Suggestions to Transform Short-Term Adversity into Long-Term Advantage

With demand for government and public sector services likely to rise sharply while tax revenues decline, government agencies and departments will need new strategies to operate within a recessionary climate, according to EquaTerra, a sourcing advisory firm. The company suggests the following to reduce operating costs:

• Conduct performance audits to determine if, how and by how much current business processes and methods of delivering services can be improved.
• Make better use of technology.
• Consolidate and modernize IT infrastructure.
• Deploy enterprise resource planning software across multiple functions -- human resources, finance and accounting, procurement, etc. -- to drive efficiencies, better manage the functions, get access to integrated data and eliminate the costs of maintaining duplicative legacy applications.
• Deploy Web-enabled tools to enable fewer people to provide citizens easy and more effective access to government services.
• Consider outsourcing IT to modernize/upgrade IT infrastructure and to deploy new applications, thereby avoiding upfront capital expenditures and having to staff for ongoing maintenance.
• Collaborate with others -- Collaborate with other jurisdictions to build out common IT infrastructure and create shared services centers to handle non-mission critical functions such as human resources, payroll, financial management and procurement/contracting services. Adopting a shared-services delivery model could reduce current operating costs between 20 to 40 percent and free staff to focus on matters of greater strategic significance.
• Identify new sources of revenue -- Explore innovative ways to capitalize on existing assets. Consider leasing public assets to the commercial sector -- everything from toll roads to real estate to physical space on emergency network poles for Wi-Fi and cellular service providers.