Greater regional cooperation is on the rise.
Municipalities already cooperate extensively in waste management, fire-fighting and purchasing. Via cooperation, they improve contract terms, combine their skills and obtain more efficient operations.
Recently, shared municipal ICT solutions have become a hot topic. Vital municipal tasks can employ identical tools and support. Common ICT solutions thereby strengthen each municipality, and enable greater regional interaction and coordination.
Scope
ICT is not an end in itself. It plays a vital role in effective municipal services.
Municipalities face demands to improve service and delivery, and reduce costs. This pressure, along with the vulnerability of going it alone, leads municipalities to seek benefits through inter-municipal cooperation.
Combining ICT services introduces an added cost. The goal is to ensure that this added cost is lower than that of running many, separate solutions.
Challenges:
Establishing a joint ICT organisation introduces a number of challenges/clarifications, such as:
- Relocation together and building a shared environment and organisation that
ensures optimal delivery.
- Obtaining a complete overview of the solutions and the need for
deliverables/quality vis-à-vis each municipality.
- Preparing an agreement with a defined service level as well as the costs/rates
for each participant.
- Establishing an improvement plan or action plan that manages benefits and
pay-outs.
Deliverables
Establishing a shared operations centre introduces some new challenges. Equipment from many municipalities is gathered into a single operations centre, but not all of it can be employed in the new solution. Some equipment may need upgrading; other items may need to be phased out.
To better exploit skills between municipalities, they may choose to start projects that standardise similar specialist applications. This allows individual service areas to share expertise and capacity.
A key precondition: The ICT organisation must have both the funds and the mandate to make changes that improve the efficiency of operations and produce quality and cost benefits.
Therefore some municipal ICT operations have focused on:
1. Financing through operational leasing in order to:
- Buy out a platform from the individual municipality, and the frame for upgrading
and investing in a shared platform, to enhance operational performance.
- Gain funds to implement projects that set up shared expert systems between
municipalities
- Gain funds for local equipment (PCs, printers, copiers, etc.), including investing
in new equipment and replacing old equipment on an ongoing basis.
Fixed costs for the municipalities and prevention of major investments for each individual municipality.
2. Management of all solutions to ensure:
- Procurement and standardisation of solutions that guarantee terms, economies
of scale and low operating costs.
- Ongoing management of upgrades or replacement of solutions and user
equipment.