16 Jul 2008
More than half of government employees are now using shared services, according to the Cabinet Office's annual report on The Transformational Government Strategy.
Sharing IT systems between government departments to save money has been a key plank of the strategy.
The Cabinet Office has designed a thin client Flex framework – managed by Fujitsu – which aims to cut overall IT costs by 20 per cent and desktop computing costs by 40 per cent by sharing computing power between departments.
"The Public Sector Flex shared service framework has already been adopted by four organisations, including two Whitehall departments, potentially saving millions of pounds a year," said government chief information officer John Suffolk.
The Cabinet Office, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, the Office of National Statistics, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) have all signed up to the system, and Fujitsu is making the business case to other government departments to do so.
But shared services are not always cost effective.
Plans to share IT systems across the Department for Transport (DfT) could end up costing £81m by March 2015 rather than saving the department money, according to a National Audit Office (NAO) report last month.
Other parts of the strategy aim to improve public service delivery by encouraging uptake of online services.
The report says the number of people renewing their car tax online has now passed the 10 million mark, while uptake of those filing tax returns online increased 30 per cent last year.
A project to streamline government information on web sites is also on schedule, with 712 extraneous web sites marked for closure as the information is moved to central services such as Directgov.
The initial Transformational Government Strategy was published in 2005 and this is the second progress report published by the Cabinet Office.
While it's refreshing to hear that the government's transformational IT strategy is finally progressing, effective management and a correct way of benchmarking are still lacking. Only once these issues have been addressed, will the full value of Shared Services be realised.
If approached using the business world as inspiration, the countless benefits will be instantly visible to public sector organisations, encouraging them to see this shift as the incredibly positive one that it is.
A substantial reduction in running costs as a direct result of shared services is the most obvious benefit. This thinking is directly in line with Sir Peter Gershon's 2004 Public Sector Efficiency Review in which his rationale was "share the service, share the cost and exploit the economies of scale." But it doesn't end there. Add to this the huge plus of reducing environmental impact and already cost reduction is no longer the only benefit, but just one positive component of sharing services.
Further still, pooling resources enables the introduction of standardised business processes and provides a vehicle to embed best practice into even the smallest of organisations.
Large commercial firms have been reaping the benefits of centralising previously splintered corporate support functions already for a decade. Local authorities need to realise too that IT should no longer be seen simply as a cost that has to be borne. Instead it has to be acknowledged as a crucial tool that can help support the business and one, which, if used imaginatively, can generate enormous advantages.
Joanna Sedley-Burke
Business Development Director
Sovereign Business Integration
www.sovereign-ltd.co.uk
Posted by: Joanna Sedley-Burke 30 Jul 2008
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