8 February 2007

Shared Services Centre is go

| johnboy
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Spare a thought for all those in the ACT Public Service today. Katy Gallagher has announced that Treasury has taken over control of their services via the “Shared Services Centre”.

“Where possible, resources are being channelled into integrated, streamlined, across government systems and processes. This allows corporate services staff to work collectively in a more efficient environment.”

In my experience this means the corporate services staff will be working in their own little empire and the service delivery sections will, in very short order, have to re-build their own capabilities leaving the SSC as an appendix to the administration.

But hey, maybe it’ll work this time?

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Sorry – referring to feds in previous comment, less sure about the locals.

Not a great deal on the HR side, I suspect – speaking from experience, there are enough differences in employment conditions between the various departments that the savings would be pretty minimal. I suppose at least the IT side of it might save a bit of money by centralising support and management aspects.

Don’t know about centralised IT, but I’d like to think that it would work for the ACT government’s HR functions, and at $10M pa saving, it would have to warrant a good look wouldn’t it?
But how much could the Federal Govt save if it pooled the payroll sections of all the departments??

Principals, I have heard, are tied up with a lot of admin stuff formerly dealt with centrally, which is handled centrally in other jurisdictions. It would be nice if they were freed up to do their job . . . Happy to defer to someone on the ground though – my info is second-hand.

if you want something done right…

seriously, someone has to answer the phone, they may as well do admin in the rest of the time.

I hope this means school admin processes will also be centralised. How silly that so many things in schools under ‘school based management’ are individually done by individual schools, when they could be managed in bulk, saving time and money.
I would be most interested if anyone knows.

Sounds like a cunning plan for the HR and IT professionals to get some Senior Executive positions for themselves and to be able to tell all the service delivery agencies that their work is important and in the queue [somewhere].

Watch the flurry of efficient people seek and obtain redundancies so they can reap the benefits, just like Sammy.

sounds like they need more than one sammy.

What happens now is that an ever-increasing bottleneck develops, and the only people who really benefit are contractors.

I’m in the situation where I contract Government work that overflows out of centralised centres like this one.

I get contracted by individual departments, and charge higher than normal rates because they need things done quickly.

The centralised centre is too busy to turn it out in a reasonable time. The backlog continues to grow by days a week, so by the end of the year, they’ve got a 2-month backlog of work.

Bring it on.

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