Listening to customers

Increasingly councils are recognising that the options for sourcing ICT resources and services are much wider than the traditional in-source/outsource solutions. Even a few years ago, outsourcing had developed from straightforward “break/fix” contracts for supporting the status quo, into strategic partnerships which were designed to achieve  a strategic/innovative approach to business improvement exploiting ICT. Some of these strategic partnerships worked well, but in many cases, councils struggled to break away from the traditional way of thinking of the client/contractor model, and hence found it difficult to engage meaningfully in a truly strategic partnership.

In an effort to make “Learning” more focused on the specific needs of our membership, we have reviewed our course offerings and launched a completely new programme for the next 12 months. The new programme offers a wider range of course, at more locations, and with more detail provided on each, to help you judge better who to nominate for the course, and the likely benefits to be achieved from it.

Shared services are much in vogue yet there are relatively few examples of successful implementations. It's not hard to see why - for anything other than a simple service shared between two organisations, the complexity of the approach quickly multiplies as the service becomes more complex, and the number of partners increases.

"Knowledge and experience of making shared services work, skills like business case development, knowing implications of EU procurement directives"