On completion of our survey, your name will be entered into a draw to win a seat at the e-Government Awards, to be held on 26 January 2011. The winner will be notified in due course.
The subject of innovation in public sector ICT has come up time and time again in recent months, as the realisation of budget cuts have moved ever closer from the horizon. Every facet of the sector will be feeling the pinch (if they’re not already doing so), and therefore organisations are inevitably looking for ways to retain or increase productivity while looking to deal with cost efficiencies.
The “doing more with less” mantra has been hollered across central and local government for quite some time, and the argument for many is that innovative use of ICT can hold at least part of the answer. There’s a perception the UK public sector is anything but innovative, but is that a fair assessment, and what do people working on the frontline of ICT in public sector organisations (not vendors) think?
On the face of it, many public sector organisations are working to implement innovation through ICT. Southwest One, a joint venture between Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council, Avon and Somerset Constabulary, and IBM is one high-profile example. Established in 2007, the venture aimed to transform the workings of the partner organisations, to modernise, reduce the costs of and improve support services, to invest in world-class technologies to improve productivity and generate economic investment. Avon and Somerset Constabulary alone expect to make a saving of up to £35 million over the next decade through the venture.
Innovation in ICT also seems to be coming from central government too, especially in information transparency. The launch of data.gov.uk earlier in the year by the former Labour government has already led to a swathe of data applications mashing their way through data from traffic accident blackspots to UK climate projections. In London too, Boris Johnson has started to drive a similar programme.
But innovation doesn’t have to be on the scale of Southwest One or data.gov.uk. More often it seems, innovation thrives on a local authority or NHS Trust level, whether that’s the implementation of an ePrescriptions system at Leeds NHS Teaching Hospitals or the award-winning KCics Integrated Children’s System from Kensignton and Chelsea Borough Council.
PublicTechnology.net has been at the vanguard of shouting about such successes for a number of years through our annual e-Government Awards and articles, and since we became part of the Sift Media stable our ability to do that has grown – and now we’re asking for your opinions on the subject.
Innovation in public sector ICT is the
subject of a new study currently being conducted by K2 Advisory, a research body that’s part of Sift Media and a sister organisation to PublicTechnology.net. What part does ICT play in fostering innovation in your organisation, and who is in charge of driving that innovation in the first place? Do you think the organisation will be able to realise the levels of innovation that will be required in the public sector in the next few years to enable the big changes without assistance from third party consultancies?
