Shared services - latest museum exhibit?

It's not just government bodies that are getting in on the shared services act - the UK's best loved national museums are also thinking of teaming up when it comes to IT.

The heads of IS at national museums including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Science Museum, among others, meet roughly once per quarter to share their knowledge and experience of implementations and tech trends.

Shared services, set to attract £4bn in spending from the public sector by 2012, have been generating a lot of interest among museum IT heads.

Jane Clift, head of IS at the British Museum, told silicon.com: "Many of us share similar software, applications and so on, so there is interest in doing shared services and we talk about that fairly actively when we meet."

"It seems like it's becoming more possible to do that now and some of the museums have collaborated on things in the past. It's easy to do it on services that can be well defined and are straightforward - many of us for example get our internet connectivity through a sponsored link from a university," she added.

For the British Museum, the benefits of shared services include a reduction in costs, as well as the opportunity to learn from its peers who may have already adopted a technology the museum hopes to deploy in the future.

Sarah Winmill, head of information systems services at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is also looking to explore the benefits of shared services but offers caveats on how much the system can be used within the museum industry.

"[Shared services] is something we've been exploring. We're all very diverse organisations, we've all got actually very complex IT environments, so to enter into a genuine major shared service would require massive change in one of the organisations so what we've tended to look for are areas which are easier to approach.

"One area we're exploring at the moment is disaster recovery provision, particularly as there are three of our organisations that share a repository in west Kensington so there's an opportunity there to share some resources and to share some knowledge around policies, processes and those kinds of things," she told silicon.com.