Is the Government of Canada's Shared Services Strategy a Threat to Small Business (Survey Result 3)

Christian, Director, Copenhagen, Denmark The strategy pursued by the Canadian Government seems sound - and as others have noticed the threat picture is drawn from the people delievering custom-made solutions of today.

Around the world there is a growing understanding among governments that investing in shared services are the way forward - the reason for this is that shared services can be seen as both a mechanism of standardization and of efficiency.

But it is not easy to devise the "right" system implementation scheme today of the Gov infrastructure of tomorrow - many parameters; like the coherence between government and regional/municipality levels, the current (lack of) integration (interoperability) and the need for custom-made alterations due to specialized needs among government entities.

In realizing the society of tomorrow - which I label the "Digitized Service Society" there are many mechanism's that needs to be included - and strategically choices needs to be made.

I believe that it is possible to devise a model of operation (modus operandi) that will strenghten Government on services and efficiency as well as preserve the competitiveness of the SME business - in fact it will lead to greater competition between small and large TSP (total solution providers) and hence generate both innovation and better prices/quality for public sector entities.

The steps to become a next generation service society (Gov perspective):

#1: Ensure that there is a centralized coordinator of public sector initatives and strategies with respect to ICT. And one with power to enforce standardization and homogenisation.

#2: Create business process mappings of key digital services - take the ones with most volume and let them be stadardized and made efficient first.

#3: Create the "Shared service markedplace" (see blog link below) as one of the digitized government's key offerings. The marketplace interlinks government needs with privat enterprises solution offers - on an shared service/ASP/SaaS basis. The way this could be utilized is by having a tender based on the business processes - this would enable both large and small companies to bid for service elements which de facto will be respecting the foundation (ie. datamodels) and hence will be interoperable.

#4: Ensure a policy on privacy - and on how services are made available on the marketplace.

#5: As this service infrastructure component is transforming government it is most likely that government won't be able to execute without the services on the marketplace - hence it needs to be resilient and well-protected. With respect to business resilience there must be several vendors of each service - and there must be a constant survailance of the marketplace to ensure trustworthyness.

With respect to cases there are some Shared Service cases on the European Commissions pages on ePractice.

Christian's Expanded Response:

The Lisbon strategy: Well, the strategy are like most strategies - not that concret and with few specific actions - it rather states the direction that MS (member states) should pursue in order to realise the 2010 goal - on the 4. ministerial meeting in Lisbon in Sep. 2007 some additional policies were agreed - but again - when you read them they are fluffy. So in order to secure real transformation I believe that individual coaching and thought leadership are needed on a MS-level - ie. assisting the individual governments in achieving next generation of it-society.

And there are huge differences between the most and the least it-prepared countries in Europe. The difference between Denmark (the nordics) and Spain (the south) is tremendous.

There is no clear linkage between my "vision" of how to operationalize a secure, marketplace oriented shared service infrastructure and then the EU Lisbon Strategy - but I hope that thoughts like these will be implemented in the next generation strategy...

The SME concerns: I understand the concern - if shared services means monopolizing tenders and competition then small vendors will be more likely not to be able to compete - and hence there will be a loss for the society both with respect to competition and with innovation - as many "start-up's" represents more innovative approaches than the big companies.

In Denmark the Ministry of Finance has recently "monopolized" some tenders within the ICT domain - which has lead to severe damage to the competitive situation - of course there has been projected large short-term savings - but I don't believe that they have calculated all the long-term costs of monopolism in their business model.

So - in order to make the "right" choice of how to offer shared services in a government context I have suggested the scheme in my previous answer. Seen from a technological point of view the possibility of realising such a scheme is much more realistic today than yesterday - so there is no hindrings for going forward.

I would - if I was to assist the thinking of the GoC - propose an infrastructure build-up with focus on business resilience combined with widespread shared service - and the shared services should be drafted with respect specifications of business processes - so that both commercial services and open source services are equal likely to (if they meet the prerequicites) to become "certified shared service" components.

Underlining this infrastructure should be a common IP-infrastructure so that the GoC could "insulate" themself in case of virtual storms - and it would also make it possible to protect the common infrastructure much more efficient - and with large-scale savings in operation and management.

To my knowledge the hasn't been other that single services offered as shared services within the government framework of Europe - one of the most envisioned ones I myself was behind - ie. in 2002 offering a common shared ASP solution to the government of Denmark on ERP (the socalled Navision STAT ASP solution).

Is the Government of Canada's Shared Services Strategy a Threat to Small Business (Survey Result 3) - To learn more about this author, visit Jon Hansen's Website.

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