That would mean sharing not just back-office functions, such as payroll processing, across local authority boundaries, but perhaps pooling front-line services too.
In truth, shared services is not a new idea, but the renewed impetus driven by real cuts in local authority budgets has certainly concentrated minds in many local authorities - especially in central London, where Westminster, Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea have led the way.
"It's effectively our response to the very significant funding constraints imposed on local government that we recognised we had to absorb, and the realisation that 'salami slicing' local services was not going to deliver the financial savings that we need to deliver - while also maintaining a service quality acceptable to our residents," says Ben Goward, CIO at Westminister City Council.
Better together
What this meant in practical terms was that the three councils have effectively merged a number of services at ground-level, while working towards a full merger of their respective IT organisations as each council's IT is standardised on the same systems.
"The shared services agenda has been driven very hard from an organisational perspective. The three boroughs came together at the service-level and, very quickly, the services themselves began to work together," says Goward. "So in adults' and children's social care, and libraries, front-facing services comprised of staff from all three separate organisations are being brought together, in many cases in a single location, and all working together on a single case load."
Merging the three IT organisations, though, will take some time. Not just because they have traditionally been run in very different ways, but also because each has services and supply contracts with different vendors that need to be naturally concluded before mergers in different areas can take place. At the same time, the three organisations also need to agree on the specifications for the new systems, based on some common principles, on a case-by-case basis.
Hence, the approach taken by the three councils, says Goward, involved an agreed framework towards which each council would move, as and when they could. "One of the things that we realised early on was that we would need to bring together the three basic compute environments in terms of desktop, data centre and support desk into one. So the IT management teams across the three organisations started to work together to agree a common specification that we could go out to market for a framework contract that we would then adopt," says Goward.
The start of the process, he says, involved commissioning external consultancy from Gartner and other organisations to get some ideas as to how the three boroughs should structure their services in the future.
"That input very much reflected best practice in the sector - government, central and local - around the 'tower' procurement model: desktop, data centre, support desk, network and telephony as separate towers," says Goward. That would be combined with integration at the client-side level between those towers.
"With this external consultancy informing our approach we were able, through agreement, to coalesce around that future model. So that's what we developed the specification for and went out to procurement with," he adds.
In practical terms, those frameworks cover a wide variety of end-user IT, although even at this stage it is not yet all-encompassing.
"There are three towers. There's the desktop towers, which covers the end-user computing environment - the laptops, the PCs, the increasingly mobile platforms that people use.
"We have a service desk. So, the actual support desk, which deals with all the incidents and problems and all the ITIL management processes. Even though that's critical, it's only a very small part of the compute environment and IT organisation," says Goward.
"We also have networks and telephony. We currently have different models for those and deliver them under contract. But we are looking at 2016 as the date when we will coalesce around a new tri-borough model for those," he adds.
Back office to the fore
Then, like any organisation, all three boroughs have their core enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which will include finance, human resources management, procurement and other applications that support the councils' overall operating functions.
"Those are all delivered separately, at the moment. But we are transitioning to this management service framework that we have procured from BT, which will offer a consistent ERP platform across all three organisations. So we have a very significant programme of work to consolidate line-of-business systems that we use as local authorities," says Goward.
At the front line, similar coordination of services is also being masterminded, with the procurement of a common library management system, a common social care system for adults and children, and a common business intelligence platform "to provide that resource insight and analytic layer across all three organisations".
What helped push the different councils' IT teams towards a unified system, therefore, was the fact that the service teams at the front line had effectively been unified first. The fact that they had to work with three different IT environments and sets of processes, and the awareness of how inefficient this was, helped to drive the project forward at an IT level.
But the boroughs are already starting to reap cost and other benefits, just three or so years in. "We have driven significant savings through the adoption of these common platforms, particularly through the procurement processes. When we go out to market, for example, for a social care system or a library management system, for the implementation partners it is typically one transition and one configuration. Therefore, we get a better price from the market for a single tri-borough system than we would if we were to procure and implement three separate systems independently," says Goward.
"Over time, we expect to drive efficiencies on the IT client side organisation as well as, obviously, managing a much reduced set of IT," he adds.
What Goward has also found is that different boroughs' IT needs do not necessarily need to be so unique, as business processes have also been standardised across the three boroughs for the same activities. Nevertheless, a lot of work has been done, and still needs to be done, in order to continue that work of aligning processes across merged services throughout the boroughs.
To that end, Goward and his counterparts have sought to keep software implementations as "vanilla" as possible, adapting their organisational business processes to fit with the software in order to minimise the level of bespoke development, now and in the future.
"That's not to underestimate the amount of work that had to be done across the three organisations to agree on the initial configuration of those systems, because we had to align three IT environments," he says.
Another key factor, he adds, has been the political support from councillors - the local authority equivalent, perhaps, of the classic board-executive buy-in. At Westminster, that support came most prominently from cabinet member Melvin Caplin, who recognised the central role that IT could play in driving forward the efficiencies that the local authority needed to make.
Now, if Goward and his counterparts at Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham are successful, they may well be doing themselves out of their jobs. Already a tri-borough CIO, Ed Garcez, has been appointed from outside the three organisations and, over time, their respective IT organisations will be fully merged.
For the residents of the three boroughs, though, Goward's loss will be their gain - one they should see in both their local services and their council tax bills.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Graeme Burton
Quelle/Source: Computing, 07.02.2014
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