Shared Services - should they be mandated?
6th February 2010
A legal duty for councils to share services would remove the need to build political consensus and address cultural resistance to the concept, the report said. Really?
Not certain about legislation - there are perhaps otherways of compelling authorities to act in a certain way. However, There is a big difference between shared services and outsourcing and outsourcing several councils' back office support services to one shared provider should not be seen as a panacea. Where outsourcing has big time failed in local government; it is not necessarily because the concept is wrong, more because it has been badly executed with poorly specified requirements and even poorer contract terms and contract management. These failings are not easily rectified and there is a risk of repetition in shared services.
Shared services within local government eg council to council should be capable of working and leaving in place the flexibility for authorities to implement changes (in a controlled rather than ad hoc way). Some commentators happily recall stories of the faliures of shared CRMs and call centres - self service websites could be added to the list. However, none of these are failures of concept, they are failure of execution. Mostly because local government went about them from a technology perspective; they were "IT Projects", senior managers and members didn't understand (or want to) so they let IT departments run them. It got councils the ticks in boxes they needed for BVPI157 and the so-called "priority outcomes". However, this was a recipe for failure simply because of the failure to listen to the needs of citizens before they embarked on implementing solutions for problems they didnt understand or may not even have existed. Local government needs to take a look at the reason it exists - to help meet the unmet needs of their citizens and businesses and improve the quality of life by improving the capacities of those unable to do so alone. Local government does not exist to run expensive HR, legal, payroll, cash collection, accounting and IT processes. Equally, it does not exist to spend vast amounts of officer time reporting to government or handling rafts of "inspections".
If councils actually focused on what matters and listened to the aspirations of their citizens, helped meet the needs of citizens who cant help themselves and went about improving quality of life for all of us, then they would have alot more friends AND be a lot more effficient and effective. The seeds of success are out there - councils like Chorley, Tameside, Lancashire and others following their lead. Pooling resources, increasing buying power, scaling down on the count of IT systems and reducing the vast amount of non-value adding and duplicated activity in the back office really should be a no-brainer; no new laws required!