Government ambitions to reduce the cost of information
technology will push the market forshared servicesprojects from £23.7bn
a year now, to £38.1bn by 2012, according to a report fromDatamonitor
.
The market analyst said governments in the US and UK want to
create economies of scale that optimise spending on IT and meet
increasing demands from voters, plus an ageing population.
Prime targets for "internal outsourcing" are back office
functions such as personnel and accounting, said Kate McCurdy, a
Datamonitor analyst. By consolidating these services into one
organisation to serve many agencies, governments will reduce the
cost of maintaining multiple systems, ensure consistency of service
to internal stakeholders, and disseminate best practices while
allowing individual units to concentrate on their core
responsibilities, she said.
McCurdy said shared services will evolve to cover high value
functions such as citizen contact, tax collection, and benefits
payments. However the political risk associated with these services
meant share services suppliers would have to prove themselves first
by providing successful administration services.
McCurdy added that provision of shared services ranged from a
unitary structure where a single government organisation
centralised a business service on behalf of several government
departments or agencies, to a privately-run firm that supplied
managed services to one or more government bodies.