The government is relying on shared services projects to
deliver substantial public sector cost savings over the next five
years. Will Hadfield considers how these services will
develop to meet the challenge
Central government has long believed that fewer people could be
employed in support functions if only the different public sector
bodies could be persuaded to share their back-office IT
systems.
Whitehall’s efforts to promote shared IT services have moved
from encouraging words to detailed plans that the different parts
of the public sector will be expected to follow. The Cabinet
Office, which is responsible for driving the use of shared
services, is reviewing nine “sector plans” that prescribe the use
of shared services for every part of the public sector.
The sectors covered by the plans are education, health, the
criminal justice system, local government, the Department for Work
and Pensions, defence, HM Revenue and Customs, departments with
multiple agencies and any other central government organisations.
The plans will be updated by the Cabinet Office this month and
published in November.
Although the shared services projects contained in the plans
will remain secret until November, Whitehall has already identified
the types of project it believes can be delivered as shared
services. They are back-office functions including finance, human
resources and payroll, contact centres, technical infrastructure,
data sharing, information management, information assurance,
identity management and IT architecture.
Few organisations have decided to share their finance, HR and
payroll with others in the public sector. The largest shared
services deals have often been projects to share support services
between different front-line services.
Birmingham City Council’s partnership deal with Capita – the
¬largest in local government – is worth a minimum of £420m over 10
years, but it could be worth several times that figure because the
partnership is the preferred vehicle for the council’s
transformation projects.
The £420m of guaranteed income provides only Birmingham’s own
shared IT service.
The council expects the projects covered by the partnership to
deliver £1bn of savings from 2006 to 2016. Those savings – none of
which require the council to share services with other public
sector bodies – are large enough to meet Birmingham’s efficiency
savings targets.
Smaller public bodies, such as district councils, lack
Birmingham’s potential for economies of scale.
The Transformational Government strategy, published by the
government last November, says, “There is significant scope for
rationalisation through sharing, particularly if central, local and
other public sector bodies can team up.”
The message from Whitehall is that shared services means sharing
between different bodies rather than just sharing back-office
functions.
In February, the Whitehall civil servant responsible for the
Transformational Government strategy said public sector bodies
should share services such as finance, HR and payroll systems.
Ian Watmore, head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, said,
“It is no longer optional to share. That will come through in the
financing decisions [in the upcoming Comprehensive Spending
Review], if nothing else. I am less interested in one or two local
authorities working together. I am interested in something on a
larger scale.”
Customer contact centres are ¬already being used to provide
shared back-office services in some parts of the country.
Liverpool City Council’s contact centre, for example, is run as
a shared services centre for both public and private organisations.
The centre provides shared document management, revenues and
benefits, HR and payroll systems. It will soon market a shared
finance system after going live with a £7m SAP Financials system in
April.
Although the contact centre’s services have been sold to only a
handful of small organisations – a firm of architects is the only
one from the private sector – Liverpool is still much further ahead
than most public sector bodies.
The contact centre has grown from 65 to 400 seats since it was
opened in July 2001. Its growth has come mostly from the council’s
decision to use Comino’s document management system to support a
greater number of services.
The council’s shared services company – a joint venture with BT
called Liverpool Direct – had to turn down a district council that
wanted to use its document management system. Liverpool Direct’s
chief ¬executive, David McElhinney, who is also a director of
Liverpool City Council, says, “We looked at Rossendale Borough
Council [in East Lancashire] to provide remote document management
and one of the problems was distance. There was not a network in
place to handle the movement of images.”
Managers at the joint venture see access to core systems outside
normal hours as a logical step forward for shared services.
“Out-of-hours is a no-brainer. Not many local authorities have
out-of-hours services,” McElhinney says. “However, most local
authorities see out-of-hours as an additional cost rather than a
saved cost.”
Liverpool Council moved its social care application, provided by
Anite, on to Liverpool Direct’s contact centre. Every big council
is required by law to provide 24-hour access to social care and
therefore access to social care systems.
McElhinney says, “There is an obvious need for the emergency
duty team through the call centre. However, because social care is
so complicated, it is hard to split out the emergency duty
teams.
“The shared services option for emergency cover is there, but if
the customer contact centre model is not already being used for
social care, it is a huge leap for councils to move to shared
services.”
Most centres in the public sector are used only to pursue
internal cost savings. Surrey County Council’s centre, for example,
is called a “shared services centre” although its new SAP ERP
system is only used to support Surrey’s own front-line services. As
the UK’s fourth richest council, Surrey can achieve its ¬Gershon
efficiency gains solely by improving its internal processes. It
does not need to share services with other public bodies to save
money.
The Cabinet Office’s plan to encourage common infrastructure for
the public sector is being driven by a group of IT directors from
both central and local government. London Borough of Newham’s head
of ICT, Richard Steel, who sits on the Common Infrastructure Board,
set up under the Transformational Government strategy to identify
the infrastructure requirements for shared services, says, “We have
had all sorts of targets around online service delivery, but these
have been reliant on having some sort of shared infrastructure.
“As we move into broadband wireless, the opportunities are
enormous for the public sector. Maybe we need some sort of public
sector bandwidth set aside.”
Whitehall also sees data sharing as a shared service. One of the
largest efforts to share data is the Department for Education and
Skills’ plans to make agencies share records about vulnerable
children.The Every Child Matters agenda, due to come into force
next year, will improve the delivery of public services to children
if agencies share data.
However, the IT challenges are so great – involving changes to
customer relationship management, workflow, middleware and online
authentication applications – that some public sector bodies expect
to spend a year just establishing their business requirements.
Newcastle upon Tyne City Council’s head of city service, Ray
Ward, says, “I do not know of anyone who thinks the Every Child
Matters agenda is not of significant importance. That whole agenda
around children’s services is the biggest transformational
challenge in local government.”
Public sector IT directors will discover how far they will be
compelled to share services when the Cabinet Office publishes its
sector plans in November.
How Scotland will encourage shared
processes
The Scottish Executive is consulting on its own proposals to
encourage shared services among the public sector bodies based in
Scotland.
The executive expects organisations to share the same support
functions – finance, HR and payroll – that the Cabinet Office has
identified for the whole of the UK. The only other area that the
executive identifies as ready for shared services is “the common
operational processes and systems that underpin front-line services
and which are duplicated across multiple organisations”.
Unlike the Cabinet Office, the Scottish Executive has set clear
targets for the savings it expects to be delivered by sharing
enterprise resource planning systems.
The Scottish Executive will spend £24.6bn across its public
sector this financial year. It estimates that between 5% and 15%,
about £1.2bn to £3.7bn, is spent on support services in Scotland
every year, in terms of employees and IT.
The executive believes that by implementing IT systems once for
many different agencies, it can save 20% – between £250m and £750m
– of the money it spends on support services.
The forecast savings from shared services are between 1% and 3%
of the Scottish Executive’s budget. If it meets its targets for
shared services, the executive will also hit the wider savings
target it was set by central government’s Gershon Review in
2004.
It expects to publish its own shared services plans by the end
of the summer.
Whitehall looks to mergers to consolidate
IT
This summer, Whitehall will publish plans that could accelerate
shared services by merging many smaller public sector bodies.
The Department for Communities and Local Government, which has
replaced the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, is due to publish
a white paper about local government reform that will propose
providing support services at a regional level and front-line
services at the level of individual streets or suburbs.
The Home Office is also attempting to provide services at a
regional level by merging many of the UK’s 45 police forces,
although resistance from some forces may cause delays.