EURIM Briefing No 31
June
2001EURIM
Briefing No 31
July 2001
Integrating Service Delivery:
National and Local
Contents
Introduction
Recommendations
Consumer Focus
Public Servants - Agents of change and the Means of
Delivery
Financial Systems as Agents of Change
The Role of Government
The Role of Technology
Conclusion
Introduction:
Modernisation is a major challenge for Government at
national and local levels. Ambitious and far-reaching targets have been set for
providing services online, primarily through the Internet. Merely enabling citizens to access existing
government systems is not, however, sufficient. The Modernising Government
programme will be effective only if there is a permanent improvement in the way
in which the public sector operates, with the use of technology as an important
tool, not an end in itself.
Integrating
Service Delivery is key to achieving modernisation targets and, more
importantly, gaining real benefits for the organisation itself. A EURIM working
group focused on the key areas of "integrating" different government
organisations to deliver services, and alternative methods of service delivery.
This paper reflects the discussions and recommendations emerging from their
series of workshops.
Recommendations
1. The real objective of Modernising
Government across all levels: central, regional and local, is to improve
service to the public. The focus should be on the quality and relevance of
service.
2.
Targets
for the electronic delivery of services should be adjusted to place greater
emphasis on the needs of individuals, operational practicalities (eg ease of
use of systems) and recognition that there will always be those who for
physical or other reasons require the help of another person to access screen
and keyboard-based services.
population.
3.
The
Office of the E-envoy should develop and implement a coherent channel strategy,
including non-electronic access where appropriate. The use of intermediaries
will be key to achieving this.
4.
Ministers inevitably look at the short term – 4 to 5 year
cycles are inherent in the political process.
The government must be encouraged to take the long-term view.
5.
Public sector financial rules should continue to be reviewed
to make it easier to plan more than a year ahead and to fund opportunities for
change. Annual budgeting does not facilitate step change.
The current split between revenue and capital does not facilitate
incremental change.
6.
Recent evidence shows that “ring-fenced” funding for projects,
which meet clearly defined standards can be successful in encouraging the kind
of innovative thinking needed to modernizemodernise
government. Steps should be taken to
expand current provision, whilst paying due regard to the need to identify
forward funding for successful projects.
7. Peer review on a cross-departmental basis for setting
objectives and monitoring progress should be encouraged. It can be an effective and inexpensive means
of breaking down a ‘silo’ mentality.
8. The National Audit Office should be required to take
evidence on joint/collaborative working and consumer focus as part of their
auditing process.
9. Officials need to be given the means and incentives
to think about their work in different ways and to use a wider range of skills
(including those of professional procurement). This requires the design of new
education and training programmes and appropriate rewards, financial or
otherwise, for those who are innovative. Penalties imposed on individuals whose
ideas subsequently fail do not encourage innovation.
10.
The public sector
should be encouraged to second their staff to prospective private sector
suppliers and partners. This will enhance the public sector understanding of
motivation, methods, and constraints within the private sector.
People, not technology, should be
the primary focus of modernising Government, not only in their role as
consumers of services but also as the agents of change and the means of
delivery. Automation is not necessarily the best means of communication with
the public.
The consumer is becoming more and
more sophisticated and the Internet is fuelling the process. Manufacturers and retailers differentiate
their products by providing an increasingly individualised service. The consumer
is also becoming much better informed.
For example, doctors are finding their patients have read the latest
research and have a clear idea of what treatments are available. That the sameThese patients
may, however,
lack the skills to evaluate what they have read, and may not have
read the crucial documents which determine the treatments they may receive,understand the process
which determines the most suitable treatment for them. These are
additional complications, placing further strain on a kind of relationship which
medical training has not equipped the practitioner to handle.
The consumer is learning to expect
more personalised and responsive services from industry. Whilst there is
evidence of public sector awareness of this development, there is a lack of effective
emulation. Yet government is uniquely
vulnerable to the views of the citizen.
A government which loses the willing acquiescence of theof
citizen-consumer risks losing its legitimacy.
