Public Sector Shared Services Come of Age

Public Sector Shared Services Come of Age

The early moves were inspired by the IT industry who could see the obvious cost benefits of using state of the art technology to apply the sort of rationalisation to public sector offices that was already saving so much money in private industry. The BuyIT Best Practice Network, which was working with the government on the take-up of shared services, estimated at the time that government finance and HR services alone cost 9bn a year more than was necessary, the equivalent of 15 new hospitals, 200 miles of motorway, 30 new secondary and 50 primary schools each year.

Of course, sharing services across 2 or more different public sector organisations may deliver significant long term cost savings but there are a number of quite challenging hurdles to overcome before seamless transitions can be achieved. The cultural problems are clearly obvious as it goes without saying that public bodies are normally long established institutions where any kind of change has generally been of an extremely limited and gradual nature.

Leaving aside inertia, union resistance and general scepticism, there are all the practical issues that revolve around suitable IT infrastructure such as software and networks that need to be resolved before a shared service finally gets up and running. One of the biggest issues that arises time and time again is security. It is hard enough trying to get individual public sector units to surrender "territory" for the greater good but what really gets their collective hackles up is the thought of sensitive data going walkabout and falling into the wrong hands.

Similarly, they don't appreciate the idea of different parties to a shared agreement snooping on each other's traffic. This is a particularly acute consideration where external, private sector entities are involved. Only this month, for instance, Hampshire County Council signed a Memorandum of Understanding with software company UNIT4 to create a back office shared services programme to be offered across the public sector. Hampshire County Council is to be the hosted service provider and through the partnership is to provide support and functional expertise for finance, procurement, asset management and HR & Payroll.

Public sector bodies who have already succeeded in getting shared services fully operational will testify to the fact that security considerations alone dictate the use, wherever possible, of preferred suppliers who have already come across the same problems over and over again and who already have the solutions worked out.

MLL Telecom, for example, is currently working on a shared wireless network for a county council which comprises no less than 1,900 circuits to 700 end-user locations. These include fire stations, primary and secondary schools, council buildings and libraries.

Where there are this many agencies involved, it is absolutely essential that users are grouped into individual segments so that they don't have access to each other's traffic. This requires that each one has a Virtual Private Network and MLL have found through experience that only one of three different types of VPN is any use in this environment.

It seems that the movement towards shared services is already mature enough to have produced sufficient experienced players who don't have to keep re-inventing the wheel.

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