Being a consultant is like being a eunuch in a harem.

You get to see all the action but don’t have the wherewithal to get involved. Sometimes you wistfully think about what you would do if you were running the organisation. What if the day-dream came true? Well it turns out that you have less and less time to make a difference and this day-dream may quickly turn into a nightmare.

According to Mark Gottfredson, Steve Schubert and Hernan Saenz in their February 2008 Harvard Business Review article ‘The New Leaders Guide to Diagnosing The Business’ they pointed out that 1 in 5 of the CEOs who left their jobs in 2006 had only been in position for 8 months. This is hardly enough time to get your new office furniture, the corner room redecorated and your Blackberry fully functional.

Processing centres – where is the optimum?

 ’Shared Services’ continues to be held up as a route to radical cost reduction in the back office, freeing up funds that can be passed to the front line where it is needed more.

 Currently, however, virtually all councils are self-sufficient in processing, with around 400 centres for Corporate Services alone.  With the inevitable move to sharing services across Local Government (and possibly across other sectors), there is a question as to how many centres we might end up with.

 The scope to reduce the number of processing centres in Local Government is considerable, with a potential reduction from some 400 centres currently to less than half that in perhaps five years time.  There is also the possibility of a second wave of consolidation, depending on economic, political and technical change, with the final number possibly between 50 and 100.

 Whatever the eventual number, it seems that more organisations are going to have to work together in future if the full scale of savings are to be achieved.