Local authorities should make greater use of shared
services for common functions such as finance and human resources,
government CIO Ian Watmore told the Society of IT Managers (Socitm)
conference in Brighton last week.
“There is huge scope for joining up [across] organisational
boundaries and getting efficiencies in back offices, he said.
The public sector is made up of 1,300 bodies most with their own
finance and HR functions, he told the conference of local authority
IT managers.
Watmore said, “There are huge efficiency gains for the public
purse and huge effectiveness gains. It’s still a long way from
practice.”
Socitm members should set up shared services that use Government
Connect for authentication and data standards.
So far, the only major local authority IT project to
authenticate customers using Government Connect is the London
Borough of Lambeth’s integrated customer record. Lambeth has been
populating the record with customers’ transactions since it enabled
authentication 12 month ago.
