A recently published report by the New Local Government Network says what we've been saying for some time - that shared services applied to the back office achieve little by way of savings. The report has found that back office functions account for only 8.9% of total local authority expenditure - so even a very significant reduction in these costs would have only a minor impact on the overall budget. Clearly Eric Pickles' claims about sharing back office functions being able to protect front line services are nonsense.

In the past few weeks, I have spoken to quite a few councils of varying sizes, and one of the topics of conversation is inevitably about what the council is doing to achieve the required budget savings both in the immediate future and in the years ahead. It has been interesting to see that, certainly for the councils I have spoken to , that they seem to fall into two quite separate and distinct groups.

We have recently published a new leaflet, in which we illiustrate through a diagram how the web needs to be central to every council's strategy for customer service.  It's surprising how so few councils really take this on board - and continue to waste money by encouraging customers to phone or e-mail their contact centre, or even worse, to have customer-serving staff scattered throughout the organisation. There are still some councils out there with contact centres of 50 or more staff - usually a sign of failure of their customer service strategy to tackle the web.

Well, it's a funny old world! Only a couple of years after separating off Socitm Consulting as an arms-length managed organisation, Socitm has now taken it back into its collective bosom, so to speak, and it becomes once again a fully integrated part of Socitm. Although maybe a bit odd to the outside world, it actually makes a lot of sense.

The benefits to be gained from channel shift to the Web are self evident. So much so that it is surprising that some councils even stop to consider the value of it. There is so much evidence of the benefits to be gained, both in theory (from the expected reduction in staff resource needed) and in practice (from the experience of those councils that have successfully achieved channel shift), that one would think no special consideration was needed.

With a number of consultancy companies reporting losses and much reduced profits in recent months, it is perhaps surprising how buoyant some parts of the local government are. Here in Socitm Consulting, our pipeline of sales is as healthy as ever, but with an interesting shift in its makeup. Most of the pipeline today is made up of work which will directly contribute to achieving cost reductions for our clients - so work such as business process improvement, shared services, and of course how to achieve channel shift to the web and to encourage customers to serve themselves.

It is clear that some councils are already well down the road to becoming a true council of the future, while others are still stuck with the mindset that savings means cuts in service, random cuts in staffing, and concerted publicity about how difficult it all is for them. Only this morning my local paper carries headlines about the services which the local council plans to cut - yet this is in a council where internal inefficiencies remain untackled, and where the opportunities for achieving the benefits of self-service delivery over the web are ignored.

Well, the festivities are over, and we've had our usual glut of invitations to tender dumped on our desks the day before the Christmas break! At least it makes sure we don't over-indulge over the festive period!

Procurement - don't you just love it?

The report by Bill Roots, "Review of arrangements for efficiencies from smarter procurement in local govvernment" looked at how savings can be made from streamlining procurement in local government - although it rather skipped over the existing degree of duplication and overlap of current so-called streamlining initiatives. There is somehow a deep-seated belief in central government in particular that there are massive savings to be made from better, and more aggregated procurement. But of course one wonders just how real these savings are in practice, and how much truth there is in the belief that "bigger is better" - buying on a larger scale necessarily brings savings. 

Well that's the conference for another year! This year, the Socitm stand in the exhibition area seemed to be busier than ever - maybe because we were cramming so much different content into it, and of course having a generous supply of chocolates on hand always helps. With our Council of the Future feature on the stand, plus the Aspire material for professionalism and SFIA, not to mention Insight and Socitm corporate, there was a lot going on.