Local government study – What the CIOs said

Earlier this month CIO UK was involved in a study of local government CIOs and how they viewed joint procurement, shared services, the cloud, vendor relationships and the government’s austerity measures.

Some 27 CIOs in local government were interviewed as part of the research process by RPC Consulting, who gave us access to the full study so we can report on the more anecdotal opinions of the CIO community:

Shared services

“The future direction is through shared services.” “Shared services is probably the best way we can all reduce costs.” “I think that shared services will grow and austerity will drive that growth.”

Procurement

“Everyone is running around in circles on joint procurement ideas.”

Outsourcing

“I do not believe third parties are reliable for protection of data so I wouldn’t outsource.”

Vendors

“Vendors now pricing better and are more affordable, but we want surety of support costs.” “Vendors are over-promising and under-delivering.” “They are all much of a ‘muchness’.”

Maintenance

“In no other environment do you have to pay to use something you’ve bought.” “We will continue to purchase the basic level of vendor support for all our applications.”

Cloud

“Cloud will become a bigger thing, but there are fears around its flexibility and security.” “Security will grow in importance but flexibility issues and security need to be resolved.” “Moving to the cloud will be needed to reduce costs.” “Frameworks and G-Cloud will feature heavily in future procurement.” “SaaS is going to be the flavour of the day.”

Austerity

“Market conditions will soon force some radical changes to local government service delivery.” “We have not hit the worst yet. There will be further pressure on frontline budgets.” “Things will get worse, we will do less and more cheaply and look to voluntary sector to take on some services.”

Transformation

“There’s a lack of IT maturity; it’s just seen as another cost.” “There’s a lack of direction here with no goals for automation or transformation.” “In the future it’s all about collaboration, Sharepoint and the desktop.”