GPSJ WINTER 2023 2024 LATEST - Flipbook - Page 29
LOCAL AUTHORITY & COUNCIL
GPSJ
Tough times for councils mean shared
services must be the way forward
Mark Gibbison, VP Strategic Sales Programs, Unit4
The stark economic challenges
being faced by the UK public sector
and local councils especially have
been impossible to ignore recently.
The sheer scale of the issue is
becoming clearer over time with the
Special Interest Group of Municipal
Authorities (SIGOMA) indicating that
a total of 26 local authorities (LAs)
are at a near-term risk of issuing
bankruptcy notices. These LAs are
beset by debt (some accumulated
in Covid days) and hampered by
legacy infrastructure, and yet must
support a population experiencing
hardship driven by a cost-of-living
crisis. The funding system appears
to be broken regardless of a
council’s location or political stripe,
but what can be done to regain
some sort of equilibrium?
This is a catastrophic environment
that calls out for collective action,
and for IT leaders to point directly
to a greater use of shared services.
Shared services are hardly new, and
the approach has hovered in and
out of fashion for decades, but their
time has surely come. Quite plainly,
authorities don’t have the necessary
bandwidth, depth or breadth to act
in isolation.
Pooling of services, resources and
projects must be examined at every
turn. By sharing core systems such
as Finance and HR, authorities can
gain not only economies of scale
but also faster time to market, as
well as access to best practices and
replicated processes and workflows.
Security, too, is improved through
broader oversight, ESG goals
become more attainable and hardto-recruit (and retain) skills can be
optimized and scaled. In turn, staff
gain greater power and autonomy
to address testing challenges
that extend beyond local remits.
Leaders also benefit from smarter
procurement and streamlined
contract and vendor management.
In the UK but also abroad,
and notably in, for example, the
Nordics and the Benelux countries,
a culture of shared services is
clearly becoming the way forward,
alongside complementary models
that support automation, rapid data
insights and light-touch actions. That
means cloud and self-service portals
will often be the way forward for both
staff and an increasingly digital-
native, mobile-first populace.
But authorities will also need
to be entrepreneurial as well as
parsimonious. Raising revenues
via everything from parking
meters to street vendor licences
and fishing permits will need to
become
a larger part of the revenue pot.
As Nick Mayes, principal analyst
at PAC, writes in his foreword
to the new executive report
Reinventing the Case for Shared
Services:
“Local government organizations
in Northern Europe face an
incredibly difficult balancing act.
They are tasked with operating
in as lean a way as possible
in order to meet tightening
expenditure constraints while,
at the same time, delivering and
enhancing vital services that
meet the changing needs of the
population. But it is not just a
case of providing ‘more for less’.
Citizens now expect services
to be delivered at greater speed,
through the channels that best suit
their needs, while having greater
transparency into quality levels.”
Mayes is surely correct. Together
with tightly run, tax spend-efficient
services, today’s citizens always
want experiences that replicate their
everyday lives as consumers. They
want compelling front-ends, excellent
discoverability and fast processes
unencumbered by roadblocks,
delays or clunky interfaces. Sharing
successful proven approaches
makes more sense than reinventing
the wheel and, amid the gloom, the
PAC report points to some bright
spots where innovation and creativity
have led to enlightened outcomes.
We may think of the Municipality of
Norrköping in Sweden with its Safe
Meetings programme to provide
remote human contacts in social
services and planning, for example.
The City of Vaasa in Finland has seen
notable improvements in security
through shared services compared
to what its internal team of three staff
could muster. Closer to home in the
north of England, Chorley and Ribble
councils have brought together 200
staff to share finance, governance,
legal and other services. Further
south, Watford and St. Albans have
extended a collaborative effort,
Mark Gibson
VP Strategic Sales Programs, Unit4
adding planning enforcement,
building control and legal services to
existing IT, HR, revenues, benefits,
procurement, and financial services
partnership.
Some shared services are well
established: Stafford Borough and
Cannock Chase councils in the
Midlands have saved about £1m per
year since 2011 and continue
to extend their efforts.
It’s hard to overstate the challenges
that local authorities face. As ever,
change will not be straightforward.
Leaders must tread especially
carefully on data sharing, be clear
on goals, always cleave to citizen
needs, and be ready to adapt when
requirements or circumstances
change. But desperate times call for
desperate measures and nothing
less than a wholesale embrace of
a sharing culture will be enough to
begin to address current challenges.
About Mark Gibbison
Mark Gibbison is VP Strategic
Sales at Unit4 and is responsible
for setting the go to market strategy
across all areas of our key vertical.
He is passionate about helping
organisations deliver improved
services at a lower cost using
modern enterprise technology.
He has previously held senior
positions with Enterprise technology
vendors such as SAP and Objective
Corporation where he was Head of
UK Enterprise Sales.
About Unit4
Unit4’s next-generation enterprise
resource planning (ERP) solutions
power many of the world’s midmarket organizations, bringing
together the capabilities of Financials,
Procurement, Project Management,
HR, and FP&A to share real-time
information, and deliver greater
insights to help organizations
become more effective. By
combining our mid-market expertise
with a relentless focus on people,
we’ve built flexible solutions to meet
customers’ unique and changing
needs. Unit4 serves more than
5,100 customers globally across
a number of sectors including
professional services, nonprofit
and public sector, with customers
including Southampton City Council,
Metro Vancouver, Buro Happold,
Devoteam, Save the Children
International, Global Green Growth
Institute and Oxfam America.
For further information visit
www.unit4.com.
GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC SECTOR JOURNAL WINTER 2023/2024
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