So, when the Office of Budgetary Responsibility decides your government department can manage just fine with only 90% of last year's budget, what on earth do you do?

Following on from my previous post on CIOs in Government, I'd like to bring up a topic that I think will be even more relevant over the next few years than ever before.

It's the HR - IT relationship.

Government departments need to spend the next couple of years extracting more productivity from its people. Most departments have been doing this for years as a matter of course. But now it counts even more. Somehow, among the lay offs and pay freezes they need to find ways of helping staff maintain high levels of service with fewer resources.

And this is where HR and IT come in. HR, typically the department responsible for learning and development must think now about the tools that they can give their staff to help them get their jobs done quickly and effectively.

Much of this will come down to enabling staff to use their judgement wisely: from top to bottom they should all understand cost benefit analysis and be able to make quick decisions on what to keep and what to scrap. But there is also a huge role for IT too.

IT and HR need to get together to educate, inspire and encourage staff to seek out new ways of doing things. Huge productivity gains can be made from online collaboration and microblogging (Yammer, Chatter etc.). God knows how many extra hours I've had to bill thanks to poor "asynchronous" communication and time spent merging documents, reading email threads that are hundreds of messages long and so on. The solutions are out there, we just need a bit of trial and error and a bit of buzz.

And staff are desperate to use them! In fact, coming in to work is like take a step into the dark ages compared to what they've got at home on their laptops, iPads and so on. Coming in to work is like tying your arm behind your back as you go through the door. Staff are frustrated, their enthusiasm sapped, their ideas thwarted.

Some do's and don'ts for government departments. Nothing magical here, just a bit of work for HR and IT.

Do:	Don't
Get senior IT and HR in a room and discuss the latest technology. Invite anyone who's enthusiastic or has experience	Assign 'Investigate online collaboration' as a project for someone kicking around the corporate pool
Test a few services for security and data protection (Huddle, Basecamp, Google Docs, Offisync) and ease up on the firewalls	Decide it's all too time consuming and scary.
Let your staff free on them and see what happens!	Do numerous trials and pilots.
Get someone to record a video on Security In The Cloud. Put it on Vimeo and send to all.	Produce pages of guidance
Spread best practice by word of mouth and by inviting staff to join in on projects.	Spread best practice by writing reams of case studies and success stories.
Talk to your consultants about how they use these tools with their other clients. Learn from them.	And don't mention the word procurement.