Are governments keeping up with the times?
According to Graham Colclough, vice president, global public sector at Capgemini, governments are finding it increasingly difficult to handle the rapidly growing population. From an IT perspective, while governments are falling behind, customers are taking charge.
25 June 2009
Publication
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People are becoming the world’s worst enemy: never before has the global population
tripled in one lifetime.
This poses the question of whether policy makers are ready to deal with the impact of rapid population growth. How can governments transform the nature of the relationship they have with the citizens they serve?
While people may be the key driver behind the problem, IT can play an important role in addressing these challenges, particularly in the arena of public services delivery.
Information and technology are rightly seen as important enablers of a better future. Recent Capgemini research suggests it is in many cases a driver of transformation, and also a pre-requisite for success.
Despite acceptance about the role that IT must play in changing the current delivery techniques, public services are not adapting quickly enough. Too few leaders are responding with bravery or at pace, and there is a lack of collaborative leadership, which is a requirement for the delivery of more efficient joined-up multi-agency services. From an IT perspective, while governments are falling behind, customers are taking charge.
User-driven services
Consumers are also the biggest enabler of change, and generational expectations are changing faster than the paradigms of our current leadership. People are losing faith in the relevance of national policies and they are losing their trust in governments to fix the issues we face.
Many governments realise the need to be customer-centric, yet still behave in a “we know best” manner, which doesn’t breed trust, a crucial element to the success of any major transformation.
Public administrations are out of touch with the lives and needs of the individuals they are serving. When they do capture relevant information, it becomes lost in the paperwork and systems of individual agencies. Indeed worse, they often lose any semblance of trust through well publicised and inappropriate information leakages.
Another way of looking at this shift is to consider the change in the information governance model, from a model of “you” to a model of “me”.
At present, customer information is passed into departmental silos, too often never to be seen again in any coherent form. The customer experience of interfacing with public services is generally appalling.
By turning the model on its head, and giving accountability for the information to the customer, and managing the boundary well between what is securely held by administration and what is freely released to the customer, the result can be a far more engaged customer and a more efficient and effective system.
Driving change through technology adoption
People are already starting to take control, to hold their own information that has until now been considered public information. This shift in control is a scary thought for public administrators and presents numerous implications around cleansing and repurposing existing data.
How fast can public services bodies transform their information architectures to be internally streamlined? How will they re-architect information across public agencies?
Almost every level of the transformation has an element of technology involved and there are eight key stages:
- Customer insight and engagement – enable the public sector to develop a “whole
view” of each and every customer, not a “single view”, as seems to be the present
trend.
- Unified Access – increase participation, improve trust and develop a more responsive and responsible society by embracing modern thinking; actively connect across multiple media and channels available
- Information governance – the threat of data loss, combined with increasing information
volumes and information exchange, presents substantial challenges. Open standards
are crucial as is an open dialogue with technology providers to ensure that fast-changing
capabilities are built into research and development to service future needs
- Multi-agency collaboration – an informational approach that captures details during the various steps in the chain will reduce lost time, errors, and additional costs between difference agencies
- Re-scaling service governance – there is a “double shift of power” happening, whereby policy setting is moving from a focus on national levels to a position where far greater influence is being applied locally and at above-national levels. By consolidating some of the presently locally delivered public services, we can reap the benefits of economies of scale that current financial pressures require
- Ambient “macro-system” intelligence – public security, environment monitoring, public health, energy or transport are such that in order to make a significant improvement, we would need to establish a means to optimise or de-risk matters through monitoring. This involves collection, assimilation and response based on massive data systems
- New leadership models – dynamic, agile and collaborative leadership models are
required to complement the nature of the “me” paradigm. To help us through the
step-change, leaders must exhibit leadership behaviours, characterised more by
relentless passion, obsession and persistence
- New leadership in the market – A far greater collaborative approach to solving complex problems, involving input from the market, unbridled by the constraints of disabling procurement processes. A shift towards a much more liberal dialogue with the market is commended but not enough in itself.
At present the existing models of service are unsustainable and control is moving from government to the public, which is demanding the liberation of data.
A new relationship needs to develop between users and the public sector which can be brought about through the use of ICT as real driver of service transformation.
If this process is done well it will significantly reduce costs of front line operations and markedly improve service delivery. Done badly, it could see administrations in serious trouble through a lack of control.
Graham Colclough is Vice President, Global Public Sector Capgemini. Email: graham.colclough@capgemini.com
Click Are governments keeping up with the times? Can governments keep pace with the technology-savvy customer and
contemporary global challenges? Twin issues, but failing on both
fronts? What role for ICT in helping out? to download the full paper from Capgemini.
