Showcasing innovation: An interview with Shared Services Connected Ltd, a UK IT Industry Awards finalist
Computing catches up with Alan Sheehan, Director of Programmes at SSCL’s Police Business, to find out more about the company, and why he feels that the awards are important.
The UK IT Industry Awards will be held on the evening of the 10th November, back at its traditional Battersea venue, following 2020's virtual ceremony. Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL) has been shortlisted in the 'Best Security, Defence or Law Enforcement IT Project of the Year' category. Computing caught up with Alan Sheehan, Director of Programmes at SSCL's Police Business, to find out more about the company, and why he feels that the awards are important.
Computing: Who are Shared Services Connected Ltd?
Alan Sheehan: Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL) is a leader in critical business support services for the largest Government departments, Ministry of Defence, Police and CITB across the UK. It provides consulting and digital services as well as Finance, Procurement, end-to-end HR and Resourcing Services.
We employ more than 2,800 people who, with their in-depth client knowledge and collaborative approach, sit at the heart of our business strategy.
Operating at size and scale through Government, Defence and Police we have already delivered savings of around £405 million, providing more funds for front line citizen services.
CTG: How is your company different from its peers?
AS: We are a values-based company. We have a "Customer First" philosophy, where everything we do supports the vision and objectives of our customers.
We have a culture at SSCL that is similar to the culture of our public sector customers - making sure that we do our best for them and their end users, always looking to innovate, using technology to drive change.
While we operate at size and scale, we are agile and have the in-house capabilities to design innovative digital solutions that enable our clients to deliver their services more efficiently.
The pandemic has helped us to accelerate the use of RPA, AI and automation for our clients - reducing the need to undertake transactional process activities, minimising risk and reducing time to deliver.
We provide SaaS solutions to help our clients maximise the benefits of technology, building services fit for the future, and we are increasingly supporting our clients' transition to cloud-based solutions.
In 2020 we launched our Intelligent Ecosystem, which brings together everything our customers need in their day-to-day working lives, accessible at any time and from anywhere.
Assets like these have made us what we are today - one of Europe's largest shared service providers.
CTG: What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
AS: At the start of the pandemic we, like most other organisations, were mostly office-based working from sites across the UK. We quickly moved our workforce of 2,800 people to remote working and technology was the key enabler for us to continue to operate successfully and securely.
A priority for us was to look after the health and wellbeing of our people, equipping them with the tools they needed while looking after their wellbeing. We put in place a range of services and solutions to enable our people to cope and to thrive in the new working environment - from counselling to pantomime to yoga!
Maintaining service delivery and achieving our Key Performance Indicators at this time was a massive achievement - driven 100% by the passion and dedication of all our employees. The work that SSCL does for its public sector clients is classed as "critical" and so it is testament to our employees that we kept everything working well and received positive feedback from our clients during this time and since.
As well as ensuring a Customer First approach and looking after our people, we continued to develop innovative solutions for our clients - such as the Operation Hampshire digital app providing support for police officers, for which we are finalists in these awards.
There are many things that we are proud of over the last year, but how we, our employees and our clients responded to the pandemic is what makes us feel most proud.
CTG: What are you working on this year?
AS: We have an exciting innovation agenda: enhancing the services we deliver and providing solutions to real-world challenges for our customers.
We provide solutions to power public sector businesses through shared services and beyond, so helping our customers with their transformation agenda is a major focus. We recently led the movement of some of the largest Government departments onto the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This was a complex, mission-critical transformation programme, one of the largest cloud technology migration programmes of its kind in the UK public sector.
We're accelerating our delivery of RPA and AI, with over 100m transactions per year already processed by our digital worker family. We are using analytics platforms to drive insight for customers.
Finally, we're always looking for ways to solve both today and tomorrow's problems through technology - like our Operation Hampshire work with the Metropolitan Police Service supporting police victims of assault.
CTG: Why are events like the UK IT Industry Awards important to the IT industry?
AS: These awards allow the industry to showcase innovation and the power of IT, and to tell the stories of how IT is changing the world. Bringing the industry together in this way is an opportunity to celebrate success, learn from each other, inspire excellence and push boundaries through the power of technology. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and Computing help shape the standard, and the benchmark is set high - it drives us to continually innovate and improve.
Being a finalist in the awards is something that we're hugely proud of in SSCL. We know that we deliver exceptional things through our people and technology, but to have that recognised by the UK's industry experts is special.
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