Government budget review cuts like a knife

Kate Craig-Wood gives her view on the government cuts and what they mean for the IT industry

As expected, there were big cuts announced to central and local government funding.

One-third focuses on central government, which will certainly have an impact on IT spending as they look to make the savings.

However, I think there is good scope for efficiency improvements within central government IT and am hopeful that this will finally end the large incumbents stranglehold on government IT by forcing public sector to look to agile, efficient SMEs and new innovations in cloud computing and shared services to deliver those services.

The 28 per cent cut for local government is going to be challenging, though. The local councils I have engaged with outside of London are already pretty lean.

There too, though, there are savings to be made in ICT. The G-cloud should really help. If they can spool up a number of generic lines of business SaaS offerings that can be used across local government, it will certainly reduce the IT budgets as there is huge duplication of systems at present.

It's not all bad news. IT was mentioned as a way to make savings in the fight against tax evasion: £900m for Inland Revenue, to save £7bn, so there is still some faith in IT's ability to improve operational efficiency.

I expect ICT budgets to take part of the brunt of the required savings, but there are also opportunities for those able to bring the flexibility and efficiency of modern IT, for example, agile development and cloud computing, into the public sector.

Kate Craig-Wood is chief executive officer and founder of Memset