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

Written by: Jon Hansen

Article Overview: Many key stakeholders both within and external to the Government of Canada (GoC) see a shared services strategy as a threat to the Small-Medium Enterprise community? Do you believe that the current GoC shared services is a threat?

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).

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Article Tags: alterations, business process, canadian government, coherence, competitiveness, copenhagen denmark, generation service, government entities, implementation scheme, interoperability, mappings, next generation, offerings, public sector entities, regional municipality, shared services, sme business, solution providers, standardization, system implementation



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