By Tony Hallett, 8 May 2006 16:35
NEWS
Public sector IT chiefs are backing the government's move to shared services but warn that it won't necessarily happen as fast as some in Whitehall would like.
The move towards shared services across public sector organisations, such as local and central government, emergency services and the NHS, was a consistent theme at a prominent public sector conference that kicked off in London this morning.
Speaking as part of his keynote address at the Government UK IT Summit, Department for Work and Pensions IS strategy director Keith Palmer said: "We are moving to shared services, to realise efficiencies, by standardising and simplifying. We will need strong, strong leadership... it's a cultural change."
Much of the debate at the event, organised by European Technology Forum, which shares a parent company with silicon.com, was about making government services run better and at a lower cost. Advocates of shared services say the approach certainly reduces costs as it does away with needless repetition, nowhere less so than in IT.
However, there were warnings that shared services is not necessarily new or shared in its meaning. Nor that it will happen at the pace government IT departments would like to move at.
Hampshire County Council head of IT, Jos Creese, said: "We need to capture the level of joined-up-ness we had 20 years ago."
Yvonne Gallagher, CIO at the DTI, added: "It is critical we have a shared vision now about how important it is to be joined up."
She also pointed out the many agencies that an organisation such as the DTI has to deal with and how they can be much harder to 'join up'.
Meanwhile Sir Chris Clarke, implementation manager at the Improvement and Development Agency, warned: "For councils, I would say learn to co-operate, collaborate and share - or quite a few of you will be got rid of. Look at what's happening in health and the police."
Comments
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1. Chris Andrews, Fujitsu Services
The move to shared services is part of the drive to improve back office services which need to align to the improvements the e-government agenda has achieved with client facing services. In turn, citizens’ expectations are increasingly moving towards an accurate single point of contact which can only be achieved with the transformation of back office services.
It is encouraging that those in the positions of power to make shared services a reality appreciate the benefits and understand that success relies on far more than the under-lying technology. As Keith Palmer correctly said, it requires a massive cultural change. My one word of caution is that while services may have appeared more joined up in the past, this was when the client expectations were much different and Directorate based silos of information were the norm. The opportunity to provide true, ‘joined up’ services and achieve the Gershon cost savings can only be delivered if services are shared.
2. Razman Zainudin
I totally agree to what Keith Palmer said that shared services is all about bringing in cultural change. As such, the drive should not only come from IT head department between agencies. Decision makers need to respond more aggressively with commitment