IfG.CC - The Institute for eGovernment

Just over a year later, SSC’s president Liseanne Forand returned to the Government Technology Exhibition and Conference to announce that 6,000 employees have been recruited from various government departments with timelines set for a 2015 delivery.

This prompts an interesting question and opportunity – What is meant by a single network? Is it a single supplier, or a single logical environment?

SSC is currently consolidating and modernising the Government’s data centres, replacing 485 data centres with seven modern, secure and reliable centres. The agency is employing Wedge Networks to upgrade data centre security and protect the Government’s critical information systems being shared across diverse departmental networks.

"China is no longer a 'maybe' destination," said Egidio Zarrella, a partner of management consulting at KPMG. "Having an articulated China strategy is essential for an organization with global ambitions."

There has been a push for Shared services adoption across organizations for a while. since such services reduce duplication and can result in cost savings. However there have been challenges to proposing and implementing shared services. Cloud is enhancing the pace to shared services migration and it naturally facilitates the use of shared services since a cloud service can be more easily leveraged by multiple consumers. Cloud is the true manifestation of a service delivery mechanism and has significantly sped up the transition to consolidation and shared services. Cloud can be termed as the next generation of shared services since it adds the dynamic computing, elasticity, self-service, measured aspects in addition to other aspects for rapid provisioning and on demand access. Cloud solution may offer lower lifecycle costs based on usage and the monitoring aspects can lay out a holistic view of usage, cost assessments and chargeback information. All this information can enhance the ability of the organization to plan and react to changes based on performance and capacity metrics.

Cloud Computing has already been pushed forward as the panacea for today’s IT infrastructure problems: instead of running separate services and data centres to meet the same requirements, everything should be centralised, computing capacity and server resources should be pooled and then consumed on a “pay as you go” basis.

But it wasn’t as simple a job as it sounds.

Emails and incident response reports from the department charged with overseeing the IT infrastructure shared by 43 different government departments give a glimpse into how Shared Services Canada interacts with other departments, and how sophisticated email scams can bypass firewalls and successfully con federal workers with messages appearing to come from government agencies.

It has, however, not yet been decided if the system will be published under an open source licence or not. The Navarra Government is considering several options for sharing the software in question.

The ‘Justice Management’ system was presented to Spain's Minister of Justice, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, when he met with the regional government in Pamplona in March 2012.

Focusing on the issue of performance improvement in local government, the first meeting of the Interest Group gathered high-level speakers and participants from over 10 European countries to discuss the success factors and methodologies for process re-engineering and results improvement in administrative organisations. Experts in shared services implementation and public management shared their views on how to achieve quality and efficiency in the public sector. Strategy coordination and process optimisation through a close monitoring of budget allocation were among the key messages delivered to delegates. Examples of successful implementation of reform strategies in various local administrations underlined the idea that change is possible, provided that public managers are able to develop consistent new processes and convince people of the need to change.

This is further evidence of how the public sector is coming around to the idea of consolidation and rationalisation of services.

Sectors such as the emergency services are taking innovative steps to consolidate processes and to work in partnership with other regional branches, with the aim of creating a more streamlined, efficient working models and of ultimately reducing costs.

On 16 September, European Unon transport ministers met in Vilnius to discuss progress and next steps for the Single European Sky.

Frank Brenner, director general of Eurocontrol – the European Network Manager which mooted centralised services as a way to speed Single European Sky reform - addressed the ministers, setting out for them the concept, which it has proposed to the European Commission and the 39 Eurocontrol member states as a means of improving performance in Europe.

So far foreign companies have transferred to Estonia mainly production jobs because of cheaper prices, but now also whitecollar jobs are moving to Estonia, with one IT company going to to move its backoffice operations to Estonia later this year.

The chairman of Tata group, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, is on record as having said that “Going digital is no longer an option, it is the default”. When we consider how the world is evolving almost at the speed of light, we can confirm these words as valid and ones that everyone must digest and understand its implications for the benefit of everyone.

Nigeria has, indeed, gone digital, having made giant strides and bold steps that have been taken by this current government to enhance digital transformation. However, there is still a lot of ground to cover, a lot of room to bring in public and private sector organisations, communities and individuals to bridge the digital divide and enhance the gains of digitization. This, underscores critical importance of the National Shared Services Centre (NSSC), powered by Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Company, Galaxy Backbone (GBB).

Lewis said the money would help councils ‘overhaul the way they do business’ by integrating local health and care services, sharing finance and human resource functions and creating partnerships for better asset management.

The 18 winning bids include a £750,000 award to implement shared services between Surrey and East Sussex county councils and their respective fire authorities.

North West Leicestershire District Council is the first legal department to join CapacityGRID, which allows local authorities to provide transactional services to each other regardless of location.

That would mean sharing not just back-office functions, such as payroll processing, across local authority boundaries, but perhaps pooling front-line services too.

Whitehall departments and arms-length bodies can save up to £600m a year if they work together and share back office functions, the government has said. It set out how his should be done late last year through its Next Generation Shared Services Strategic Plan.

At local government level, the merging of IT departments and infrastructure via shared service arrangements continues to gain traction in all areas. In 2012 Herefordshire council reported an annual saving of £619,000 from shared services among NHS services and local government departments. Likewise, Westminster City Council, the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea expect to save about £6.7m in total by 2015 by merging their IT.

Shared services are under the spotlight at the moment with the cost savings or lack of savings created by shared services centres under scrutiny. However, physically co-locating services is not necessarily the only or best model for sharing services.

The public sector ICT body said more and more authorities were recognising the importance of self-service through the internet as a way to save money, with many councils providing services online, looking to reduce the need for costly contact with the public over the phone or face to face.