Getting IT right in 2011

Socitm's latest IT Trends survey, published last week, shows how well local public service providers' IT people have responded to the challenges of the downturn, delivering more services at lower cost than a year ago.

Over the next 12 months, Socitm Consulting will be outlining how you and your colleagues can build on these foundations. Key areas include:

• Focusing on the web. If your council is not already doing so, it can generate really substantial savings from the web - not just via the website itself but from social networking, smartphone apps, and making the website central to the interaction between the council and its citizens; using these to enable and encourage self-service achieves major savings
• Driving down costs. Renegotiation, rationalisation, refocusing - or just keeping suppliers on their toes - can generate major savings. Is the total cost of ownership of the desktop as low as it could be?
• Exploiting cloud services and shared services. You need to be planning the migration now from in-house, capital-intensive and inflexible IT infrastructures, which may also lack resilience, and looking at how working with partners can reduce costs further
• Rebuilding your team. The changes ahead entail a very different IT service, with a very different skills mix

Whether you need support in redeveloping your website, your IT or your information strategy, dealing with suppliers, assessing your team's professional skills (and don't forget, we can also provide interims for hard-to-fill technical vacancies), or working with partner organisations, Socitm Consulting is uniquely well-qualified to help. Call me on 0845 241 2770 or reply to this email if you would like to discuss this.