As the reality of the government budget cuts hit, local authorities in the UK are faced with difficult choices. Local Government is tasked with maintaining service levels, but reducing the overall cost of delivery. In doing that, Councils are looking at ways to change in order to meet the needs of their citizens for years to come, and these changes include maximising efficiencies and leveraging current available assets.
It’s fair to say that ICT in local government is at a cross roads, and time may not on its side. If it is to survive, how will it challenge the fundamentals of traditional local government ICT delivery methodologies?
Will local government change in order to survive, and is it willing to challenge the organisational ICT norm within the sector. If the government hadn’t impose austerity measures, would we have seen a change in the focus of local government ICT, or would they have happily continued in the same direction?
If each council continues to work in isolation, and provide all areas of ICT (hardware, software, development, infrastructure, etc.) will they fail? Alternatively, if they decide to embrace change and leverage the power of new technologies such as cloud, BYOD and social media, IoT, Big Data Analytics, will they meet the needs of the citizens and services, deliver a truly scalable enterprise infrastructure which can reach beyond the organisation’s boundary, and ultimately make the significant financial saving needed to survive?