We have identified five key actions which will enable the council of the future to save money – as much as 10-20% of revenue costs – and at the same time improve customer service:

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.

Socitm Consulting has worked with numerous partnerships - many originating in response to the e-government funding initiative, and many of these continuing to grow in strength and scope. But all too often, partnerships exist in little but name, and any attempt to achieve consensus on a way forward is likely to be unsuccessful.

In response to this, Socitm Consulting has developed a range of management tools which help it to assess the state of maturity of partnerships and to highlight the next steps in the development of the partnership.

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.

"The benefits of working with others are recognised; may include shared services, partnership to join-up public services, commercial partnerships"