Uk Public Sector Shared Providers In which Now and In which Following?

Sharing providers has risen up the agendas of your UK's national and local governments in recent times, propelled by political and fiscal traits as well as by more concrete factors these kinds of as Sir Peter Gershon's 2004-5 Performance Review and Sir David Varney's report on transformational authorities. In an make an effort to throw some light-weight on new here developments and also to study where shared solutions may very well be headed in future, SSON convened a roundtable debate involving a bunch of practitioners and advisors at regional and national amount, chaired by SSON's on the web editor Jamie Liddell. The outcome were being, in fact, illuminating...

Attending were:

Tony Isaacs Programme Supervisor Warwickshire Immediate Partnership The Warwickshire Immediate Partnership is actually a shared providers programme comprising all 6 regional authorities in the county of Warwickshire: North Warwickshire Borough Council; Nuneaton & Bedworth Borough Council; Rugby Borough Council; Stratford District Council; Warwick District Council; Warwickshire County Council; and three private-sector partners in Steria, MacFarlane Telesystems and Northgate Information Systems.

Dominic Swift Head of Shared Solutions Browne Jacobson Browne Jacobson is one in the largest law firms inside the Midlands with offices in Nottingham, Birmingham and London. The firm acts for over 100 area authorities, either directly or through their insurers. It recently published its Shared Products and services Survey '08, one with the most comprehensive surveys ever carried out into shared products and services while in the UK.

Peter Telford Chief Executive Officer Research Councils UK Shared Providers Centre Research Councils UK (RCUK) is actually a strategic partnership between the seven UK Research Councils. RCUK was established in 2002 to enable the Councils to work together additional effectively to enhance the overall impact and effectiveness of their research, training and innovation activities, contributing to the delivery in the Government's objectives for science and innovation.

Ray Tomkinson Community Governing administration Improvement Specialist and Shared Providers Author Ray Tomkinson is the author of Shared Providers in Nearby Authorities: Improving Service Delivery (Gower, 2007). Ray managed the Welland Partnership shared providers project and currently operates as a consultant.

SSON: Peter, you're at the head of one of your much more prominent national shared providers centres [SSCs]. Can you explain a little about the drivers behind the move in your organisation?

Peter Telford: Behind the Research Council's business case are benefits focusing on what are seen as monetary gains which will be passed back to research and the research community, but probably far more importantly inside the early stages is the feeling that we can secure better effectiveness in business support to that research community by aggregating the seven Research Councils' services onto one common platform, and transforming them. The business case started with an outline about two a long time ago. There was a lot of work done on certain parts of your shared service model even before that, but the activity's really come together within the last two several years. The full business case was accepted by the Research Councils in line with CSR07 [Comprehensive Spending Assessment 2007] in August last year, and the intention at the moment is that we will go live on the platform at the beginning of next year. We already have some providers live in the IT and strategic sourcing areas.

SSON: Tony, your project's been going for rather longer than that. Would you say that the drivers behind the Warwickshire Direct Partnership are similar?

Tony Isaacs: I think ours have been slightly different in that when we started off in 2002/3 the driver behind that was, basically, to capitalise on the money that was available from central govt at the time. We made a bid as the Warwickshire On the internet Partnership, and set up that particular team specifically to bid for that money: a total of £2m. We identified a number of different projects that we would make an effort to procure and implement with that money, not least of which was the joint procurement by all six authorities in Warwickshire of a CRM [citizen-relationship management] system and associated telephony systems. We got the full £2m and since then we have actually implemented it; we jointly went to procurement and we've ended up with the Northgate front office CRM system.