Many district councils are considering outsourcing and shared service solutions. The concern is whether by outsourcing too much or the wrong services that the heart of the council is lost. This raises the question….what is the heart of the council.
I have a friend who is CEO of a district council. He is grappling with this very issue and as decisions need to be made on each service he keeps encountering the same question. “If this service goes, have I damaged the heart of the organisation?” Further….”what is the point of the council if we don’t do this?”
So how do you know? We think there are three key questions that help determine what the council believes it is there for:
1. Are we a community leader and enabler? That is, do we view ourselves as an organisation that helps change people’s lives for the better and improve their life chances?
2. Are we a commissioner or a provider of services? That is, do we view ourselves as necessarily needing to be involved in delivery in order to stay close to our citizens?
3. Are we a leading player in the network of local partnerships? That is, do we see ourselves as a key player in aligning and integrating services to citizens?
These are not yes/no questions and are all a question of degree. However if housing happened to be the service in question it would be pretty difficult to outsource if questions 1 and 3 were answered “Yes”.
Whilst not going through the same questions my CEO friend reached the same conclusion. Intuitively he knew where the heart was.
Ignite has been helping councils understand what they want the council to be and where the heart really is. We use these core questions and a whole range of subsidiary questions to develop a visible profile. We can then translate this into what the organisation needs to look like and what are the real priority services that must be retained to maintain the heart (and maybe even the soul) of the council.
