SSON Roundtable Debate UK Public Sector Shared Solutions Where Now and Where Next?

Programme Manager Warwickshire Direct Partnership The Warwickshire Direct Partnership can be a shared services programme comprising all six local authorities this project inside 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 Services Browne Jacobson Browne Jacobson is one of the largest law firms inside the Midlands with offices in Nottingham, Birmingham and London. The firm acts for over 100 neighborhood authorities, either directly or through their insurers. It recently published its Shared Services Survey '08, one of the most comprehensive surveys ever carried out into shared solutions in the UK.

Peter Telford Chief Executive Officer Research Councils UK Shared Services 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 more effectively to enhance the overall impact and effectiveness of their research, training and innovation activities, contributing to the delivery of the Government's objectives for science and innovation.

Ray Tomkinson Neighborhood Government Improvement Specialist and Shared Services Author Ray Tomkinson is the author of Shared Solutions in Nearby Government: Improving Service Delivery (Gower, 2007). Ray managed the Welland Partnership shared solutions project and currently operates as a consultant.

SSON: Peter, you're at the head of one of the more prominent national shared solutions 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 financial gains which will be passed back to research and the research community, but probably more importantly in 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' solutions onto one common platform, and transforming them. The business case started with an outline about two years ago. There was a lot of work done on certain parts of the shared service model even before that, but the activity's really come together within the last two years. The full business case was accepted by the Research Councils in line with CSR07 [Comprehensive Spending Review 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 services live inside 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 were 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 government at the time. We made a bid as the Warwickshire Online Partnership, and set up that particular group specifically to bid for that money: a total of £2m. We identified a number of different projects that we would attempt 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.