If you’ve been anywhere near the Public Sector in the UK (or anywhere else in the world I bet) I suspect you’ve been hearing lots of talk about saving money, lots of talk about cost reduction, lots of talk about re-use of assets and overall, doing more with less.

It’s not a bad place to start but while we’re on that journey, we really need to make sure we’ve got a holistic approach to this whole efficiency thing.

Before we start hacking services and cutting back, how about looking at the other side of these cost savings, and looking to make existing systems more effective and efficient?  Recent reports show that HMRC (the UK’s Inland Revenue) will struggle to collect almost a third of the tax owed to the state because of deficiencies in the IT systems that support tax collection – these are big numbers (£11.2bn out of a total £27.7bn) and you can’t help but think that if you were looking for the big impact, quick wins – this should be at the top.

Modernising (Government) IT is a key strategy which often feels a lot less interesting than citizen/customer engagement and improving collaborative capabilities of employees and on the surface it probably won’t bring you much love from the voters/shareholders – get it right however and you can take a sizeable chunk out of the savings you need to make which is good news for everybody.