Scottish Government and public bodies (including NHS healthcare organisations) corporate function data, 2023-24 and 2024-25

Annex A: Corporate Function Definitions

Below is the guidance as it was given to organisations when they were commissioned for data.

What is a ‘Corporate Function’?

A Corporate Function is a central team within an organisation responsible for setting, delivering and monitoring the effectiveness of a range of related services.

More details on the distinction between corporate functions and professions can be found via the following link: Government Functions

Who sits under a ‘Corporate Function’?

A corporate function describes the team a person is in, rather than the type of role a person is carrying out. The types of teams and activities associated with each of the functions in scope are detailed below.

The six Corporate Functions as defined within the commission may not fully align with a public body's structure, impacting data supplied, and therefore, not all intra-function comparisons between public bodies will be exact.

Corporate Functions: Function Definitions

Human Resources 

We are defining the scope of the HR function to include the following teams and activities:

• Casework - HR guidance, and advice and support to line managers, to help understand issues on individual cases and evaluate possible solutions and likely consequences of decisions e.g.  relating to attendance, discipline, etc.
• Recruitment & Staffing - Includes Workforce planning to ensure that the correct resources, capability and talent are in place to deliver an organisation's short, medium, and long-term priorities. This includes recruitment and selection, redeployment, surplus management and transfers, redundancy and administration of exit process. For the definition we are also including the activity of overpayments to be in scope.
• Performance Management - Appraisals and feedback systems, goal setting through monthly 1-2-1 engagement, managing performance by providing the organisation with the tools to effectively management performance.
• Diversity & Inclusion - includes our inclusive hiring practices, training & awareness and monitoring and reporting.
• Learning and Talent Management - Includes skills development planning and frameworks, performance standards and employee appraisal. Delivery and evaluation of L&D, driving culture of CPD, designing blended learning solutions and monitoring how efficiently learning has been transferred to employees.
• Compensation & Benefits - Staff terms and conditions of employment, pay and reward strategy, flexible benefits, post grading, pay and benefits administration, provision of advice on reward issues and employee incentive and recognition schemes, pensions commissioning and internal administration (excluding contributions).
• Change Management - Alignment and engagement of people and culture, support for reorganisation and restructuring and designing organisation structures , including strategic workforce planning.
• Policy and Employee Relations - Research, development, implementation, advice and guidance on employee policy.
• HR information / queries - Employee record management and maintenance, maintenance of organisational data, service desk management and self-service and first tier query answering.
• People Strategy - Developing and driving forward departmental people strategy, analysis and reporting of people related data, advice to board and senior management.  Managing of Centrally Managed budgets on behalf of the organisation. This includes, maternity & long terms sick budgets, learning and development budgets and supporting resourcing activity across the organisation

The scope of the HR function does not include the following teams and activities:

• Commissioning consultancy and contingent labour - The commissioning of consultancy and contingent labour is driven by business areas and paid for through their budgets.
• Payroll activities - Payroll (including pension contributions) is part of the Finance Function.
• Health & Safety - Health & safety activity is considered to be out of scope for the purposes of this definition.
• For training and development, please include the cost of FTE managing L&D programmes, but not the cost of training and development courses delivered by third parties for the entire organisation as part of the HR Cost of Function.

Finance

We are defining the scope of the Finance function to include the following teams and activities:

• Setting out governance frameworks over financial management, including risk management and assurance, and exercising budgetary control.
• Undertaking medium-term planning, including adhering to planning and performance frameworks, working through spending reviews, and adjusting to fiscal events.
• Undertaking annual planning to assess budgeting and ensure accurate supply estimates.
• Adoption of financial processes where applicable: purchase to pay, order to cash, cash management, grants administration, payroll and expenses, inventory, tax, project accounting, investment appraisal, non-current assets, and debt management.
• Providing reporting: management accounting including forecasting, financial accounting, and other external reporting.
• Supplying management information and producing financial analysis tools.

Internal Audit and outsourced External Audit costs are outwith the scope of the Finance Function definition.

Commercial

We are defining the scope of the Commercial function to include the following teams and activities:

• Commercial Strategy, Planning & Governance - Creation of internal procurement processes, ensuring all organisational procurement complies with necessary legislation and policy.
• Commercial capability & resourcing.
• Pre-procurement.
• Procurement & contracting - Specifying, sourcing (including strategic sourcing), management of tender process, commissioning, procurement, pricing, T&Cs and legal (i.e. IPR, Liability, Insurance etc).
• Contract management - Day to day management of existing contracts, regular “catch-up” meetings with suppliers, price change negotiations, issues resolution, performance monitoring and exit strategy.
• Managing categories, markets and supplier relationships - Development of a market facing categorisation structure, management of purchasing categorised goods and services, managing suppliers to continuously improve and achieve efficiency savings within contracts, through regular meetings and reviews.
• Managing commercial systems, reporting and information - Management and administration of purchase-to-pay (P2P) and other e-procurement systems, provision of management information, electronic reconciliation and issues management, spend analysis, eSourcing including tendering and evaluation.
• Commercial Policy (e.g. social impact, SMEs, sustainability etc).

