We’ve been talking about sharing services and combining functions (particularly the so-called “back office”) for most of the 33 years I’ve worked in higher education.
So recent calls for greater efficiencies and economies of scale to address current financial challenges felt like déjà vu.
Back in 2013, Universities UK and Jisc set up Efficiency Exchange funded partly by HEFCE and the Leadership Foundation (predecessors of the OfS and Advance HE), in response to government calls for the sector to get its act together and achieve cost savings in ways other parts of public services had already been pursuing.
Money was ploughed into shared services concept studies and activities with relatively few lasting results. Why so little progress? I suspect it’s down to a combination of sector culture (institutional autonomy), insecurity and egos (which senior leader wants to be the junior partner in a coalition?), genuine doubts about achievable efficiencies (think NHS and other public sector attempts to design a shared service or a joint procurement that cost more than the planned savings; the NAO’s report on the Research Councils’ shared services project saw an implementation overspend of £60m and a shortfall on projected savings of £73m). Oh, and cultural differences – the “way we do things here”.
