My objective at the Home Office is to create a single platform for the delivery of shared services that fall into four categories covering information technology, estates management, back-office services and information records management.

My team’s first goal is to share services within the Home Office, and over the next two years we will turn our platform into a fully-fledged business for other parts of government.

The project has two aims: to deliver 20 per cent worth of cost savings and to improve the quality of services ­ better delivery of IT, more efficient processing of payments and a greater degree of back-office compliance.

Shared services, meanwhile, brings three broad benefits.

First, it offers efficiency, in terms of cost savings.

Second, it improves effectiveness. The public sector has not, historically speaking, delivered service levels that are comparable with the private sector. The public sector has also tended to have very high back-office staffing ratios and transaction costs. Shared services is a mechanism for resolving such problems.

Third, it enhances employee performance. Public sector workers are constrained by substandard systems, and employees tend to have a low service level ethos. The move to shared services is also about providing a customer-centric approach to delivery.

The government spends billions of pounds servicing its estate. Shared services allows us to rationalise the process by eliminating duplication and waste in our management activities.

We are changing our approach to managing our resources to make them more effective at meeting the requirements of users.

Finally, if we can deliver a smarter estate that is better designed and cheaper to run, we can provide a better working environment for government employees.

At the Home Office, implementation of the shared services plan is under way. A shared business service programme has been drawn up.

We have the vision for shared services, the senior-level commitment for the initiative and we plan to implement a full back-office shared service in Newport in 2008.

It is very difficult to implement a shared service by mandate ­ the provision needs to be conformed to, not complied with.

Most shared service programmes that fail have been imposed on people, and this underpins our approach.

Adopting shared services is ultimately a voluntary process.

To their credit, Home Office employees have carried out a huge amount of work on the project without being forced to do so.

Having said this, the Treasury’s spending review contains spending settlements that are conditional on the implementation of shared services.

Such conditions can be viewed as a carrot-shaped stick: people will receive funding if they move forward with the shared services agenda.

We have won the argument that shared services are beneficial.

What we need now is some more proven examples of how shared provision can be used in practice. Hopefully, the Home Office will be one of those examples.

David Myers is director of shared services at the Home Office. This article is an excerpt from the IBM publication: Leaner, greener, keener: insights and inspiration on delivering change on UK public sector.