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.
As well as the financial savings, there are operational benefits too. The creation of a shared service offers the opportunity to transform desktop delivery, enabling BYOD (bring your own device) and flexible working. Additionally, centralising IT and desktop delivery within the data centre means specialist resources are pooled at a single location, providing increased levels of performance, security, and resilience.
The confluence of efficiency targets, budget cuts and changing work styles makes transformation a strategic priority and will mean moving to a completely different model of operation allowing staff to be more mobile, flexible and agile. Organisations need to move away from fixed-desktop installations to more centralised models of delivery to realise these benefits.
But with a constantly changing set of virtualisation, cloud and hybrid solutions available, it can be difficult to identify the right one. On top of that, with the responsibilities of primary care trusts being transferred to local authorities this year, PCT staff will need secure and reliable access to NHS systems. Any shared services infrastructure must therefore adhere to the code of connection compliance (CoCo) for access to the Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSx).
Beware complexity
While success within the private sector has demonstrated the potential value of shared services, there have been some notable public sector failings. According to the National Audit Office (NAO), the private sector has typically saved in excess of 20 per cent with a less than five year return on investment by sharing corporate back-office functions such as HR, procurement, finance and payroll.
Yet delivery of shared services does not seem to be a core government skill. Since the Gershon Review in 2004, central government has created eight major shared service centres that have so far failed to achieve value for money. Following a review of the progress made by five of the service centres, NAO concluded that government had spent £1.4bn against a planned £900m, and created complex services tailored to individual departments that reduced flexibility and failed to cut costs.
The NAO has therefore issued advice that bringing in operational and commercial expertise is vital to improving current capability. Given that shared services drive organisational change too, it is unsurprising that many public sector organisations choose to partner with an independent technology specialist who can offer a blend of transformation and technology consultancy skills to guide them through the technology options.
Many projects ultimately fail because of a mismatch with the organisation's longer term strategic goals or the adoption of an inflexible technology that can't adapt to the needs of an ever-changing world. So a vital first step for any shared service project is to clarify and capture both broader strategic goals as well as specific functional, technological, and user requirements.
This involves bringing together IT directors and heads of service delivery from several separate organisations, some of whom may feel personally threatened by the consequences of a shared service. The result can be a highly charged atmosphere in which it can be hard to achieve agreement and avoid harmful compromises. Here, an independent outsider can play an invaluable role as facilitator, expert advisor, arbitrator and peace-keeper.
Technology options
Although the shape of the shared service and the underlying technologies may vary, it is likely to involve some combination of desktop virtualisation and cloud technologies.
Desktop virtualisation and VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) separate the desktop environment from the physical machine, with desktop programs, processes and data run centrally from a remote central server. In essence the client device (desktop, laptop or tablet) becomes a desktop viewer enabling users to access their 'virtualised' desktop from almost any location or client device.
Over the last five years, many public sector organisations have been implementing desktop virtualisation solutions to enable hot-desking, and flexible and remote working. They also aim to reduce operational costs, through easier management, simpler desktop provisioning and quicker and easier application deployment.
Additionally, desktop virtualisation can improve data security and compliance, because sensitive data is not stored locally and, for desk-based users, the use of USB-ports on thin client devices can be managed remotely by the administrator. Thin clients also offer a cost-efficient and energy-saving alternative to desktop PCs. The Cabinet Office for example, expects to realise savings of £2.5m and a reduction of more than 300 tonnes of carbon emissions per annum through shared services based on thin-client devices.
In the early days of desktop virtualisation, the cost of providing the necessary storage was often a major inhibitor. A number of technologies are now available that can dramatically reduce storage costs through the intelligent optimisation of resources and are already being used by many organisations delivering shared services.
Centralisation not only enables public sector organisations to reduce the cost of their desktop estates and mobilise their workforce, but achieve broader strategic aims by releasing significant amounts of real estate.
Increasingly, public sector organisations are investigating the possibility of moving desktops to the cloud. While there are a growing number of applications and services that can effectively be delivered from the cloud, a wholesale move to the cloud is not yet practical for sizeable organisations.
However, there is scope for developing on-premise, private cloud infrastructures that enable organisations to easily transition to becoming a service provider or service consumer in the future. This is a five-stage journey:
- Implement a centralised infrastructure – with desktops delivered via the data centre and a standardisation policy for critical applications
- Create a storefront for delivery of Windows applications, mobile applications, software as a service (SaaS) applications, and web applications (not forgetting data as well) – a storefront provides a single point of management and control, with single sign on, and automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of accounts
- Adopt public cloud techniques around automation and orchestration – effectively building a private cloud infrastructure to automatically provision the infrastructure behind these services
- Evaluate who is using the applications and services and calculate the cost of provisioning them – with this level of control and intelligence, organisations are in a position to decide the services it might want to deliver from the cloud, and those it might want to deliver internally
- Assess benefits of becoming a provider of services to other organisations, with departmental billing to charge back customers on a usage basis
Turning a vision into deliverable strategy
A good example of how local authorities can approach this journey is Suffolk County Council, which is at the forefront of transforming the delivery of public services. Its vision is to move away from local ICT infrastructure and service to those hosted in the cloud. It benefited from using the services of external consultants, as the NAO advocate, to capture and crystallise its strategic needs and translate these into a deliverable technology roadmap.
The resultant desktop virtualisation project at the council has been very well received. It now has people working on site out-facing and in other sites, in-facing in a far more productive, critical and simple way than they were before. It is also entering the next phase of its ICT transformation programme, with the migration of more users to the virtualised environment and cloud applications, as well the introduction of a secure sandbox for testing iPad, tablets, and smart phone applications.
Any transformation requires organisational inclusion, clarity of objectives (short term and long term), appropriate but not overly-detailed needs development, but, most importantly agreement. Chairing and managing this process is a key success factor for any shared service project. Only then can the plan, the results and the next steps be agreed.
Moving forward, continuous change in working patterns will be the norm. The principles underpinning the government's end user devices strategy – i.e. enabling the public sector workforce to work from any location on any end user device – are already embedded in the next wave of procurement, while policies on data centre, network, software and asset consolidation, as well as green ICT, continue to drive change.
Although the primary focus today is to drive cost efficiencies, with the right technology infrastructure in place, public sector organisations can ensure they deliver on other important targets – namely improved service quality, value for money, and price certainty.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Rob Greenslade
Quelle/Source: Public Service, 19.04.2013
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