Business dept sinks £14m into canned shared services plan The department for Business, Innovation and Skills has sunk £14m in consolidating its legacy kit as part of a cross-government shared services plan that it later pulled out of. According to an FOI response, BIS invested £13.9m during the first phase of consolidating back office services for the department and 13 public bodies …
My favourite is spending 94million on money saving efforts but only saving 90 million!
The caveat was "in two and a half years". In my experience, there's very few complex business projects that would expect to get a cash return in much less time. In the ten years since commencement, NAO expect costs of £159m versus savings of £484m. Which would imply that from now they have ongoing operating costs of about £8.6m a year, but are saving about £50m a year, and fairly quickly the project should be saving more than it has cost in total.
Seems to me what NAO are actually criticising is the over-egging of benefits in the first case, the lack of joined-up working and refusal of subsidiary agencies to participate, and the usual poor planning and delivery of any government change programme.
As the whole point of the service seems to be to make the users do all the work themselves (i.e. taking service away) pushing cost and time wasting on to the consumers.
Showing even the no-frills delivery engine of this not even paying for itself is quite an achievement...
the whole point of the service seems to be to make the users do all the work
That's what most of the private sector do these days, so public sector users shouldn't feel too hard done by. You do have a point that it is usually more costly for the end users to do things than for an efficient back office support function, but whilst PHBs continue to believe that support services are merely a cost, such outcomes will repeated.
In my own company, we did this big "multi-country shared services, users do all the work" project. Now it's difficult to get things bought, difficult to pay for them, difficult to recruit, and whilst we've not really saved any money, the whole scheme is a desperate drag on our commercial agility (and we weren't much good at that to start with). But, as always, if a big business outsources something, then it is making a choice that it doesn't care about the quality or the cost, it simply doesn't want to actually do that work itself.
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