Main navigation

Strategy (continued)

Shared Services

39.  A new Shared Services approach is needed to release efficiencies across the system and support delivery more focussed on customer needs. Technology now makes this far easier than ever before. Shared services provide public service organisations with the opportunity to reduce waste and inefficiency by re-using assets and sharing investments with others. Tackling this will be a major challenge as government prepares for the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review. Particular attention should be paid to the following areas:

1. Customer Service Centres, such as those for customer contact or payment processes, where there is significant scope for rationalisation through sharing, particularly if central, local and other public sector bodies can team up.
2. Human Resources, Finance and other corporate services, where improved professionalism, standard systems and processes and effectiveness of these corporate functions should achieve efficiency gains across the whole public sector and in the functions themselves, as well as enhancing the employee experience and realising indirect efficiencies from better financial, personnel, knowledge and asset management.
3. Common Infrastructure, where as government services converge around the citizen and organisations adopt commercial off-the-shelf technology solutions, the ability to share items of common infrastructure increases. Common technology will enable joined-up solutions, leverage investments and shorten the implementation timeframe of new reforms. To facilitate this a user-led Common Infrastructure Board will be established; it will be supported from the Cabinet Office and financed through user investment; and it will set out a roadmap and timetable for the delivery of common infrastructure.
4. Data Sharing: data sharing is integral to transforming services and reducing administrative burdens on citizens and businesses. But privacy rights and public trust must be retained. There will be a new Ministerial focus on finding and communicating a balance between maintaining the privacy of the individual and delivering more efficient, higher quality services with minimal bureaucracy.
5. Information Management: to facilitate the move towards more collaborative working on issues that involve a range of government organisations, common standards and practices for information management will be developed, with an effective range of tools to allow the most efficient use and sharing of information to all those across government that have a legitimate need to see and use it.
6. Information Assurance: despite the difficulties of a fast moving and hostile world, underpinning IT systems must be secure and convenient for those intended to use them. The Government will further develop its risk management model to provide guidance on this, approved by the Central Sponsor for Information Assurance. And it will develop a simple, tiered architecture for its own networks to support this model in practice, with an updated application of the protective marking scheme for electronically held information. Government will also play its part to promote public confidence by leading a public/private campaign on internet safety and by a new scheme to deliver a wider availability of assured products and services.
7. Identity Management: Government will create an holistic approach to identity management, based on a suite of identity management solutions that enable the public and private sectors to manage risk and provide cost-effective services trusted by customers and stakeholders. These will rationalise electronic gateways and citizen and business record numbers. They will converge towards biometric identity cards and the National Identity Register. This approach will also consider the practical and legal issues of making wider use of the national insurance number to index citizen records as a transition path towards an identity card.
8. Technology standards and architecture: to ensure that government's technology is cost effective in terms of public and private sector best practice, the CIO Council will determine a consistent approach to standards and architecture to be taken across government. Legacy systems will be progressively refreshed: by taking advantage of open standards, commercial off-the-shelf products and asset re-use, expenditure will be reduced and capacity freed for the transformational agenda. An overall strategy for geographical information will be developed under the leadership of the Geographical Information Panel recently created by Ministers.

40.  The Shared Services agenda is a major cultural shift for the wider public sector. To implement it:

1. Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Councillors and Chief Executives must give strong leadership.
2. Bodies awarding funding should presume that public service organisations only deliver good value for money when they standardise and share services with others.
3. A Shared Service Director has been appointed in the Cabinet Office to promote and drive sharing across the public sector and to establish overarching standard frameworks for shared services with a joint HM Treasury and Cabinet Office team and governance; and Regional Centres of Excellence have been established for local government.
4. HM Treasury will work with the National Audit Office, the Audit Commission, the Cabinet Office and public service delivery organisations on guidelines for the governance and funding for service sharing. They will ensure that relevant accountability frameworks expect and encourage full use of shared service provision where applicable, including measuring performance against published benchmarks.
5. Each government organisation should set out clear policies for sharing for services and assets that it needs or can provide to others.