Do more for less: Innovation opportunities for local government

Guest blog by Hilary Bannister, Principal Architect at Kainos #LPSInnovation

Budget pressures have put local governments in a tricky position. They need to innovate to deliver more effective and resilient services, and they see cloud technology’s cost-saving potential. So, what should you focus on?

In this article, we look at how you can deliver more for less by following three steps:

Tackling legacy IT-related constraints and risks
Re-evaluating budgets to account for and allocate costs accurately
Focusing on cost-effective innovation POCs that deliver meaningful outcomes

Legacy IT: Eliminate risks and create opportunities

We need to celebrate the progress local governments have made in moving to the cloud. All the effort has created a foundation for cost savings, agility and innovation.

However, cloud isn’t a destination, it’s a journey.

If you lift and shift and then treat cloud like an on-premise data centre, you restrict agility and end up with technical debt that can create security vulnerabilities. You also drive-up costs. To put this in perspective, 50% of government IT budgets are spent on legacy tech.

Next step: Well-architected review

To achieve the goal of doing more with less, consider opportunities to move towards cloud native. This should be an incremental transformation that starts with a well-architected review of your current estate. You then get clarity on dependencies and modernisation opportunities, which you can prioritise based on those that:

Minimise disruption
Automate manual tasks and remove redundancies
Have clear boundaries between legacy and new
Reduce security vulnerabilities in migrated libraries

By iteratively tackling legacy IT, you progressively reduce costs, meaning you can reinvest in the next priority. You also gain buy-in and drive cultural change for new tech and ways of working.

Budget re-evaluation: Understand TCO and allocate costs

To do more with less, you must accurately understand costs and savings potential. This can be hard when moving from a capex-focused on-premise model to an opex-focused cloud model. The framework for budgeting and cost allocation must reflect the new pay-for-what-you-use approach.

Next step: Updated TCO calculations and FinOps

When evaluating budgets, it’s crucial to account for the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the cloud-based solution:

People costs need to be factored into TCO for how much time they need to support the systems but also to ensure they have the skills and training to support new cloud native components
It’s not just the savings from physical servers, equipment, and depreciation, because with cloud you don’t have to overprovision to anticipate high traffic volumes
Include elements like energy consumption, licencing, upgrade and support costs
Factor in resource costs – team/partner time required to design, develop, deploy and support solutions

Taking this holistic view of cost frees up budget for new projects.

Then, to track spend accurately, you need an innovative approach to financial operations (also known as FinOps). This means having processes to track and allocate costs to the appropriate teams /solutions, as well as continuously identifying ways to optimise cloud purchasing and usage.

Innovation POCs: Deliver meaningful outcomes

Tackling legacy IT opens innovation opportunities, and taking a holistic and accurate approach to budgeting frees up spending. Now, you can look at use cases where new technology can enhance service delivery.

Next step: Focus on quick wins that build momentum

Here are four examples of proofs-of-concept (POCs) where local governments are leveraging cloud-based technologies to improve citizen experiences:

Citizen reporting services – Augment existing services by enabling citizens to send photos and videos. AI analysis establishes the severity of issues and prioritises them. This reduces the need for on-site surveys and speeds up resolution
Inspections – Instead of manually cross-checking against standards and writing up reports, use speech-to-text and generative AI to assist inspections for roads and housing stock. Inspectors instead speak into their smart phone-based service about the issue, receive real-time compliance information, and get automated reports
Licencing – From pubs to riding stables, use AI to assist processes. Models can analyse applications against policies, flag issues and provide recommendations
Inter-organisation collaboration – Cloud data platforms enable secure data sharing. This could be between health and social care or nearby councils. It could also involve users, government and private-sector providers to deliver funded services like childcare. Having a single, modern data platform not only improves service effectiveness and efficiency, but also makes it easy to share costs

It's about incremental progress, not big-bang transformation

To do more with less, local government must free up budget and time to invest in improving service delivery.

So don’t get stuck thinking digital transformation is too difficult – or that service delivery can remain the same without increasing risks or costs.

Local government’s effectiveness and resilience depend on continuing the cloud journey, and these three areas provide a realistic framework for driving progress.

Local Public Services Programme

techUK's Local Public Services Programme provides the forum for local public services to engage with industry to better understand the innovations out there, horizon-scan how the technologies of today and tomorrow can re-imagine local public services and solve some of the most pressing challenges our communities and places face. It also helps connect suppliers with each other, identify new business partnerships to help grow an ever thriving local government ecosystem.

Learn more