Shared service delivery, efficiencies, joined-up working and economies of scale - anyone working around local government will be familiar with suggestions this is the way of the future. What is less recognised is that the future arrived some time ago with the formation of e-government partnerships, at sub-regional and regional levels, to grasp the opportunities that come from working together.

One such example is the Staffordshire e-government partnership, which has a strong vision for the seamless delivery of public services. To turn the vision into reality, each of the Staffordshire authorities - including eight districts, a county and a unitary - makes an annual contribution towards the cost of a dedicated partnership team that works within a formal structure in which all partners have an equal voice. This was boosted by accessing partnership funding from the ODPM, enabling the partnership to deliver a wide range of projects including:

· undertaking a joint survey of Staffordshire residents to understand needs and expectations;

· the joint procurement of an e-payments system;

· working together to set common security standards;

· the development of a product to join up the contact directories for all authorities and Staffordshire police - bringing access to over 10,000 contacts to every desktop at the click of an icon.

But the key project has been the procurement of a single Oracle customer relationship management system that will result in a single database for capturing customer contacts across all the authorities and enable us to deal with service requests for each other.

Shared learning, joint work on process re-engineering, reduced procurement and implementation costs are just some benefits that we can evidence with savings already totalling close to £2m.

This work is about delivering real changes that our customers will notice. But it doesn't stop at joint e-government projects. Building trust through working together in our e-government partnership is creating new opportunities for collaboration. Lichfield and Staffordshire Moorlands district councils both identified concerns about the ability of their IT services to meet the demands of e-government.

They came together to create a contract of sufficient size to procure these services from the private sector, and this has resulted in a partnership with ITnet, which has won awards for its innovative approach including being highly commended in the Socitm/Solace /Intellect awards and winning "best IT outsourcing deal 2004" from the National Outsourcing Association.

This is not an isolated example: the county and districts in Staffordshire now have examples of shared services being delivered through one-stop shops. There are plans to share out-of-hours responses, and it is taken for granted that projects will be undertaken by clusters of authorities that are identifying common issues. Opportunities to work with other providers are also being developed from forming links with Citizens' Advice bureaux to thinking through how police, fire, health and the parish councils can be engaged.

But working in partnership is not easy - especially if, at times, it means having to compromise to achieve the greater good. But when I joined local government, the suggestion that we could work together with some of our neighbours would have been met with horror. Now not only is it accepted, it is expected.

The Staffordshire partnership is not the only shining example of partnership working. Joint programmes and projects are in progress across the country, and the ODPM is currently working on an evaluation of the products and lessons learned from the funding put into partnerships. Shared service delivery, efficiencies, joined working and economies of scale - it's happening now right across the country in a partnership near you. It may be a silent revolution, but that does not make it any less real.

· Rita Wilson is corporate director of organisational development at Lichfield district council.