Ultimately, it may find itself circumvented. The recent fuel crisis shows how easily this
can be done.circumvented – as illustrated by the fuel crisis in
Autumn 2000.
Modernising
Government targets should be refocused on the needs and aspirations of the
consumer. Processes need to be
re-engineered so that the consumer recognises that he has received a better, more
appropriateservice, a service - one more
attuned to his needs. A
service, moreover,needs and which improves over time.
Public
Servants - Agents of Change and the Means of Delivery
Some citizen-consumers are also
charged with providing government services.
What of them? Industry has
discovered, through much trial and not a little tribulation, that unless their
staff buy into the change process from the outset it is doomed to failure. Whilst many public servants recognise the
need to change there are many who do not.
Among those who do, there is a need for information, support and
guidance. They are the agents of change
and the means of delivery and must be supported and trained if the process is
not to founder.
Above all, there is a need for
clear leadership and constant reinforcement of the message that change is
inevitable and even desirable; that the focus from now on is the citizen, not
the individual department or that department’s current Minister, and that this
will not be reversed or placed on the "back-burner". For the
Government, this requires the whole-whole-hearted
commitment of the Prime Minister, and the appointment of a Cabinet Minister
responsible for e-government, with oversight over the whole process including
budgetary provision to support appropriate projects. It also requires a strengthening of the role of the e-Envoy and a
re-examination of the role of departmental change managers and e-government
champions. These latter need to be
chosen not only for their IT awareness, but also for their business awareness
and customer focus. They also need to
be sufficiently senior within the department to be effective agents of change.
Private sector managers are more
used to partnership sourcing, whereas most public institutions still operate in
customer-supplier combat mode.
Secondment from public sector bodies to private companies should be
further encouraged in order to learn how to manage the inherent conflicts. This
also ties in with programme and project management as well andas procurement
skills and theirinter- inter-relationship with making partnerships
work.
In general, there is an urgent
need for training programmes to be undertaken by all staff at all levels,
mirroring similar programmes in industry, and covering skills such as change
management, change control, partnership working, leadership and relationship
management as well as procurement and technological skills. Sappropriateuitable means of
rewarding appropriate behaviour, whether financially or by secondment and
further training, must also be identified and implemented to encourage those
staff who do “think outside the box”.
Financial
Systems as Agents of Change
Financial systems can also be used to bring about change. Too often Treasury rules are quoted as the
reason why radical solutions cannot be attempted. If we are to break down "silos" and encourage
departments and different levels of government to work together, a way must be
found to allow the transfer of budgets between departments. Without this, projects which originate in
one department but whose benefits accrue in another, or in many others, will
never get off the ground. There can be
few departmental managers who are willing to bear the costs without sharing the
benefits.
Current accounting processes
restrict the ability of local authorities and departments to invest in
long-term projects which can eventually result in significant benefits. Despite
changing to comprehensive spending review, funding rounds support routine
business, but are still detrimental where step change is required. Major cultural change takes time to
implement and achieve its full potential.
There are financial benefits, cost savings, to be found in Modernising
Government but the most significant of these are unlikely to be demonstrated
within a single financial year.
As government contracts are
presently constructed it is difficult to achieve true partnership. Flexibility is inhibited by the way in which
client-prime contractor-sub-contractor relationships are defined. Yet greater flexibility could often enable
minor changes to be made, as the contract proceeds, which would be to the
client’s ultimate benefit. The need to
make a plethora of individual contracts with departments, agencies, and local
councils is also a significant burden on industry where similar services are
being provided across the board. A
unified contract to supply groups of departments etc. would ease this burden, making the
provision of government services more attractive.
If, as seems likely, government
services are to be delivered through a variety of intermediaries, consideration
must be given to the costs of delivering a universal service. Delivering services to the elderly, the poor,
the disabled and the isolated, will always cost disproportionately more. If differential pricing is not acceptable to
the government, how can we ensure that suppliers are not penalised for
delivering a universal service?
On the positive side, the Invest
to Save Budget and the former DETR’s Promoting Electronic Government (PEG)
project are encouraging developments.
