The public sector can grow revenue by making use of big data to cut down on fraud and can trim costs by migrating to the cloud, says EMC.
Ronnen Brunner, EMC's Information Intelligence Group's business development director for the public sector in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, says governments need to do more with less and politicians are increasingly recognising the need for public sector reform.
Finance minister Pravin Gordhan recently said government must “address inefficiency, extravagance and waste in public administration” and that SA needed to spend more on infrastructure development and less on consumption in a bid to save jobs.
Gordhan, speaking during the recent mid-term budget, also said tax collection had fallen during the recent recession and was a challenge.
Brunner says governments need to trim budgets, and figures mentioned vary between 25% and 30%. In addition, the public sector faces the challenge of delivering service faster, especially in emergency situations, he adds.
Governments also cannot afford to invest heavily in projects that take too long to implement, says Brunner. He says the public sector needs to show solutions quickly in today's environment.
Hidden revenue
Olivier Silberzahn, EMEA central government and public security practice lead, says the public sector is challenged by the need to save costs and, at the same time, improve service delivery. He says this can be done by using cloud computing to trim operating expenditure and big data to be more efficient.
According to Silberzahn, about 70% of governments' IT budget goes to “keeping the lights on” and only 30% is spent on developing new products. To reduce costs, governments must automate and trim operating expenditure, he adds.
Cloud computing can save governments millions, and they can add to their coffers by mining data efficiently to uncover tax, welfare and other fraud, says Silberzahn. The UK revenue and customs department will invest £900 million, R11.5 billion, to update systems, which is expected to bring in an additional £7 billion, R89.9 billion, in revenue by 2014, he adds.
Mawson is hosted in Berlin courtesy of EMC.
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