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Government, Government Procurement, Local Government, Technology

UK mindset altered on shared services

By Rob O'Brien | 18 October 2010

London’s councils are facing a financial reality with widespread budget cuts but chief executives and politicians have swung behind the convergence of IT and management systems to bring about cost savings.

Speaking to delegates at the FutureGov Summit in Kota Kinabalu, Westminster City Council CIO, David Wilde, said that London was considering more collaboration in the shape of shared services and the merging of council management teams.

“The view across London and the rest of the UK is recognition of IT as a key enabler for any consolidation and any shared services activity,” he said.

“That’s quite a mindshift for chief executives and politicians in the UK – that if you want to pull together HR teams you can’t do it without pulling together the systems in which that data sits.”

Local government ICT nationally is worth GBP£6billion of which GBP£1billion covers the 33 London councils and Greater London Authority.

Wilde said that the financial crisis had completely changed the political attitude around the ability and necessity for local authorities to collaborate.

“It’s as if we’ve had to re-learn business cases based on hard ROI,” he said. “One of the consequences of the current financial situation is that the councils have become a lot more focused on what gets delivered on the back of that investment.”

In his address, Wilde said that IT systems were still dealing with legacy issues that had been costly for lower tier authorities.

“It’s very disaggregated, there are lots of legacy systems… we have an aweful lot of IT systems down at very low municipal levels and often it’s the same system sold many, many times over. So the cost of IT is quite significant.”

London councils had delivered on 30 IT projects so far this year, he added, ranging from an e-admissions system to primary and secondary education across London, and an employer authentication system which allows public sector workers to have access to IT systems across any London council.

He said that talks were underway with two local authorities about merging management teams built around service delivery and the customer, but added that the overall costs of public sector cuts would lead to a “ramping up” of outsourcing.

“For the supply side the appeal is that there’s going to be more government work that will go to the private sector… the down side is that the size of that marketplace comes down from GBP6 billion to GBP4 billion by about 2013.”

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