Delivering ICT Shared Services to Local Governments:A new species of public enterprise?

The past decades have seen the OECD countries attempt a number of sourcing practices in local governments, including corporatization, collaborative arrangements and partnerships. One such option is to share services, an emerging strategy that casts a new actor in a leading role, i.e., the shared service organization or ‘SSO’. In the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) these special-purpose vehicles deliver services to the sharing councils based on models other than publicly funded collaboration arrangements and the usual ICT outsourcing practices. The paper uses an explorative case study to analyse the SSO route taken by an Italian enterprise, wholly owned by a public utility, in which it steers and guides its client councils on their ICT strategies. The article offers a general reflection on the new SSO’s operating model, discussing its hybrid nature (part-private and part-public), the system of multiple local relations and the indirect influence the SSO has over the ICT decisions of the client councils.