IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) has initiated a three year strategic partnership with the InfoComm Development Authority (iDA) and HP Singapore by ‘best sourcing’ its entire IT application, hardware, software and services to iDA and HP.

Country head of ACCA Malaysia, Jennifer Lopez said the growing popularity of the SSO trend has many implications for players as well as the accounting and finance profession.

With the emphasis on greater cost savings, process standardisation and operational consolidation, China seems to be an obvious choice, but the process of mapping and launching Shared Service Centres (SSCs) into a new location is not without challenges.

Details of the settlement reached last month had been confidential, but were disclosed by the Council under the Freedom of Information Act.

According to newly-released documents, the local authority was "deeply dissatisfied" with HBS's performance and served a written termination notice on the company for alleged breach of contract.

The decision is seen as one that could open the door for other councils to use outsourcing, turning local authorities from providers of public services, to enabling councils that commission others to carry out services.

Dave Prentis, Unison general secretary, said: "This is not the way to run council services. There will be no democratic accountability. It is a disgrace that the council has not asked the public, or council workers, what they think."

In local government, IT outsourcing has an image problem. A detailed survey of staff in 94 local authorities found that user satisfaction was 13% lower in councils with outsourced IT compared with those that ran IT in-house.

The highest scoring council with outsourced IT failed to make the top 50 in user satisfaction.

Back in 1995, when Computing was first reporting a massive upsurge in public and private sector outsourcing deals, we also revealed that UK businesses such as The Body Shop and Sainsbury's were using a web address for commercial objectives.

Despite a history of government IT outsourcing disasters, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) is preparing to outsource its IT systems. Suppliers are invited to tender for a deal which could be worth £35m, in an advertisement published on 14 June 2005.

Councils that have outsourced their IT don't perform as well as those running an in-house service, according to the latest research from Socitm.

The report shows that user satisfaction is 13% lower among councils with outsourced services than in those with more traditionally run IT.

The UK public sector is set to outsource a further £20bn worth of services -- representing a growth of 50% over three years, according to research from Kable.

Public sector IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) will grow by 78 per cent to an annual spend of £6bn by 2006-07, according to researcher Kable.

The IT sector represents just under 10 per cent of the government's overall outsourcing spend of £45bn per year across blue- and white-collar services, and is the biggest single area.

The report said IT services must be credible in order to make e-government deliver improvements to service. "A large slice of that credibility must come from what users think of the service they receive and the degree to which ICT helps them deliver high-quality service," it said.

NVT, based at Bellshill in Lanarkshire, won a framework contract with the Scottish Government this year which could provide a maximum £6.8m of revenue over four years, depending on how many government agencies opt in to the shared computer support.

Stephen Park Brown, managing director of NVT, said the contract was on track for around half that total, with Strathclyde Police the latest organisation to join the framework.