Many participants talked about the perceived environmental benefits and efficiencies of shared services - “If we've got a a central organisation that helping facilitate this, whether it's to do with systems or management of digital services or support in digital services, I think that would be quite helpful. Generally that provides some efficiencies as well. If you're doing it in one hit rather than every health board doing it independently.” (Sustainability lead in Health and Care).
This was seen as a potential solution to some of the existing skills and capacity gaps in organisations - “You need to have the right to expertise, the right skills and capabilities in that digital technology space to be able to architect and design services from the outset that take all this stuff into play. Trying to do that across however many Welsh public sector organisations is 10 times harder than actually centralising lots of those functions and doing it out of one place.” (Digital and technology lead in Central Administration).
It was noted that this also ties into wider public sector objectives - “Ties back into your program for government kind of objectives of saying once for Wales. Why do it in each and every organisation when potentially CDPS can provide it to everyone. You then have a national toolkit that people can use.” (Digital and technology lead in Central Administration).
“I'd go back to the All Wales Digital strategy probably and say what's happening to things like Public sector data centres? What's happening for Wales in terms of application design? So there's quite a few things like that within the All Wales Digital strategy which were aspirations that I can't really see at the moment a great deal of movement on.” (Digital and technology lead in Health and Care).