Council IT departments face a tougher challenge in the next
12 months, despite four years' striving to meet national targets to
get all local government services online, according to the public
sector user group Socitm's IT trends survey.
Local authorities have made good progress in putting services
online by 2005, with e-government expected to deliver improved
access and better service to the public, the report said.
There has been less progress in rationalising the back-end systems
that lie behind the web-enabled customer facing systems, the survey
found.
This failure to re-engineer back-office processes is now creating
difficulties. The challenge for council IT directors has been
compounded by new priorities for local government from the Office
of the Deputy Prime Minister, together with the efficiency savings
mandated in the Gershon review of public spending.
John Serle, report editor, said streamlining processes was now a
major difficulty for IT departments. "Until last year - and the
announcement of government priority outcomes - the interest was in
e-government across all services.
"The back end has not become more efficient," he said, warning that
this now posed problems for councils trying to make savings under
the Gershon review."
This requires councils to make efficiency savings of 2.5% each year
for the next three years.
"There is also a difference between what Gershon is saying and what
the government is saying in its priority outcomes, which focus on
key services such as social care, education and good homes," Serle
said.
The e-government programme did not focus on business value and was
instead aimed at creating a good shop window for public service,
Serle said. "It is likely that the shop-window build for
e-government was the wrong shop window. If we had started with
re-engineering the business, we would not have designed things the
way we have."
Despite this, IT departments were experiencing strong support from
council leaders because of a broader acceptance of electronic
service delivery, he said.
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