Ex-Durham County Council CIO Phil Jackman says that austerity can be liberating

Working with limited resources has forced the public sector to think about when, where and how to use them

We talked to Phil Jackman, former head of IT at Durham County Council, recently to hear his views on the future of the CIO role. Having been in the public sector for more than 14 years, though, he also had a lot to say about the challenges he has faced and the growing pains that the sector is going through.

The government's austerity policies, implemented around the time of the 2008 financial crash, remain in place. During the 'age of austerity,' public sector budgets and services have been cut to the bone - but that hasn't always been a bad thing.

"Austerity was both a restraint and a liberator," said Jackman. "It allowed us to do things that we'd have never got away with in times of plentiful money." As an example, he talks about his work to replace all of the personal printers at Durham CC with multi-function devices (MFDs). The project saved the council about £500,000, and under austerity that was a "no-brainer." If a firm had that money spare, though, they might be tempted to avoid the hassle and keep what they already have.

Another example was an automatic letter folding and stuffing machine. It saved the council about 30 pence on each letter, which over two years totalled about £1.8 million on a £140,000 investment. "Nobody noticed the money they were spending, because nobody had a budget for that," said Jackman.

"[Austerity] meant that you had to look at the easy things, you had to look at the more difficult things and then you had to look at the really difficult things," he concluded.

These changes were relatively easy to implement, because Jackman was so committed to them. Others have been much more difficult; the public sector has a lot of momentum, and changing course can be difficult. The sector is both very good and very bad at consulting and engaging on projects: sometimes there are too many people involved, and sometimes too few - it's about getting the balance right. Relatively few people need to be consulted about upgrading printers, but when it comes to replacing a social care system, hundreds of people need to work on the project. C-level executives, especially, are not always as connected to technical change as they need to be.

On that topic, Jackman said that the public sector drastically needs to change to modernise - but so does the private sector:

"The whole world is going through an unprecedented period of change; I don't believe we've seen anything yet. Particularly in the public sector - things like robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, augmented reality - they're going to fundamentally change what goes on."