This document summarizes a shared services event with guest speakers Matt Prosser and Max Wide. Matt Prosser discussed the achievements of the Dorset Councils Partnership, a tri-council model that shares a workforce and leadership team. Key programs included HR and OD, customer access and channel shift, enabling technology, and democratic leadership development. Max Wide discussed challenges with shared services and recommendations, including taking a citizen-centered approach and factoring in power issues. The document also covered Bristol City Council's commercial developments and the potential for platform-based service delivery models.

1. Welcome to the Shared Services in
Local Government event
With chair Jos Creese; and guest speakers Max Wide and Matt Prosser

3. Dorset Councils Partnership
Shared Service Programme
Chief Executive, Matt Prosser, @mattprosserceo
2nd March 2016

4. 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.

5. Strategic Approach
• TCA Funding
• Learning From
Experience
• Setting Stronger
Together Portfolio
of 9 Programmes
• This Portfolio aims
to meet the
Medium Term
Financial Strategy

6. Achievements So Far…
• HR & OD
• Customer Access & Channel Shift
• Enabling Technology
• Service Transformation
• Democratic Leadership Development

7. HR & OD
• Staffing Structure
• Organisational and Workforce Development
Programme
• Workforce Convergence Harmonisation

8. Customer Access & Channel Shift

9. 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

10. Smart Working Case Study
Economic Regeneration and Revenues & Benefits Teams

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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

14. Shared Services, what works, where next?
Bristol City Council
Max Wide, @maxwide
Strategic Director of Business Change, Bristol City Council
SOLACE spokesperson, Innovation and Commissioning

15. • 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

16. • 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

17. • 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?

18. Recent Commercial Development in Bristol
Bristol Energy
• Limited
Company
• 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

19. • 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

20. 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

21. 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)

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

23. 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
ative
Communities of
interest

24. 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
Worker
Innovation
Processes

25. Shared Services Report:
Getting IT right
Jos Creese, @joscreese