The former has demonstrated some success in generating worthwhile
inter-departmental projects and, perhaps as importantly, generating interest
and commitment to the idea of inter-departmental working. One County Council has created its own
“Invest to Save” budget with strict payback rules supported by public
consultation. PEG is enabling local
authorities to establish their own practical methodology for developing and
delivering local services. These
projects show what can be achieved when "ring-fenced" funding is made
available to projects which meet specific criteria.
Central government’s role is toclearly
identify clearly national
priorities and goals and to take action to ensure that they are
implemented. It is not always
appropriate to leave matters to the vagaries of market forces. Valuable time is being wasted on the
on-going debate of open systems versus proprietary systems. If the Government could publicly state its
support for open systems then the debate could move on. There is concern about the lack of mandatory
standards across government systems.
Interoperability between local and national portals is promised, but the
timescale has not been defined and the responsibility for policing has not been
identified.
It seems likely that government
services will increasingly be delivered through intermediaries. This will require a more collaborative,
commercially sensitive and flexible approach from government. There is much concern about issues of
confidentiality and security – particularly security of government funds – and
how these can be assured. The physical
location of post offices in rural and urban areas enables electronic government
to be brought within the orbit of social groups who can otherwise be hard to
reach. Research shows that this
organisation is also highly trusted by the consumer. However, electronic government does permit us to re-think the
whole idea of physical service provision.
For example, the viability of a rural school may be limited in
educational terms, but as the location for a part-time doctor’s surgery, a
mobile library and information service, a post office and a community centre
its future can look quite different.
The
present approach to meeting the government’s targets for 2005 seems to be
characterised by the application of technology like "sticking
plaster" to present systems, losing much of the real benefits in the
process. Technology should be used to
facilitate the provision of better services.
In some areas it is said that more resource may be spent reporting
service delivery to central government departments than in delivering the
service. Whilst it is true that improvements to communications where demand is
infinite can result in spending finite budgets faster and lead to
communications breakdown, great savings can be made by getting the right answer
to the consumer at the first attempt.
It
may be that by ordering information differently and at a more local level we
can achieve a more effective result. We
welcome the launch of the UK online citizen portal. It has brought
valuable information to the consumer and will become increasingly effective as
the service is developed. We would
also encourage experimentation with other, less prescriptive, systems. The
citizen's relationship with government is on-going and dividing information
into life episodes may not always be appropriate. The provision of information is only part of the story. Online transactions between the citizen and
government are also needed but are much harder to achieve.
UK onlineonline also
highlights two further areas of concern.
The service is being offered on the Internet via PC’s for very good
reasons. The first is the ease of
updating information. It takes veryrelatively little
time– relatively speaking – to change
information on a website. Government
is, perhaps surprisingly, a dynamic business and needs to be able to take
advantage of this facility. The second
reason is the quality of the service which can be provided. PC’s with high-resolution screens and their
ability to accept complex graphics are simply the best available vehicles for
the communication of complex information – provided that the communications
facilities are in place to give acceptable response times.
Yet the expectation is being
created that government services will soon be available on games machines,
digital TV’s and WAP phones. In the
present state of technology, they will not all look or act in the same
way. If we do not educate both the
public and the specifiers ofthose specifying
services about the inherent differences in various technologies, we may find
that the take uptake-up of electronic services is
inhibited. Portals need to be
responsive to different technologies and easily up-dated as information and
media change.
The
process of modernising Governmentgovernment will
not be complete by 2005 even if the present targets are met.
It is a much more complex task than many in government appreciate. Research shows that the consumer needs a
mixture of delivery systems, including face-to-face and print, as well as
electronic. Much good work is going on
to integrate services and break down traditional barriers between
departments and different
levels of government, much of it isolated and un-rewarded. We need to take full advantage of this
pioneering effort by identifying it and publicising it widely. We need to identify the gaps where little
appears to be happening and find out why.
Above all we need to raise modernisingModernising
Government above the short-term horizons of party politics and make an enduring
long-term commitment to resolving the issues and questions which arise.
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