sourcingfocus.com speaks to Sander Kristel, the CIO of Staffordshire County Council about the benefits they have seen from implementing one the country’s first Public Services Networks.
Kcom were selected by Staffordshire County Council to deliver one of the country’s first public services networks (PSN). Can you give an overview of the PSN and how it will be used by Staffordshire County Council?
The public services network gives the ability to any public sector organisation in or around Staffordshire for broadband connectivity, for any sort of telephone solution and for contact centre solutions as well. The partners can then choose under the contract which services they want to buy, and how they want to implement them. For instance some partners might want a fully managed service, and others might want to manage parts of the services themselves. For the County Council as the lead body in this agreement, it’s a broadband service that we deliver to all our County Council sites and also to the vast majority of our schools. Other partners that have joined up until now are all South Staffordshire Health Partners, Lichfield District Council, and we also provide the education network for Wolverhampton City Council as well.
How is the PSN benefiting the residents of Staffordshire?
Well, it’s in a number of levels. First of all, it’s really important for a PSN that it’s cheaper for the partners than going out and getting connectivity themselves. Clearly there is a saving for the taxpayer; at the start we estimated the saving to be at least £1 million, but actually we can see now that that saving will increase over time. More important than the technology itself and the direct savings, it’s all about shared working and shared services that we provide because the public sector can be quite a complex environment for a customer to manoeuvre. So for us to be able to provide end to end services and work more closely together we need to share more information securely and appropriately, we need to share buildings etc. To do that you really need to write plumbing underneath it to underpin it all and to make it easy to do, and that’s exactly what our PSN does.
On that theme of shared working, can you tell me more about Staffordshire’s integration of public services in general?
As an example, we are the first in the country to have a significant amount of our social workers move into an integrated health trust. For example, a social worker could arrive at someone’s home in the morning and do an assessment of what the needs of that client are. A nurse could be there in the afternoon and do exactly the same, and neither knowing the other was carrying out the same task, which is obviously very inefficient, and annoying for our residents. By moving our social workers into the integrated health trust we avoid a lot of duplication and we hope to improve and enhance the services for our customers, as well as reducing costs.
Which examples of best practice would you like to highlight from the implementation of the PSN from Kcom?
I think what was really important for me was to be completely transparent to all of your partners. For us, this is not something we want to make a profit on; we have been completely transparent with regards to costs, to rollout – and that’s where you could run into some problems with your rollout, you have to be completely transparent for your partners because trust in a relationship like this is incredibly important. Furthermore it was really important that the solution and the contract have flexibility, as mentioned earlier, some partners still want to manage aspects of their contract. If you don’t accommodate for that they will turn around and say “this is not for me, and I don’t want to join this.”
Can you give me some examples of how you maintain transparency throughout that period?
If you look at the procurement, we ran it as a competitive dialogue process and we invited partners even though they hadn’t signed up to the PSN on day one, and they had the opportunity to hear what the suppliers were saying, see the costs, and have conversations with the suppliers. As long as you keep that consistent throughout the process it’s a really good way for partners to get some trust in you and show that you’re not trying to fleece them.
Could you tell me more about the initial procurement exercise and why Staffordshire decided to partner with Kcom?
Obviously in the public sector the procurement processes that we run are very stringent, they can be quite cumbersome at times. We chose a competitive dialogue process because at the time that we did it the Public Services Network framework hadn’t been awarded yet so we had to do it ourselves. We chose the competitive dialogue process because it allows transparency, you can invite partners in, but also because we weren’t entirely sure what it was exactly that we wanted. We knew we wanted something that was shared, and we really wanted to get the expert input from the supplier to help define what it was that we wanted.
Now throughout that process it was clear to us that to be more flexible, more cost effective etc. that we could still achieve the same outcomes but by incorporating other technologies into the solution as well. That is where Kcom were very strong with the flexibility of their solution as well as the price.
What do you see as the up and coming trends in shared services and shared working in general, how do you see it developing and evolving across other counties?
I think, like the county council is doing now, a lot more councils, particularly county councils, will become commissioning organisations so they won’t necessarily deliver all those services themselves, but they will commission them. So shared working will be a lot more evident in the public sector and more important in future, as well as more shared work with other public sector organisations because we have to provide more end to end services for the public. But also shared working with the private sector and looking at more innovative vehicles like joint ventures and social enterprises, which will definitely develop and grow.