Communications

We are defining the scope of the Communications function to include the following teams and activities set out in the Government Communications Function's (GCF) Modern Communications Operating Model (MCOM).

More information can be found here.

For the purpose of this definition, the scope includes individuals working under direct line management of seniors under MCOM. i.e. communications activity that takes place outside of the control of the communications function is not in scope.

The disciplines in scope are:

• External Affairs: building and maintaining relationships with a range of influential individuals and organisations for the public benefit. These professionals inform internal thinking, coordinate high-level stakeholder engagement, and explain government policies to encourage supportive voices.
• Marketing: use of behavioural science and data to understand and meet the needs of citizens, running campaigns to fulfil operational and policy objectives.  Data is used to determine habits and preferences in order to be relevant and effective. Communicators in the marketing discipline will raise awareness of policies, influence attitudes and behaviours and support the operation of services.
• Internal Communications: inform and engage employees to maximise their performance, increase motivation across the organisation and deliver business strategy most effectively. These aims are achieved by driving change, creating advocates, partnering with leaders and engaging with individuals through innovative means.
• Media: There are five core functional aspects that practitioners across a media team are required to operate. Proactive (announcements) and reactive (crisis communications) media handling, relationship management (journalists’ trust), digital/content creation and insight/evaluation.
• Strategic communication: planning communication activity based on insight in a timely way and delivering agreed priorities to measurable effect. These specialists work alongside policy, operations, HR and project delivery colleagues from the outset, so they can inform and advise the government and organisational decision makers on appropriate communication options and strategies. 
• Insight: creation of evidence base of techniques that work best, evaluation of campaigns, using data to target and identify best practice activities.
• Digital communications: digital strategy and leadership, data and insight analysis, technical content creation, copywriting, editing and channel management. Digital communications offer the ability to directly connect with the public and discuss important topics.

Data and Digital

We are defining the scope of the Data and Digital (DaD) function to include the following teams and activities:

• Developing and maintaining core platform.
• Technology management: both hardware (e.g. computers) and software components (e.g. operating systems) to support the delivery of the functions. With suitable controls in place to reduce legacy technology to ensure efficient and effective solutions across government.
• Delivering and maintaining digital services: A service delivers an outcome for users and can result from government policy or user needs. A service can be public user-focused, such as applying for a licence, or internal user-focused, such as HR platforms.
• Major digital transformation projects: involves the end-to-end transformation of services through redesigning existing business processes in order to make them usable and efficient. e.g. digital transformation programme which began in 2022 and included 6 missions that the government would like to achieve by 2025.
• Data & digital innovation (e.g. automation, robotics).
• All other data/digital activities

Items such as the purchase and maintenance of equipment, software licences and data networks that support the whole organisation are not to be included in the DaD functional spend but instead captured in the ‘Spend on running IT & digital estate’. These costs are only included in the DaD functional spend where specialist software and hardware is used by the DaD function itself. This applies to other functions, so e.g. specialist financial management software in finance functional spend etc.

Property

We are defining the scope of the property function to include the following teams and activities:

• Governance of property related activities carried out by the organisation, involving setting and/or following appropriate management frameworks. 
• Developing and maintaining a property strategy incorporating aspects such as evaluating asset efficiency, location strategy, and maintenance needs, quality of buildings, facilities and environment. 
• Further, implementing these strategies with delivery plans, and providing necessary assurance.
• Management of the property life cycle: asset acquisition, asset use, adaption, maintenance, and operation, and asset disposal. Specific activities include, but are not limited to the management of:
  • Building security
  • Cleaning
  • Building repair and maintenance
  • Utilities
  • Construction
  • Waste
  • Catering
  • And finally associated practices when managing the property lifecycle, including record keeping, performance reporting, risk management, induction and training, sustainability planning. 

The property functional cost just captures people costs, and non-pay costs (which can include specialist software / equipment etc) to deliver the function as above. Costs related to rents, rates, utilities, facilities management, building repair and maintenance should not be included in the property functional cost nor apportioned to each function’s cost. They should instead be captured in the annual net running costs.