Central government is in danger of making a grave
mistake if it forces local authorities to adopt shared services
against their will. You would be hard-pressed to find a single IT
professional who did not think shared services are, in principle,
an excellent way forward. But ask them to point to successful
examples of shared services, particularly in the public sector, and
it is a quite different story.
That is why so many local authority IT leaders are concerned
that Ian Watmore, head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, and
John Oughton, chief executive of the Office of Government Commerce,
should appear so keen to mandate shared services.
Whitehall's warnings could not be more blunt. Watmore told the
Society of IT Management's Business Transformation conference that
the funding of local authorities beyond 2008 would almost certainly
assume substantial savings from shared services, which could only
be achieved by large numbers of local authorities working
together.
No one would deny that cross-authority and cross-agency working
can deliver major benefits, but mandates from above, particularly
those accompanied by threats of financial sanctions, can create the
perfect conditions for IT project failure.
It can create a political quagmire as executives try to hang on
to their empires and staff to their jobs. Without buy-in, change
projects fail.
The most advanced organisations face being held back by those
with the least-developed IT. The most innovative face being
shackled by being part of a larger, inevitably slower-moving
group.
Also, organisations all have contracts that cannot be aggregated
or redefined until they expire, and they certainly can't be
railroaded to fit an arbitrary timetable laid down by
Whitehall.
If delivering shared services in the public sector were easy,
Whitehall would have done it years ago. Alas, high-profile shared
services projects are few and far between. That is why if Whitehall
wants to see shared services across local authorities, a carrot,
not a stick, will work best.
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