The Guardian Public Leaders Summit will see 80 big-hitting senior public managers debating the big ideas shaping the future of public services in 2013.

Senior speakers at the event, being hosted at the Institute for Government, include: Michael Coughlin, Executive Director of the Local Government Association; Chris Sims, Chief Constable, West Midlands Police; Sharon White, Director General, Public Spending, HM Treasury – and there will also be high-profile figures from health, the civil service and local government, as well as the private sector.

The keynote speaker at the summit on February 6 is policy expert, journalist and author Karin Svanborg-Sjövall – she’s very experienced in civil service reform across Europe, and her talk is called ‘New visions and new horizons – what’s the alternative?’

There are many debates going on at the moment around so many areas of public service, among others, there’s procurement, probation, welfare… and there’s a whole new era of policing, with the new Police and Crime Commissioners now being in office.

Overall, the script is more or less the same, wherever you look across public service in the UK, providing services is getting more and more expensive, and the money available to provide these services is shrinking.

Of course, all of these changes are not going on in a vacuum. There is the wider political landscape around the economy – the need to create jobs, to deal with an ageing and growing population, to cope with the need for better infrastructure and dealing with the global slowdown.

Additionally, the public sector is a challenging landscape to negotiate a way through. Changing political agendas and the delivery of very complicated services in criminal justice, health, and local government, tax even the most brilliant minds.

So, the challenge going forward is to find a way through this complicated landscape, to deliver more, for less.

We will be following the summit with great interest, and hope that a host of new ideas will come out of it, to help achieve better outcomes for society.

Here at Alliantist, we try to tackle these problems from the standpoint of improving partnering, the efficiency and effectiveness of working practices, improving collaboration, and so improve community outcomes.

However, many public services are cautious about collaboration and sharing sensitive information, and rightly so, due to concerns about information security – and there is also the legacy of the old silo mentality.

At Alliantist, we are doing our bit, and rolling out our latest software, Restricted pam, which enables the sharing of sensitive data rated to IL3… about which there will be more later.

Let’s hope that this new summit can find other solutions, too, to bring about the better outcomes we all want for society.