Councils set their sites on value

IT Week: As technology director of public sector consultancy firm Civica, what is your view of the Transformational Government scheme?

Paul Smith: There’s a lack of focus. The government keeps telling public sector bodies to join up their services, but doesn’t say exactly what this entails.

How big a part does the web play in Transformational Government?

Local authorities have a love-hate relationship with the web. They want more people to use it because it’s cheap, but just telling people there are services online doesn’t mean they’ll use them. Furthermore, they don’t want to disenfranchise anyone who doesn’t have access to the web. I believe a local authority should aspire to make its site the home page for local residents.

How could they do this?

They could tell you what’s on in your local cinema, where the local restaurants are, if there’s a planning application to turn your local cinema into a supermarket – it’s very empowering for people and could work very strongly for local authorities. We have an application, for example, that can take all the environmental health reports on restaurants and publish them to the web. If you tied this up with letting customers post reviews up about the restaurants then it can become something quite powerful. Local authorities have all that information and once it gets personalised it could be quite exciting.

What is your perception of IT departments and their challenges?

Local authorities are all competing to provide the best services, so there’s a range of different back-office service providers, middleware and front-end CRM systems that are used. And IT departments have a variety of levels, skills and competencies. IT managers’ major demand is to deliver service in a demanding environment, and they are under pressure to achieve five percent efficiency cuts every year – it’s quite a challenge, and there are political agendas to deal with too.

Will Transformational Government deliver better value for tax payers?

It needs to happen. Council Tax can’t keep going up so councils have to be more efficient. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister said that the e in e-government needs to change from electronic to efficient, and that’s what’s happening. The web is a key part of this. Figures suggest it costs around £20 for a face-to-face [transaction]; £4.50 for the same on a telephone; and around 12.5p on the web – that’s potentially a huge amount of money you could save.

Is there any interest in mobile internet tools in the public sector?

There is interest but the solutions are not there yet. Some people are looking at text-to-pay solutions on mobile phones.