Durham and Northumberland have agreed one of the first
shared services deals between county councils, after Durham decided
against sharing services with 10 smaller local councils in the
county because of poor business fit and mismatches in their
respective IT cycles.
Durham is projecting a saving of £900,000 a year by running its
procurement and financial management functions on Northumberland's
IT systems. Since implementing Oracle E-Business Suite in 2004,
Northumberland has realised cost savings of £1m a year.
Durham will replace its Smartstream finance application from
software supplier Geac with the Oracle system by 2008. E-Business
Suite also offers a procurement function for which Durham does not
have an IT system currently.
Roger Goodes, head of efficiency at Durham County Council, said
efficiences from the deal would come from stripping out manual and
duplicated processes.
"Different departments within the county council had developed
their own financial management systems to feed into Smartstream, so
there has been a degree of rekeying to get a corporate view of the
council," he said.
Northumberland wants other councils to use its Oracle systems
once Durham's procurement and finance functions have been
successfully transferred.
Durham will set up disaster recovery facilities for both
councils.
With the shared services due to go live in 2008, the two IT
departments are currently planning how to manage the deployment.
They are expected to begin by connecting both councils'
networks.
The deal is one of the first examples of two county councils
sharing core back-office services. Most sharing between counties to
date has seen two councils use one or two applications to manage a
single front-line service.