Cabinet Office Chief Information Officer
Last updated: 11 December 2009
To deliver Transformational Government the public sector needs to adopt common approaches and sharing in a number of ways e.g. data sharing, common identity management, common standards, and corporate services (HR, Finance, IT, Procurement etc). By working more closely together, both across and within departments, government can save money, reduce waste and move closer to delivering services in the way that citizens want and expect.
Focussing initially on human resources and finance, the Shared Service Team are working with central government departments to develop shared service plans in order to make efficiency savings, become more effective and improve the employee experience.
Efficiency
A potential 20% per year in HR and finance costs will be saved, with similar savings expected in other potential areas for sharing.
Effectiveness
Management information, transparency and visibility of departmental resource allocation will be improved. Significant improvements to key business processes, business critical information and IT systems. Better added value from the government’s top managers as they are freed from responsibility for transaction processing.
Employee Experience
Corporate services will become more professional and will make the civil service a better place to transact business for all staff. The establishment of shared service centres will provide better trained and more highly motivated staff that can develop a clearer career path in delivering corporate service functions. This will produce a more flexible government machinery with the capability and readiness to deliver future reform and change.
To help create a public service which is able to release as much resource to front-line delivery as possible the Shared Services Team in the Cabinet Office will:
The National Audit Office (NAO) report, “Improving Corporate Functions Using Shared Services"” published on 29 November 2007, and the subsequent Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report of 8 May 2008, both recommended that government improve the quality of information and data on the cost of its corporate services. In response the government has made commitments to the following:
The Shared Services Team is working in cooperation with Heads of Profession and departments to achieve the following:
It is envisaged that the benchmarking and monitoring of the performance of corporate services and Shared Service Centres will become an accepted tool to drive performance, efficiency and quality of service. The range of functions benchmarked will increase and help refine the methodology behind benchmarking. Our ambition is for the rapid convergence of public sector and private sector benchmarks.
Shared services in central government are currently focused on improving corporate transactional services such as HR, finance and procurement. Progress has been steady:
The government has avoided mandating a particular vision or template for how shared services should develop in central government. This has allowed a varied landscape to evolve at a reasonable pace, with departments at different stages of development following various shared service models
The Cabinet Office has moved all the transactional elements of its Finance, Procurement and HR and Payroll services to the established shared service infrastructure and capabilities provided by the Department for Work and Pensions. The transition was completed in April 2009. The objective is to improve service and achieve efficiencies through standardisation, simplification and sharing investments with other government departments.
This project also had the stated aim of “paving the way” for other departments and agencies to procure shared services from designated government sector suppliers. With this in mind, the Cabinet Office team has developed a full, structured description of the approach taken and the lessons through its transition project. The aim of this is to help other “customer” organisations accelerate and de-risk their own transitions. It is strongly recommended that anyone considering or planning a move to shared services looks at the Cabinet Office framework to benefit from this experience.
Unlike local government, central government departments have not tended to fully outsource the ownership of the delivery of their corporate services to the private sector. There are some examples of Joint Ventures, such as the one between the Department of Health/NHS and Steria, which provides finance, accounting, payroll and purchase–to–pay services to around 25% of NHS organisations, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
The trend has been for the private sector to provide partnering and specialist skills to assist departments in the internal delivery of its corporate services, and where they exist, shared services. For example, most departments use the SAP or Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning systems on which the back office functions are based and these are often managed and enhanced by private sector service suppliers. Central government is currently at the ‘in–house’ stage of the shared service journey with the majority of smaller departments expressing a preference to buy from ‘internal’ suppliers Central government departments. However, as the experience of creating shared services matures within and between departments, a greater engagement with external providers can be envisaged.
Options for broadening the scope of sharing are being explored as the pressure to maximise savings through economies of scale and greater standardisation of processes increases. Areas include: vetting, banking, fraud, IT desktop, and archives. Lessons learnt from earlier sharing programmes are being used to help inform and shape these initiatives.
With regard to IT desktop, more information on the Public Sector Flex programme can be found at www.cio.gov.uk/flex.index.asp.