While career options are drying up in business, the public sector
is experiencing an IT boom. Mike Cross finds out what pitfalls and
perks may await IT professionals who make the leap
Oxfordshire County Council last month advertised five new vacancies
in its IT department. Of the 120 applications received for the
posts, more than 100 came from people working in the private
sector. Suddenly, the public service - especially local authorities
and the National Health Service - has become an attractive career
move for ambitious IT professionals.
In part, the commercial downturn is to blame. At a time when banks,
telecommunications companies and other traditional high-rollers are
slashing their IT budgets, the public sector is investing heavily.
On top of its £1bn UK Online programme, the Government has
announced major increases in spending on IT for the NHS and
criminal justice system. Announcements on a new defence information
infrastructure are expected later this year. Even local government,
traditionally the poor relation, did well in this summer's
comprehensive spending review.
For IT professionals, the extra money has three main consequences.
First, it pays for jobs: the UK public sector as a whole increased
its headcount by 140,000 in the year ending April 2002 and the
trend will accelerate this year as the Chancellor's spending
pledges come on stream. More importantly for IT specialists, public
bodies now have more flexibility to pay competitive salaries: the
NHS is looking for IT directors at packages now creeping towards
six figures.
Most important of all, the money pays for new challenges. As well
as the target of making all public services available online by the
end of 2005, there is the chance to play a part in modernising
services that really matter, such as hospitals, social work and law
courts, using state-of-the-art IT.
At Oxfordshire, Ian Williams, network services manager at the
council, says he is offering salaries that compete with the private
sector - £35,000 to £40,000. But that is not the only attraction.
"It's the quality of work that's appealing," says Williams. As well
as putting all Oxfordshire's services on the Web, the council is
installing a major broadband network, drawing up a customer
relationship management strategy, setting up intranet connections
for county councillors, wireless networks and much more.
"There's a lot happening," Williams says.
Paul Offen, head of IT at the London Borough of Barking and
Dagenham agrees that it is an exciting time. "The applications are
really varied. Unlike the private sector where you might be making
motor cars or providing financial services for your entire career,
in local government you're doing everything from cemeteries to
planning to housing benefit. Making everything Web enabled. So the
opportunities are huge, the work is interesting."
Many of the UK's county councils, unitary authorities and major
borough councils have ambitious IT agendas. While a handful have
chosen to hand their e-government work over to facilities
management partners, the majority will tackle the 2005 target with
in-house resources. Because IT is one of the few professional areas
in which local authorities compete for staff directly with the
private sector, they have traditionally had difficulty recruiting.
That is now changing. "Salaries are far more competitive than they
were," says Offen. "We're more and more in line with the private
sector."
According to the latest annual salary survey carried out by the
Society for IT Management (Socitm), which represents IT managers in
local authorities, there is still a gap in cash terms between local
government and the private sector. The 2002 survey, compiled in
spring this year, found that local government salaries are lower
than in the IT industry, but that local government staff enjoyed
many fringe benefits.
Salary increases over 2001 also lagged behind those in the private
sector - the average was 5.5% compared with 6.8% in the IT industry
as a whole. (The industry figure however dates from November 2001;
this year it is likely to be lower.)
Where local government scores is in fringe benefits and enlightened
employment practices. Socitm found that in its sample of 141 local
authorities, 92% offer flexible working hours; 25% plan to increase
opportunities for homeworking in the next year; 85% offer job
sharing and 71% have a structured training and development plan for
all staff.
Offen pointed to two more benefits that for many people outweigh
slightly lower salaries - longer holidays and, for many
authorities, more convenient geographical locations. By definition,
most local government offices don't have to be in the City of
London or the Thames Valley corridor. "You're not crammed into a
train to go into the city every day."
The result is that when IT staff go into local government, they
tend to stay. Barking and Dagenham is recruiting at the moment, but
because of expansion not staff turnover, Offen says. "Of my 80
staff, in the past three years we have lost only one, and that was
a redundancy he requested himself. We must be doing something
right," says Offen.
