in terms of spending, policies, governance, transparency etc? The deployment of ICT both in public sector (e-government) and in UK plc is necessary for doing more for less, and the UK has identified a number of good areas and if implemented correctly will deliver sustainable growth opportunities, but more needs to be done.

well, that is all from me today folks, thank you for attending and/or reading the blog. Attendees will get a summary of the conference in due course.

Tags: Efficiency savings, intellect, intellect-ogc conference, OEP, public sector ICT, supplier-customer relationship

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Private Sector. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.