Based on the experience of a consortium of public bodies in Bedfordshire, this article argues that some of the current efforts to modernize government should be redirected at creating electronically enabled integrated customer access to all public services. This should be additional to the current focus on Electronic Service Delivery (ESD), which will absorb vast resource and yet runs the real risk of failing to achieve joined-up government.
To achieve this supply side service integration, as well as automation, vast investment in IT will need to be matched by the political and managerial capital necessary to develop a radical new service architecture. One based on patterns of customer need, irrespective of departmental and system silos. This will no doubt come but it will be a costly and lengthy process.
Alternatively, the Government could visibly and dramatically produce the benefits of ‘joined-upness’ very quickly, and at little, if any, cost. This could be done by adopting a parallel strategy of integrating and simplifying customer access to public services, with the objective of enabling and empowering the customer to join-up services for themselves. Customers have the motivation to apply themselves to the task of assembling the right package of public services for their own particular need. What they usually lack is the means – information, advice and authority – to argue their case.
Consider the following scenario. You are a single parent resident in Bedfordshire and are in trouble with debt, which has suddenly been made worse by a fine for your son’s truanting from school. You ring a single telephone number that has been widely publicised as the easiest means of access to any public service in your area, whether provided by your local authority, agencies of central government such as the Benefits Agency, the voluntary sector or, indeed, the private sector on contract. You immediately get through to an experienced and capable member of staff who tries to understand the problem from your point of view, and genuinely assess who is best placed to provide help.
Your advocate feeds in a number of key words into his or her desktop system, and within seconds you are provided with information on the debt-counselling service provided by the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, and the benefits available from the Department of Social Security or housing department to which you may be eligible but never knew to ask for. You are also given advice on the process and criteria for an appeal against the fine for your son’s non-attendance. Your advocate then applies for the benefits on your behalf, sets up an interview with the Citizen’s Advice Bureau and lodges your appeal. Three days later the advocate rings you back to keep you informed on progress. Alternatively, you could have done the lot yourself on the same internet site that your advocate used.
The benefits to the customer in easier access to the right service, and saved aggravation, are obvious but this also saves public money. By reducing, even by a small percentage, hand-offs between, and multiple assessments by, different departments and public bodies, this initiative would pay for itself within a couple of years. And this is without including the vast benefits to public service effectiveness from the more accurate targeting of services onto need. Nor does it take account of the invaluable harvest of automatic customer and performance information on how well public services are meeting customer demand.
Yet none of this requires the actual delivery of the service to be done electronically. Simplifying and integrating access to public service produces these benefits irrespective of progress in integrating the back-office systems.
This scenario is not in the realms of fantasy. This is the vision that the Bedfordshire consortium is developing with the assistance of seed-corn money from the Government’s Invest to Save fund.
Easy access for all – Multiple channels, one portal
Simplifying and integrating access to public services is made possible by the use of internet ‘portals’, the links in a website that can act as an intelligent gateway to other websites. Portals provide the ability to search and collate information held by all providers of public services, rather than creating a new monolithic central information repository. Portals also provide the means to apply for services and to interact with any relevant service providers.
The Bedfordshire Consortium has discovered that the advantage of portal technology is that it can simply tap into current working systems – it updates its information as the members update their own. Moreover, the technology is remarkably flexible and robust, adapting easily as new suppliers come on board or as transaction numbers increase.
The portal is the tool used by all customer-facing front-line staff to help people access services. Alternatively the customer can log into the site directly from their home PC or digital television, or perhaps from a kiosk set up in the local supermarket. Even more radically, the portal could give rise to an enhanced citizens’ advisory service – a customer advocate with the tools to help the customer navigate to the right service and monitor whether the service had been delivered to the right standard. Either way, the portal guides the customer to the services available for their need, irrespective of which organization actually supplies the service.
The portal idea also offers joined-up benefits when information flows go the other way with the customer making an application for a service or providing some new personal data. For example the birth of a new baby can be registered by a parent through a hospital staff member who accesses the portal via their PC. This would not only register the birth with the Registrar, but also advise the health visitor of the need to make a diary entry for the home visit, at the same time as requesting the relevant forms for a passport for the child.
The practical challenges of organizing access around the customer
The feasibility study for the Bedfordshire initiative demonstrated that the service information to which the portal provided access had to be hard and useful. It would need to cover service quality standards and levels, as well as advice on how to apply. It would also need to impose transparency on some sensitive areas of public provision, such as defining the eligibility criteria for access to those services that are rationed.
The organization of information within the portal must be done in such a way that the process of finding and selecting services could be made more intuitive. The study concluded that information needed to be indexed in a number of ways, but one of the most useful was to organize it around life events, such as ‘birth of a baby’ or ‘moving house’.
The provision of integrated access would have to overcome customer reservations over security and confidentiality issues. The concern was of encouraging the state as ‘big brother’, with the wide dissemination between agencies of confidential personal information. Resolving this would need protocols on what customer information can and cannot be made available between organizations – and by showing the customer how these protocols were being observed.
This all means creating an independent entity to act as the steward of the portal and its use, with a separate ‘brand identity’ from the organizations delivering the services. This would help position it in the public mind as a trusted customer advocate, able to challenge a service provider if necessary. To be effective as a customer guide and advocate, this steward of the portal would need to be organized in geographic regions that allowed for a genuine understanding of what was available locally – probably in county units or similar.
The feasibility study concluded that these issues could be resolved and that the technology necessary for the implementation was already tried and tested. The project could fly, and the next step was to build a prototype.
Integrating customer access across the UK
The Bedfordshire experiment is worth following closely, not just because of the scale of its ambition in bringing together a partnership of every public service body in the region, but because, if successful, it is a model that could be used across the UK. It is possible to conceive of the Government finding a trusted third party, for example the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, as a sponsoring agent to roll out the model nationally. This would necessitate all providers of public service to offer up information on the nature and availability of services they provide. This is probably the major challenge, not because it is technically difficult but, rather, it requires a readiness for openness about information that will enable the customer to argue their case more forcibly.
That Tony Blair should feel that he has marks on his back from the struggle to modernize public services is in itself an indicator of his problem. While the majority of public services remain (rightly) free at the point of delivery, there is no market mechanism to provide the information and dynamic necessary to stimulate continuous improvement.
Creating a national system of electronically integrated customer access would help address this problem. It would enable every application for a public service to be counted as a transaction, and produce invaluable information on the changes in demand for services. It would provide a way of tracking the success of public delivery organizations in meeting customer requirements and in monitoring both service quality and the effectiveness of outcomes. Public sector management would have access to the same systemic feedback and performance management disciplines as their commercial brethren. Just introducing transparency into what public services are available would put the searchlight on areas of overlap or gaps in provision.
Integrating customer access is a radical proposition, but as a focus for effort it offers the promise of being one of the single most visible and effective initiatives in improving public services yet undertaken by this Government, and possibly any other since the Second World War. And it could be rolled out in the lifetime of a single Parliament. All this, and it would actually save public money. If New Labour is serious about empowering the customer of public services and of adopting radical measures to get more from less, then focusing on customer access is one of the answers.
