At the Engine Shed, in March, there will be a local government executive briefing with Bristol City Council, chaired by Jos Creese (former CIO for Hampshire County Council), with guest speakers Matt Prosser from Dorset Councils Partnership and Max Wide from Bristol City Council.
The event will address issues in IT shared services – such as pressure to reduce spending – and the importance of implementing changes to IT infrastructure for all councils. The event is for both local government officials and business partners.
“Technology is a strategic prerequisite, not just a tool in the ‘kit bag’. As such, it needs to be considered early in the due diligence and planning process”
Getting sharing right
Jos (pictured left) explains in his report Getting IT Right: “The experience of many public sector shared service projects show the importance of IT in successful shared programmes. Technology is a strategic prerequisite, not just a tool in the ‘kit bag’. As such, it needs to be considered early in the due diligence and planning process.
“Today’s public sector depends heavily on IT systems for transactional processing, communications, administration and customer service delivery. A shared service programme will therefore inevitably require careful design of a shared and flexible IT architecture to support it – infrastructure, systems and data.
“IT is arguably becoming the highest risk and highest value area in a shared service project and will certainly be one of the biggest and most complex work streams”
“Pressure to collaborate and to share is only going to grow. Councils in particular are designing digital services which work across traditional organisation boundaries, and central government is committed to devolving power to local services which will mean new service boundaries. IT is arguably becoming the highest risk and highest value area in a shared service project and will certainly be one of the biggest and most complex work streams.”
You can find out more and register via www.eduserv.org.uk and keep up with what Eduserv is doing on Twitter too: @eduserv
