Shared Services Conference Day Two and Summary

Here are my notes from the conference.

What are shared services?
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has developed a working definition of the term ‘shared services’. It can be summarised as ‘institutions co-operating in the development and delivery of services, so sharing skills and knowledge, perhaps with commercial participation’. The focus of shared services in on Institutions sharing services rather than simply ‘outsourcing’ or buying in services from third parties to replace in-house activity.

What is driving shared service initiatives?
Central government has issued documents in which shared services feature in strategic plans for public services. This initiative is in the context of the Gershon report for the Treasury which sought back-office savings from the use of shared large-scale transaction-based IT systems. The funding councils are committed to supporting Higher Education to seek cost savings and make service improvements through specific use of shared services.

Shared services already in place
There are some good examples of shared services including:

• Universities and Colleges Admissions Services (UCAS)
• The JANET network – Bradford is connected through the regional Metropolitan Area Network (YHMAN)
• M25 consortium of Academic Libraries – sharing resources and services for the benefit of students and researchers in the London area
• The out of hours IT help desk support service (NorMAN) hosted at Northumbria

What benefits could shared services bring?
As well as responding to political impetus, there are a number of potential benefits including:

• Delivering value for money and potentially lowering total cost of ownership
• Improving service standards that a single Institution might not afford
• Maximising resources to release back into academic priorities
• Continuity and resilience of services
• Shared expertise and knowledge

Some challenges of sharing services
There are challenges associated with sharing including:

• Loss of control/confidence in service provider
• Contract management expertise and delivery
• System Integration issues
• There is currently a tax (VAT) on shared service provision which reduces benefit
• Danger of “one size” fits all solutions

The Conference Exhibition
There were six suppliers that exhibited existing or planned services. These included:
• The financial and business system supplier Agresso – offering a shared service through its technology partner InTechnology to provide a high availability, remotely hosted Shared Service implementation of the “Agresso Business World” product.
• UCAS demonstrating its market intelligence, market monitoring and research service providing specialist analysis solution based on the UCAS applicant cohort.
• Logica presenting a shared eco-data centre solution for those Institutions looking for replacement or new space for IT servers and data storage.
• Steria who presented cases studies on BT and the NHS. The NHS example reduced finance and accounting costs through sharing common services across NHS Trusts – this is related to an initiative in the West Yorkshire Health Authority.
• Parabilis provides an e-marketplace for the HE/FE sectors integrating finance systems to provide one platform to place purchase orders and receive electronic invoices.
• Microsoft promoting its email and collaboration services for students through external hosting – a university labelled “hotmail” account for students.

The Conference Programme
There were parallel workshop sessions provided by Universities and organisations that had undertaken shared service initiatives. There were also presentations from the suppliers. The keynote was Tony Hey, Corporate VP of External Research Microsoft who headed e-Science program and before that was Dean of Engineering at Southampton. Tony’s presentation was Microsoft product specific but the vision was interesting: “low cost, low complexity infrastructure to streamline and enable student and faculty interactions”. I made contact with Dominic Watts the HE Business Manager for Microsoft and will follow this up. We are following up on the discussions about “Microsoft Exchange” at the University.

There was an excellent presentation by Northumbria University which is hosting an out of hours IT help desk service for 15 UK Institutions. Increasingly students and staff are using technology and networks around the clock but traditional support services are not available for peaks of activity which occur outside traditional office hours. LSS is already investigating this solution as a way to improve customer service and responsiveness. We were already following this up with Northumbria and aim to reach a decision on viability by Christmas 2008.