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Institute for eGovernment

Having used Axios’ award winning IT Service Management (ITSM) software, assyst, since 2009, the organization have rolled out the assystNET Self-Service portal to more than 5,000 business users throughout the council over the past year.

The two authorities will discuss plans to merge all corporate functions ranging from finance and human resources, to information technology and legal services.

Both will consider recommendations to examine proposals with the aim of establishing a fully-merged shared corporate service over the next two to three years.

Wigan is already sharing some services with Trafford and Stockport Council and now they are to share an HR and payroll system.

The project, entitled SWiTch, will be hosted by Wigan Council, and is expected to make savings of more than £2m for the three councils in the first two years of its use.

The system will handle records for more than 30,000 employees and will operate on three separate databases.

The two councils, together with Wigan and Leigh Housing and Wigan Leisure and Culture Trust, agreed to join forces in their search for a new IT provider — meaning they could share costs and seek a better deal.

The four have now signed a contract with technology specialists Agilisys. The deal will save Bolton Council about £500,000 a year.

The Next Generation Shared Services Strategic Plan, launched in late December, should lead to fundamental changes in the way government shares corporate services including HR, procurement, finance and payroll.

MPs have blamed budget overruns at shared government services centres on a "complete lack of leadership" from the Cabinet Office.

A report by the National Audit Office earlier this year found that five shared services centres, serving the Ministry of Justice, DWP, Defra, DFT and Research Councils UK, had overrun their costs by a combined £500 million. The plan had been to cut costs by 20%.

However, while the savings identified in 'Services shared: Costs spared?' are impressive, they are "nothing like large enough to make up for the sizable cuts to local government funding which are being made".

Research by the LGA and Drummond MacFarlane is the first to provide a detailed insight into the scale of savings that have been achieved through sharing back office functions like IT and legal, and teaming up to deliver frontline services like waste disposal and road maintenance.

The paper, Six Approaches to Successful Shared Services, sets out six proven approaches to sharing services, depending on how ambitious the parties involved want to be. Options range from shared software and underlying IT systems, to contracts and framework agreements, management, operations and transaction processing.

Public sector organisations are struggling to make the cuts to their IT budgets proposed in the coalition government’s Comprehensive Spending Review last year, according to new research.

In a survey of 102 senior public sector finance officers carried out by ComRes, on behalf of VMware, more than two thirds (69 percent) said that the cuts would be difficult to achieve within the proposed three-year time scale.

Some local councils and individual NHS trusts are taking a closer look at their IT estate to see where modest investment in new hardware or software can help them reduce operational expenditure, sometimes by using automated processes, standardisation and rationalisation programmes, and more often than not with the long-term aim of reducing staff.

Shared services can help local authorities provide services more cost effectively and in ways that make sense to the citizen – they should be a key driver of savings in local government. These and other benefits explain why a recent Browne Jacobson survey found that around 90 per cent of local authorities are engaged in sharing, with a similar proportion planning to share further functions.

The government's flagship implementations of shared services initiatives are running way over budget and are seemingly losing, rather than saving, taxpayers' money.

A report published today by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) runs the rule over five shared services centres that are being established for use by central government departments. The report notes that the quintet of deployments are "performing adequately", but notes that they cost £1.4bn to build, an increase of more than 50 per cent on the cost of the £900m forecast in 2004.

In 2006, the UK’s seven Research Councils, working together as Research Councils UK (RCUK), agreed with their sponsors, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (the then Department for Trade and Industry) they would work together to harmonise all their back-office functions by 2009.

The National Audit Office says a £46m contract with Fujitsu for an ICT system to support a shared services centre for UK research councils was abandoned due to poor management by the project team, subsequently leading to a big increase in costs for the programme.

In its report on a back office shared services centre for the seven research councils, the watchdog says that Fujitsu was appointed to build and maintain the systems underpinning the centre in August 2007 under a 10 year deal. It was aimed at providing a shared service for HR, finance, procurement and grants allocation by 2009, with a projected cost of £79m.

The three London councils announced their ambitions for the extra £7m of savings, which have been identified within the corporate services portfolio, in a new tri-borough progress report which was tabled on 7 March during a meeting between the three councils' leaders and Communities Secretary Eric Pickles.

At least 95% of councils in England have such agreements with other authorities, up 27 percentage points from 62% last year.

Sharing deals have collectively saved councils £263m since they first started doing so. In December 2011 that figure was just £165m.

Sir John Arbuthnott was commissioned by eight Clyde Valley councils – Inverclyde, West and East Dunbartonshire, North and South Lanarkshire, Glasgow City, Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire – to examine existing shared services initiatives and identify opportunities for further development of shared and joint working.

It would mean most of the former Strathclyde region councils sharing support services of finance, payroll, revenues and benefits, HR and IT.

Between 2,000 and 3,400 staff could transfer to the new shared body.

The decision, taken at separate meetings of both councils on Tuesday, follows a seven-month project supported by the Scottish Government to develop an outline case for the shared service.