It's easy to criticise the way that publicly funded bodies seem to be good at making very hard work of things like IT, while private sector organisations only make hard work out of them.

While spending a day with IBM recently listening to its efforts across the public sector, from defence and healthcare, to local authorities and education, I took on a newfound appreciation for the scale of the challenges facing the public sector and its chosen partners when it comes to getting the biggest bang per buck out of technology to help them deliver better services.

It's easy to listen to success stories and wonder why nuggets such as these (St Bart's NHS Trust using ITIL if you can't be bothered with the link) don't get championed at a higher level and spread, virus like, across the nation (why don't they??), and it's easy to get annoyed by anecdotal evidence of small minded wastefulness ('Bradford refused to ask Leeds for advice on its ERP implementation but was happy to trek to Scotland'). But it's much harder to come up with a single strategy to make everything just work better, because I don't think there is one.

Which is why a strategy to implement lots of small, good things and then swapping them around until everyone has them might actually work.

Moving on, but in a similar spirit, Southwest One was brought to my attention at the aforementioned event and is an interesting idea not only because it's an example of two local authorities collaborating on a grand scale to create an SSP (Strategic Service delivery Partnership) but for a number of equally interesting reasons:

• the service delivery company is comprised of staff from both LAs plus IBM;
• IT is not a separate component—rather an integral part of the whole thing;
• it has room for growth—other public sector bodies can use its services.

Now I know that some of the attributes above are defined by the very nature / point of a SSP, and that not all SSPs launched thus far have been complete successes, so it remains to be seen if Southwest One will eventually form a positive part of the Blair government's legacy, by showing that SSPs in general, and this one in particular, (see here for some questions being raised about its existence in the first place, IBM's motivation and so on) can work and deliver additional benefits over and above traditional outsourcing arrangements.

At the same time, IBM has stuck its neck out because it rounded out its bid with a lot of social transformation related activities. It needs to be seen to deliver on this as well as the IT side, otherwise the harm that could be caused will have much wider impact on both the communities involved and IBM, than an underperforming IT solution.

On the notion of good ideas spreading and being replicated, elements of the Southwest One concept are reflected over in Suffolk, where Suffolk County Council and Mid Suffolk District Council have merged IT departments to share back-end business processes. The overall scale looks smaller, but it has its finer points too—for example there has not been a single, wall to wall standardisation of service provision—instead, the smaller, more rural Mid Suffolk has more local, public facing elements to its offering, to reflect the makeup of the area. Its 'proper thinking' like this that needs recording and centralising for others to benefit from.

Fine comment from CSD (the name of the shared services company) CEO Bridget Taylor: "These things should be running themselves. People have more than enough to do trying to improve the lives of the public to worry about how the IT or the HR works too. We were looking for a private sector partner to effectively deal with those two parts of the business."

Shame this type of thinking wasn't more apparent when there was uproar at the prospect of NHS logistics being outsourced last year (20 years after everyone else did, logistics definitely NOT being an NHS role), and strangely little fuss made about proposals to ship spectrographic analysis (reading x-rays and the like) out to India (I'd prefer my ER consultant to do that thanks). Strip what you do back to the bones and it's easier to see the difference between the outcome, and the tools used.

Shared service models do mean change, which many will not like, especially the ones who find themselves surplus to requirements in a modernised, services and performance centric environment. However, rather than being responsible for providing jobs for life, public sector organisations are mandated to provide the best possible ways of using tax payers money, and that means moving with the times.

It is this element, and not the rise of IT as a means to achieving this, that leadership and the unions need to address on behalf of their workers.