Plain speaking on outsourcing

We report this week on two ground-breaking local government outsourcing developments: Somerset's "South West One", behind which stands IBM, and Westminster City Council's declaration that it will be free of IT infrastructure by 2015.

Westminster's CIO David Wilde tells a lucid story about how his council will go further down a road many councils are part travelling: outsourcing the IT infrastructure.

Meanwhile, in Somerset, IBM has sought to stop the county council from divulging key details of a £400m outsourcing deal in the teeth of the fact that the council is obliged under the Audit Commission Act to disclose this information to local electors or anyone paying business rates in the area.

The contract looks innovative. It is the first of its type and brings together two public authorities and a police force into a "strategic partnership" organisation, which delivers IT, finance, HR, property procurement and customer contract centres. The South West One venture has taken over the jobs of 1,400 staff, and promises to save about half the £400m being invested in it over the next decade. Its objectives are bold. The plan is to reinvest monies saved into an SAP customer relationship management implementation across Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council and Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

Yet, as ITV West's "West Eye View" reported last week, local critics have found it difficult to judge how good the deal is. The fine detail of the business plan and contract has been opaque. However justified that critique may be, companies that receive taxpayers' money ought to do their best to be transparent.

The IT strategy itself - to outsource as much as possible to focus creatively on the business of your business - is sound. Robin Dargue, CIO of the Royal Mail group, tells us this week how a robust and reliable IT and logistics infrastructure would allow the company to deliver new IT products and services. The infrastructure itself will be taken care of by CSC, Fujitsu, Lockheed Martin and Siemens.

South West One may not be wrong, but it is hard to assess the reasonableness of the scale of its ambitions.