I don't care about the citizen

OK - so that's not entirely true, but sitting in Public Sector, I am acutely conscious that the issue right now is about maintaining / growing the economy - and that's very much about business rather than individual.  Yes, I know business employs individuals, and therefore we've got to make sure that we don't ignore the citizen.  Yes, I know that consumerisation and the citizen's home experience is having an increased impact on the future workplace.

But ultimately, the service the citizen gets from Government will depend on the strength of the economy - and that is about the strength of the business community.  So what keeps / attracts business into a locality? 

Traditionally the levers of attraction might be fiscal (taxes, grants, etc), resources (labour pool size and competences), legislation and regulation (degree of perceived bureaucracy).  But in the current economic climate, I would suggest that these levers are getting harder to pull - and thus less differentiation.

But I do think connecting the republic is critical here - we absolutely need to use technology to make the locality a better place for business to be in - we absolutely need to do things once, share many, between public and private - we absolutely need to use the technology to gain real value from cross-sectoral clustering (the whole being greater than the sum of the parts) - we absolutely have to make life much easier / more secure / more conjoined for SMEs.

When I see discussion about the role of public sector, my response has to be that it progressively needs to be (at least loosely) coupled with the private sector.   Now more than ever, it's time to really think out of the box.  We're all clear that expensive new technology applied to old proceses simply leads to more expensive old processes.  So we know to challenge the process.  But let's not simply challenge the process internally - we need to consider the entire process and its external implications.  For an economy to prosper, we need to do more than simply look for internal efficiences and productivity - we need to stretch for conjoined efficiencies across public and private.  That will clearly make it more attractive for a business to be based in the locality - and a side benefit will be that it will make it harder for the business to "jump ship" and move to another locality.