The Socitm survey found this experience to be repeated elsewhere.
"The sheer variety of IT projects in local government, and the
exciting challenges ahead, are key factors in the lower labour
turnover rate illustrated in the local authority survey, which was
around two-thirds of that found in the wider IT industry sample."
However, the survey found that staff turnover is creeping up, and
warned that authorities would have to work harder to attract the
best staff.
Ironically, a new source of competition may be elsewhere within the
public sector. The hottest recruiter at the moment, especially for
senior staff, is the health service. After years of stagnation, the
NHS is starting to spend serious money on modernising its IT. The
cultural and technical problems it faces are immense - and this is
reflected in packages being offered to staff with a good track
record in managing IT projects.
At the very top, the new director-general of IT for the NHS is due
to be appointed imminently and will become the UK's highest paid
civil servant. The six-figure salary is expected to be greater than
the £245,000 earned by Sir Andrew Turnbull, head of the civil
service - and considerably more than the £150,000 earned by Nigel
Crisp, who has the double job of chief executive at the NHS and
permanent secretary at the Department of Health.
At the next step down the chain of command, each of the 28 new
strategic health authorities in England is supposed to have a chief
information officer (CIO) post by this autumn. The job title is
significant: it replaces the NHS jargon of IM&T (information
management and technology). The implication is that the Government
wants CIOs to come from the commercial sector. Lord Hunt, the
health minister in charge of IT, says he is looking for "very tough
cookies indeed".
Current recruitment advertisements give some hint of the challenge.
For example, London's five strategic health authorities are looking
for a "co-ordinating chief information officer", at £90,000, to
knock the capital's NHS IT systems into shape. "You must have
technical understanding and practical commonsense, an unusual
degree of drive as well as powers of persuasion and motivation. You
must be able to show evidence of success when working in
controversial situations with many stakeholders."
For someone who fancies a more specific challenge, the London
Integrated Mental Health Electronic Record Project is looking for a
project director capable of creating an integrated unified
electronic health record service for mental health patients. The
project has a budget of £30m - the salary (on a three-year
fixed-term contract) is from £65,000 per annum.
Of course, the challenge of "working in controversial situations
with many stakeholders" - in other words, winning over senior
doctors, angry patients and militant ancillary staff - is not for
everyone. One of the attractions of going into IT in the first
place is to avoid politics.
It remains to be seen how many CIOs recruited from the private
sector will be able to come to terms with the different culture and
values in public service.
But for those who are up to making the move, the challenge is
irresistible. Alan Mather, who as head of the e-delivery team at
the Office of the E-envoy has one of the best (or worst) IT jobs in
government, sums up. "It's the job you really want to do.
Everything is really secondary to this. It has 60 million
customers, every technical problem you want to play with and a
customer base that is worthy of attention. If we start to get this
right, things really start to change in the country."
Making a difference
Ian Williams, network services
manager at Oxfordshire County Council, moved to local government
seven years ago from the private sector. Contrary to myth, he finds
the public sector the place where IT professionals can get things
done.
In the private sector, he felt "frustration... I didn't mind the
long hours and the salary is OK, but we didn't have the back-office
support. Any work I picked up on the client site I had to deal with
myself. There was a lack of support for the front line.
"With a local authority you've probably got more room to deliver
projects. It can be extremely bureaucratic at times, but you're
doing more exciting work than in the private sector.
"In my previous life, the board of directors set the vision,
salesmen went out to get the business, the IT staff were left to
follow up. Here, we're very much trying to help formulate views. IT
managers are having an effect on the organisation."
Of course it's not all roses, Williams says. "Sometimes getting
budgets approved is hard. There are pressures on local government:
the e-government target is just one pressure which sometimes seems
remote to county councillors. In the private sector everyone
understands what IT can do. Here you've much more of a selling job
to do."