Welcome to the Shared Services in

Local Government eventWith chair Jos Creese; and guest speakers Max Wide and Matt Prosser

Dorset Councils Partnership

Shared Service ProgrammeChief Executive, Matt Prosser, @mattprosserceo

2nd March 2016

Dorset Councils Partnership

• Dorset Councils Partnership is the first tri-council model in the country that has a

single Chief Executive and Senior Leadership Team and a combined workforce

serving three

sovereign councils.

• Established in March 2015 with the support of Transformation Challenge Award

(TCA) funding of

£2.145m, it serves a population of 235,000 people spread over 669 square miles of

Dorset.

Strategic Approach

• TCA Funding

• Learning From

Experience

• Setting Stronger

Together Portfolio

of 9 Programmes

• This Portfolio aims

to meet the

Medium Term

Financial Strategy

Achievements So Far…

• HR & OD

• Customer Access & Channel Shift

• Enabling Technology

• Service Transformation

• Democratic Leadership Development

HR & OD

• Staffing Structure

• Organisational and Workforce Development

Programme

• Workforce Convergence Harmonisation

Customer Access & Channel Shift

Enabling Technology

• Using Dorset Public Services Network, DCP now operate under

the same network across sites

• DCP have also created a New Exchange and Partnership Domain

meaning a single email domain can be used across DCP

(dorset.gov.uk)

• Instillation of partnership telephone system for quick contact

• Reduces duplications of work

• Shares resources

• Work together

Smart Working Case Study Economic Regeneration and Revenues & Benefits Teams

Customer Services:

Service Transformation

• Customer Services review

• Objectives to reduce costs and transform service

• What we have achieved: 30% reduction in cost

• On boarding new technologies to support service delivery e.g. web

chat

• Leading channel shift/Dorset4you super users

• Providing customer insight into services undergoing transformation

Democratic Leadership

Development

• Working with our Members to review our three sets of democratic processes

and working arrangements.

• Projects:

– Committee Management System

– Democratic Settlement

– Harmonized Constitution for Partner Councils

– Member Learning, Development and Engagement

• 111 Members, serving a population of 235,000 spread over 669 square miles.

IT: What We’ve

Experienced

• Issues surrounding NDDC who had an outsourced IT provider

• Harmonising policies and practices

• Invest in technology upfront and not insignificant amounts

• High expectations of a small team running many projects concurrently.

• Contracts & licencing not in line

• Relying on external suppliers/vendors

• Time to procure – framework contracts / existing relationships

• Managing Expectations

Shared Services, what works, where next?

Bristol City Council

Max Wide, @maxwideStrategic Director of Business Change, Bristol City CouncilSOLACE spokesperson, Innovation and Commissioning

• Politics– “I’m all for shared services…

– ...as long as its other people sharing my services...”

• Sustainability– Tri-Boroughs, the poster child for shared services

– What’s happening now?

• Benefits– All they are cracked up to be?

– Who would tell you differently?

• Future proofing– Where do we go next?

– ‘One off’ benefits and the cost of change...

Some issues

• A citizen-centred approach

– This has to be about more than ‘efficiency and cost reduction’

• Working across political parties

– helps build strong support, minimises political opposition and makes projects more resilient against political changes.

• Do not avoid difficult conversations

– Understand different objectives and make sure this works for everyone.

• Make it real for people

– Make the most of those projects already functioning,

– Pioneers, prospectors and settlers

• Factor in power issues

– by ensuring governance and decision-making structures are sensitive to differences in size and regional power.

• Form authority clusters

– within which shared service ventures can be developed, building momentum, resilience and choice around the agenda.

Recommendations

• Platforms platforms everywhere built little sense to make…– Digital platform, open data platform, software platform, citizen platform,

government as a platform…

• Two disciplines that have little to do with each other– ICT and OD

– If they did they could change the world, and outside of local gov. already have

Where next?

Recent Commercial Development in Bristol

Bristol Energy

• LimitedCompany

• Just completed full market entry

• Substantial borrowing against a business case of social and financial goals

• Due to return a profit in a defined timespan

Bristol Waste

• Teckal Company

• Formed at the failure of an outsource contract

• A holding position from which we can develop a new waste service

• Potential to take on other Councils work

Bristol is Open

• Joint Venture with the University of Bristol

• Brings together BCC fibre ring with the UoB’s software and super computers to create an experimentation platform, time on which is being sold to companies

BNET Ultraband

• To develop and commercialise 180km of fibre

• Business development

• Commercial ventures that serve the City purpose

• Further development of the infrastructure

Bristol Holding

• Oversees the companies in the Bristol Group

• Business monitoring for the shareholder

• Development of further commercial opportunities

• Delivery ‘boards’ chaired by the Mayor and due to aggregate data, administer additional powers, and deploy funds across the City

• Substantial amount of Council spend is contracted out and delivered through different forms of contract

• Increasing amounts of spend is through personal budgets given to people

• Millions spent on voluntary sector groups

• Huge agendas to integrate and deliver in partnership

• We are part of a complex network of organisations, set to become more complex and possibly more fragmented

Other development in delivery vehicles

The rise of platform organisations

• “What emerges from the observation of major organisational changes in the last two decades…the crisis of an old, powerful but excessively rigid model associated with the large vertical corporation”

• “Networks are the fundamental stuff of which new organisations are and will be made. And they are able to form and expand over the main streets and back alleys of the global economy because of their reliance on the information power [data] provided by the new technological paradigm”

• Manuel Castells – The Rise of the Network Society

The original platform organisation

• Cisco Systems – Created in 1985 by two Stanford Professors in San Jose, an internet ‘backbone’ equipment manufacturer

• Grew by 2,356% between 95 and 99, $220b 4x General Motors

• Success partly right place right time – but other more tech advanced did not share in the prosperity

• Cisco applied to itself the networking logic it was applying to its customers, it organised in/around the Net all relationships with its customers, suppliers, partners and employees

• Building a network of suppliers it cut its own manufacturing to the bone – from 30 manufacturing sites to 2, by 1999 83% of orders fulfilled directly by network of suppliers

• What does it get paid for? R&D (providing insight), attracting and policing the suppliers on its platform (growing the market and building trust), conveying market needs to the supplier network (customisation, market shaping), building a marketing platform for its suppliers (cost reduction and channel shift)

The technologies that a Platform organisation uses must be open to connections, enabling others to provide and find services

Strategic

Council

Citizens

Market offer

Service accessAccountability

Shared Platform

Partners

Providers

Service

matching

Co-production

Consultation

and

participation

APPS

Self-service

Matching/

brokering

Community

Portals

Rating/narr

ativeCommunities of

interest

Strategic

Council

Citizens

Market conditions

Contracted and Pay

as You go business

support

Low cost environment

Shared Platform

Service

Providers

DeliveryCo-payment

Public Sector

Network

SERVICES

Self-service

IAAS

SAAS

Business

incubation

Mobile

WorkerInnovation

Processes

Shared Services Report:

Getting IT rightJos Creese, @joscreese