The growing pressure on the government to use IT more
efficiently has been added to with calls from the trade association
Intellect to widen the focus from just cutting costs to start
improving the use of technology.
Yesterday the ex-head of Logica, Martin Read, produced a report
that detailed how the government could be saving £7bn a year
through better procurement and use of its IT estate.
Intellect has warned that just focusing on cutting costs would
not help improve efficiencies of existing kit and help deliver
improvements to public services.
"The technology industry exists to enable its customers do a
better job, be more efficient and save them money - this goes for
the public sector too. But, simply cutting the ICT budgets would
not be the answer," said John Higgins, director general of
Intellect.
The pressure on the government to look at its use of IT has
increased in the last few weeks as the budget has drawn nearer and
the demand to produce some public sector savings has grown in
importance.
This story originally appeared on
Microscope.