Your Country Your Call - have you checked it out yet?

Howitzer said:

My fear is that one of these will be the winner.

The Sunday Times has a column called Think Tank whereby punters post their solution to a problem. Most of the published ones generally make sense, are presented articulately (real word?) and are doable. And that's the thing, most of the time all you should be aiming for IS the low hanging fruit. Like taking 1/2 cent coins out of circulation.

Here's a pretty good example.

Council IT should be integrated

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This isnt a revenue generating idea - it isnt going to create anymore income for the country. Its simply an expenditure cut through rationalisation.

csirl said:

This isnt a revenue generating idea - it isnt going to create anymore income for the country. Its simply an expenditure cut through rationalisation.

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I would disagree. It depends what your goal is.

Is the goal to just create jobs - busy work - or is it to create world beating companies.

If it's busy work well that's easy to do, we've been doing that since the creation of the state.

• Bring back the Irish Sweepstakes. Use the income to bloat the admin and middle management of the HSE.
• Make all unemployed people sweep the streets, effectively turning them into low paid Council employees. This will greatly improve the tourist industry.

All countries engage in some element of Keynesian economics. The US sends monkeys to the moon with the ultimate aim of developing world beating high technology companies. We subsidised the construction sector so we could have - God knows what.

The vague notion of having a green economy isn't bad because you hopefully spawn a load of companies, some of which become world beaters.

But you can also aspire to having world class Local Government IT systems and see what companies that spawns.

For example, Curam Software is an Irish company that specialises is Social Security systems, though strangely enough they don't sell into the Irish market.

Towger said:

We already have that, in the form of the LGCSB, aka the Local Government Computer Services Board. The problem is each Council can go off and do their own thing, they should be forced to standardise their systems. The HSE is another example of huge back office duplication...

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Howitzer said:

The LGCSB is a classic example of right idea, wrong solution.

What was created there was a centralised board tasked with developing IT solutions for all LAs. What was centralised was "software development". What you should centralise is the business knowledge.

It's incredibly rare that an IT service is required by an LA for which they don't already have some sort of solution. So the LGCSB mostly provides solutions of marginal benefit. (The one exception being the NPPR tax site which was an obvious fit)

I'm not going to regurgiatate your man's arguements but every single LA provides a number of IT driven services - planning, housing allocation - which could be centralised - or regionalised - but certainly rationalised.

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http://www.fxcentre.com/news.asp?2599738

IT consultants and outsourcing firm, Version 1, today said they have won new contracts to the value of E5m.
The deals include a Claims Management implementation for Irish Life and Permanent plc, an Application Support and Development contract for the Local Government Computer Services Board's two Housing Systems ...

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