WRITTEN ON September 19th, 2007 BY Paul Smith AND STORED IN Uncategorized

The announcement by John Suffolk (see Kable coverage) looks like government is making great progress towards sharing some of its “back office” functions. With “more than half” of civil servants now affected by shared services agreements.

Whilst it is important to recognise that shared services for more than 120,000 employees in the DWP is a step forward, I think if we took a straw poll of customers, the majority would think of DWP as one department – and would be surprised to think that there wasn’t one system. When one reads on, there are examples of other departments joining together to combine HR and finance – albeit on a significantly smaller scale and still to come. Older readers may like to trawl through their memories to recall the Chessington Computer Centre – er a shared service for Government sold off in the 1990s.

So “shared services” doesn’t necessarily mean services that are shared across government. It does not augur well for “joined up” citizen services and I think the problem remains one of silo management and a scale of ambition. It appears big is best and there is little place for a small centre with local operations… the most successful shared service in the UK public sector is probably the NHS’s joint venture with Xansa where the central service offers local delivery at somewhere near 30% discount on existing prices. And that’s ignoring the role of local government who have always had shared services – both within and without the local authority. Indeed, there is one excellent example of a shared service for local authorities AND the DWP: a small service company (Aspiren) offers a “software as a service” that allows local council statutory housing information returns to be delivered quickly and easily from the council to the DWP, pretty much without the need for the local IT department to be involved. Congratulations to the DWP who core funded it – the approach should be an example to all involved in setting the scale of ambition and in creating a competitive marketplace that over time will self-regulate.