Conservatives to kill shared service centres?
Co-operative approach to herald the age of micro-outsourcing - and micro-management
The days could be numbered for centres that provide shared IT services to Whitehall and local authorities if the Conservatives win at the forthcoming General Election, according to analyst house Ovum.
The Tories' pledge to allow groups of public sector workers - such as school teachers or workers at a Jobcentre branch - to form employee-owned, local co-operatives to deliver services in collaboration with IT companies is bad news for government's current shared services arrangements, according to a research note by Ovum senior analyst Sarah Burnett.
"Changes are likely to come as a result of the party's decentralised approach to public services," the note said.
"This is in contrast to the current government's strategy that is based on centralisation through shared ICT, the potential scope and scale of which is increasing as the pressure from budget cuts pushes different organisations to join forces to share costs."
The public sector has already heavily invested in shared services: in Whitehall, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) shared services centre provides back office services to the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Cabinet Office, with the recent Government ICT Strategy revealing that some 80 per cent of civil servants rely on shared services to deliver at least some finance or HR services.
Local councils are also embracing shared services, with major schemes including the Southwest One joint venture in the West Country to provide IT and back office services to local authorities, police forces and other public bodies.
Burnett said that the Conservative co-operative approach would need a far greater level of micro-management than existing service arrangements and a close relationship between the co-operatives and the local authorities that they would be providing services to.
"It is not yet clear how such schemes would work but it is expected that government departments and local authorities will be contracting out services to the co-operatives. This kind of micro-level outsourcing would bring new challenges of its own in management, reporting and monitoring of service delivery," she said in the note.
Learn more about what a Conservative government might mean for IT in silicon.com's special feature on Tory IT.