Improving services through IT
Frank O’Dea, Partner and Head of EY’s Performance Improvement Services, looks at how governments can use information technology as a tool to improve public services.
It’s hard to imagine life without computers. Not only have they penetrated deep into the day-to-day lives of citizens around the world but governments and businesses are increasingly underpinned by their dominance. With physical boundaries disappearing as more and more data is transmitted over the internet, we are living in a world transformed from even just a decade ago, and this revolution is far from complete.
While technological advances continue to ricochet across the private sector – applications, cloud computing, social media and big data are all relatively recent advances. Governments are now racing to keep up while at the same time adapting to sweeping spending and headcount reductions – hardly the ideal environment for fostering sustainable and innovative IT improvements.
Take the European Union for example. Its Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) identifies four areas for priority: opening up access, simplifying online and cross-border transactions, building digital confidence and reinforcing the single market for telecommunications services. In addition, it has set the aim for key cross-border public services, agreed by member states in 2011, to be available online by 2015.
Emerging countries over the last few years have made significant progress because they aren’t encumbered with legacy IT systems. Thailand’s Information and Communications Technology Ministry, for example, has rolled out the ‘Smart Thailand’ strategy, part of a national ICT framework called ‘ICT2020’. Under the plan, policy-makers are aiming to transfer more than 800 government services from manual set-up to electronic platform, as well as link back office systems to offer an integrated one-stop-service. In addition, Thailand’s broadband coverage is set to be expanded from its current level of 33 per cent to 80 per cent by 2015 and 95 per cent by 2020.
The US, too, is making important strides. Its federal government is the world’s largest IT buyer, spending more than $76 billion each year on more than 10,000 systems. However, such projects don’t have to have a high profile to make a strong impact. For example, over the past 12 months the Department of Treasury’s Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation (FIT) has worked collaboratively with shared service providers to develop an online tool that enables federal agencies to compare performance with their counterparts elsewhere in government. Thanks to this initiative and many others, FIT has identified the existence of approximately $1-2 billion in annual savings opportunities.
US policy-makers are also leading the push for cloud computing. Cloud, which offers benefits such as lower cost, increased agility and reduced energy consumption, is proving increasingly popular in the private sector, where companies are moving from the more traditional outsourcing contracts to cloud service providers. It is an attractive option for cash-strapped governments as well. In the US, its considerable merits have underpinned a migration of multiple websites and IT infrastructures to public cloud environments, including Recovery.gov which provides public access to information about the use of economic stimulus funds.
However, it is important to note, from a government perspective the path to cloud is far from straightforward, primarily due to lingering uncertainty around data security. Policy-makers also need to safeguard interoperability standards in order to enable vendor switching. In this era of budget constraint, governments need to have the flexibility to adjust their contract services quickly and efficiently.
It is clear that government IT remains a fast moving environment replete with challenges old and new, large and small. EY has identified eight key areas for improvement that, if effectively addressed, will help propel IT from serving as a utility to acting as a business transformer.
Given that taxpayers have become accustomed to a whole range of online services that are driven, in most cases, by ease of use and secure, transparent systems, government has a tough act to follow.
This background means that governments need to enable society to interact with government in the way that we now interact with everything else.
So far, IT has succeeded in making existing processes more accessible and efficient but where are the breakthrough uses of social media? Where are the benefits of big data being felt by citizens? If IT is successfully viewed as an opportunity to transform public services for the better, rather than a problem, then the answers and solutions should follow.
Frank can be contacted by email at frank.odea@ie.ey.com
