The Strategy for shared services involves a number of key strands:
- Wider use of ERP systems across Central and local Government to improve efficiency
- Creating visibility of applications that can be shared across the public sector (e.g. Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM), Ministerial correspondence, banking, vetting etc)
- Ensuring through collaborative procurement that we ‘buy once and use many’
- Moving both managed services and shared applications in to the G-Cloud
- Creating the G-AS of business services and components to ensure re-use across the public sector
The adoption and wider use of Shared Services in the Public Sector has already saved money and headcount by rationalising HR, Finance and Procurement delivery and increased exploitation of current technology (shared Enterprise Resource Planning platforms). Over 80% of Civil Servants are now supported by a Public Sector Shared Service solution and the Departments running them have declared some significant savings. For example:
- DWP Shared Service Centre provides many HR and finance functions to the Department, its executive agencies and other parts of government. By the end of the financial year 2008/09 this led to the realisation of £100 million worth of savings
- Shared Business Services, a joint venture between Department of Health and Steria, now serves over 100 health trusts. This shared service delivers 20-30% savings on like for like savings and has achieved 90% referencability from its customers
- We have also succeeded in delivering shared services across departments. Cabinet Office now receives their day to day Finance, HR and Procurement support from DWP Shared Services and shares their ERP platform. DSCF will use this platform and service from November 2009. Home Office and the UK Borders Agency receive back office services from NOMs Shared Service Centre and plans are in place for the Identity and Passport Service, Criminal Records Bureau and MOJ to also share this service
The current programme of Public Sector corporate service benchmarking will be used on an ongoing basis to continue to improve the performance of the back office and to drive more public sector organisations towards the Shared Service model.
This ICT Strategy means that by 2020 there will have been a step change in the way that Shared Services are perceived, operated and paid for. The G-Cloud and G-AS will provide a one stop shop for the internal business needs of Public Sector organisations. Many back office business activities will have been commoditised and will be accessible to all public sector organisations and employees via an on-line portal. Additionally, having been procured at Crown level, the shared ICT infrastructure will be located in the G-Cloud. The greater visibility of applications afforded by the G-AS will ensure that the public sector will buy once and use many times.
In 2010, the Shared Services group will commence work with Shared Service Centres to move services to the Government Cloud and Applications Store. This will pave the way to delivery of more than £4bn savings outlined in the OEP report.
Sounds like an exciting opportunity for the usual suspects to push poorly specified, overengineered and cost-overrunning SAP implementations on the nation.
ERP only works in my experience when it is *very* tightly focussed and specified by in-house experts (consultants have a strong tendancy to gold-plating specs and use of inexperienced staff to do the implementations)
In the year that HMT, the Home Office, DWP, MOD and HMRC all had their accounts qualified by NAO, it would appear that there are more urgent problems than implementing shared services like Human Remains and ERP systems. Moving to shared IT services will only give Perm Secs another excuse for the financial chaos they preside over.
Make the Perm Secs accountable for fixing the financial mess and get the books in order before even contemplating more complex IT projects that will be poorly delivered and late.
Agree wholeheartedly – we all know that the bloated civil service of this country is wholly unable to accept change of any measure, and SAP/Oracle/A.N.Other ERP require either:
1) Re-engineering the business process to meet the system (expensive, unreliable, requires a change culture which our public sector is poorly adapted to handle)
2) Re-engineering SAP/Oracle etc to meet the current business process, which is expensive, woefully sub-optimal and ultimately futile – if you are not changing process, why bother changing systems? (at a cost of $30K a seat!!)
Per secs and their associated management teams need to be held to the same rogours as operations managers across industry – delivering process excellence (timeliness, accuracy, meeting requirements etc) – and maybe the government would like to hire permanent and skilled business analysts rather than shelling out hundreds of thousands on external consultants (rates often exceeding £1000 per day) – reducing headcount in this area for the sake of statistics is almost always a false economy
Some Siebel, some Sybase, some SAP, some SAS
> The current programme of Public Sector corporate service benchmarking will be used on an ongoing basis to continue to improve the performance of the back office and to drive more public sector organisations towards the Shared Service model.
Is this published and transparent? It feels a bit weird when you say you’ll use a measure to drive a particular outcome. If it’s an honest and worthwhile measure then how can you tell in advance what it’ll say?
Can we please move to customer-driven metrics, ie which show the cost and real quality of service experienced by real customers?
This assumes that the software on the shared service is suitable for all, and that’s very unlikely. A CRM “solution” for the NHS is going to have very different requirements than a CRM solution for, say the DLVA.
The cost benefits for a shared services model only come into play when the service is the same, and the multi-tenancy problems, security, scalability etc. are solved. Shared services works when it’s standard software, once the need for customisation starts then it’s pointless. If you wanted plain old collaboration then sure, roll out a shared Microsoft SharePoint system – but once you want custom workflow, then you need your own instance, and at that point all the benefits vanish because you have to start separating department services, removing the sharing.