No one can accuse Geoff Sissons, applications and information manager at South Cambridgeshire District Council, of being a quitter. He's a keen advocate of the concept of shared services, even though a previous attempt to create a combined HR and payroll service across three local councils, including his own, failed to get off the ground. Today, he’s as convinced as ever that it will eventually happen. “We need councils with a vision for shared services who will try to implement it, because it's the way forward,” he says. “It's one of the things we should be looking at."

Sissons isn’t alone in believing that shared services will play an increasingly critical role in both the public and private sector. Generally applied to the idea of sharing ‘back-office’ business activities such as HR, payroll, finance, facilities management or IT, it can be implemented in many different ways. Some organisations have pooled multiple business functions in one central service centre, for example, effectively creating an internal services business. Others, particularly in the public sector, have looked at pooling IT systems for individual disciplines like HR between different organisations.

The Cambridgeshire region already has two shared services operations up and running – Cambridgeshire County Council administers South Cambridgeshire's pension system, and also provides a contact centre handling calls to the district authority’s offices. As Sissons points out, this set-up provides a number of benefits. Because agents at the contact centre handle most queries from the public and pass on only the most complex or specialist calls, it frees up significant resource at the district council. In addition, the contact centre works longer hours than South Cambridgeshire, helping to cover peak periods in the morning and early evening. The service level agreement that governs the contract also provides a template for any future shared services arrangements that South Cambridgeshire chooses to pursue.

Sissons had been hoping to introduce a similar shared set-up to manage the council’s HR and payroll operations. Four years ago, he found out that two neighbouring authorities, Cambridge City Council and Fenland District Council, were in the process of upgrading their software just as South Cambridgeshire was planning to replace its own payroll application with a combined HR and payroll system. The authorities investigated a number of potential shared services models, but practical difficulties stood in the way. The city council, for example, runs HR and Payroll as separate entities, so it would have been difficult to share common processes when South Cambridgeshire was looking to merge the two disciplines. There were also contractual and data protection complications. As a result, all three authorities eventually went their own way.

"We didn't achieve all the cost reductions we could have," says Sissons, "and we didn't achieve all the risk reductions we could have." South Cambridgeshire had hoped to introduce self-service functionality for council employees, for example, allowing them to see their pay records and access pay slips electronically, and saving the cost of printing as many as 450 pay slips per month. Time and resource constraints now prevent the council from carrying out that work on its own.

Despite the setback, however, Sissons takes a number of positives out of the initiative. One of the consequences was that Cambridge City Council, Fenland District Council and South Cambridgeshire all decided to standardise on the same combined HR and payroll software package – and another local council has also bought the same product. Although the county council uses different systems and runs HR and Payroll as separate entities, Sissons believes all of the authorities could eventually share HR and Payroll services between them. That might mean standardising on the county’s system – but the fact that the other authorities now have a similar IT approach would help smooth the transition. "We have the same database of information, the same structures, the same concepts and we're using the same reporting mechanism," he comments. "It should make it more feasible for us to share."

"Other authorities are in a similar situation," he argues. "If we centralise and run one system on one server with one group administrator to support and maintain the system, we could save costs." He’s careful to stress that centralising and sharing the system is not to be confused with sharing the entire HR function. "You need to think of HR as being a local function. If you don't, you might as well outsource it," he says.

While there are obstacles to overcome, he believes the building blocks are in place for implementing shared services. What it needs is the initiative, vision and resource to make it happen. "We all run our own housing systems, benefits systems, revenue systems, planning systems - why do we do that? At the end of the day, the public doesn't care. Often they don't even know which services the county offers and which the district provides. It's as though we can see it, but we can't make it work."