Public sector
Overview
Public services must deal with a collapse in revenues.
The American budget crisis, the global financial crisis and the eurozone sovereign debt crisis all have painful implications. As evidenced by the British Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review of 2010 which mandated £6 billion in cuts by 2015 - double the £3 billion initially forecast1.
Cuts, of course, are only one response available to deficits and shortfalls. Others might include debt restructuring, printing money – or even defaulting.
But for now, it is cuts in public budgets that are causing pain to a degree which, as The Economist points out, Governments may not be able to sustain: “…it is not clear how long they can go on asking for sacrifices in order to pay what are perceived to be foreign creditors. In the end, the price is too high…”
So there is an urgent need for those involved in public services to find a way of doing more with less. In fact, of doing much more - with much less.
Looking back to the recent past may help.
A variety of private-public collaboration and partnership models were in evidence before the current crises made matters urgent. Now must be the moment to test their potential for producing savings and efficiencies to the full.
Public services organisations have the opportunity to capitalise on the procurement disciplines and expertise routinely used by the most successful private organisations and to revisit their priorities in outsourcing.
Despite a mixed history in the public sector, outsourcing is again being discussed as a way forward in providing public services that are both excellent and affordable:
“Like it or not, central government has spent all the money saving the UK
banking sector and now it's time for the public sector and taxpayers to pay for it. Politics and personal gripes aside, the elephant in the room is about to start trumpeting that the sector cannot achieve its lofty savings targets alone. The private sector, in the form of outsourcers, simply has to play a part in relieving the burden3.”
At its best, this will be a new outsourcing tailored to new conditions: ‘Transformational Outsourcing’.
‘Transformational Government’ is already part of the public sector vocabulary in the UK, driven by a bid to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of public sector IT systems and technology-led public services.
Perhaps ‘Transformational Outsourcing’ now needs to join it, focused on outsourcing strategically important tasks with the aim of delivering better public services for less?
1 http://bit.ly/bPpmtz
2 http://econ.st/oL5biS
3 http://bit.ly/pvjmON
To discover more about the ways in which we can help our customers, please click the links below:
We offer public services organisations the opportunity to remove complexity across a full range of business processes. By unburdening themselves of back office functions which support their operation but are essentially peripheral to their vision and mission, we give these customers time and efficiency to focus on what they do best. The result is more flexibility and greater efficiency in the face of formidable challenges. Customers in this sector already trust us to process workers’ compensation claims. When required, we can also process payroll, learning and development, recruitment, and HR administration as well as offshoring services which can deliver advantages including speed to market, back office transformation, on-demand business, improved customer service and cost optimisation.
Customers include: WorkCover NSW, WorkSafe Victoria
We offer extensive technology capabilities across a variety of industry sectors. In public services specifically, our application development team already supports customers in the international justice system with solutions for finance management. On the wider stage, our infrastructure team supports customers’ growth with cost effective, scalable and rapidly-deployed solutions. We also design, build and run the software that supports a range of business processing solutions. We embed our intellectual property (IP) to create a solution faster and more cost-effectively than our customers can themselves. We can also provide customers with Total IT Outsourcing (ITO) solutions – a single point of supply for an end-to-end managed service.
Customers include: Subordinate Courts of Singapore, University of Reading, University of Exeter
We are experts in supporting procurement professionals with services including sourcing, spend management, procure to pay (P2P), system management and software solutions. We actively engage with the procurement community across industry sectors and look to provide thought leadership and develop strategies for creating added value procurement.
