The concept of shared services has been around in one form or another since the 1980s. It has been driven since then by advancing technologies and a realisation that the concept can be applied wider and deeper. It can work with a broader range of services and address activities that are further up the value chain.
A recent report by the LGA 'Services shared: costs spared?' confirmed this with one of the key findings stating that as shared services mature and evolve, they are able to benefit from wider business transformation.
Business processes and cultural change programmes can benefit alongside the better use of IT and an organisation's assets. In the current economic climate there is a real desire for cost reductions, efficiency and productivity improvements across the enterprise that deliver results quickly.
As a means of restructuring and delivering improvements in efficiency and capacity shared services provides an organisational concept that meets the challenge. However, delivering sustainable improvements from shared services is not a quick fix and many shared service implementations have stalled and created problems within the enterprise that have meant the expected benefits have not been realised or increased the level of investment required to unlock the service potential.
This raises the big question can shared services be a short term savings tactic or are they only a strategic objective? Is there a sustainable means of delivering near term results from shared service programme that also enables ongoing innovation and longer term ROI?
Innovation is the fundamental property that any organisation, public or private, seeking to improve needs the most and our strategic partnership with Hertfordshire County Council is now introducing an inspirational approach to customer services. By sharing resources across the council and ourselves, and working closely with third party suppliers, we now have a central contact centre that is resolving many customer enquiries at the first point of contact.
By integrating front, middle and back office functions across, the performance-based shared managed services contract with the Council has begun transforming its internal business processes, significantly developing customer services and achieving guaranteed efficiency savings of at least £25m.
The Hertfordshire agreement also includes a framework which allows the 10 district councils and the police authority to benefit from the scale and footprint that already exists in the county's services delivered by Serco - a real example of the shared service 'build once use many times' mantra in action.
This level of integration – even in high- value and sensitive customer service areas – is a major step forward that builds on success in other areas; and because the focus is purely on the real needs and outcomes of the service users, the scope for service innovation and improvement is considerable.
Jonathan Prew is the managing director for public sector BPO at Serco
This content was provided by Serco and originally appeared in the Municipal Journal
