ICT strategies - savings by design

An accelerating pace of innovation and the need to deliver more and better services for less money requires strategic thinking to be focused on the need for swift implementation of change.

But should you focus on maintaining and developing legacy systems or on exploiting new and potentially transformational technologies such as cloud computing and open source? Would an outsourced ICT service reduce your risk and be more responsive? An ICT strategy should be a pragmatic tool for maximising return on investment - a costed roadmap to guide future spending on achieving your corporate objectives and priorities and meeting your customers’ current and emerging needs within a trusted and secure environment.

It must seek to exploit committed investment in areas such as EDRM, flexible working and the paperless office, while leading from the front in new initiatives around avoidable contact, shared services and lean thinking. An ICT strategy is only partly about the technology – the corporate infrastructure and systems needed to support the council; it is more about addressing how information is managed in the council, and how the business processes of the council use that information to deliver services efficiently and effectively.

How Socitm Consulting can help

• ICT options appraisal, strategy visioning, development and review
• Encouraging use of the most efficient customer access channels
• Developing shared services approaches to ICT delivery, customer service delivery and business continuity/disaster recovery
• Information management strategies
• Maximising office space rationalisation savings via EDRM and mobile working
• Reducing energy usage and software licensing costs via server consolidation/virtualisation, thin client, ‘Cloud’ computing, open source, printer rationalisation and energysaving policies

For more information, see our other pages:

• ICT strategy and review