The pace of change without the pain of change
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Transformational government programmes promise better services to the citizen from a lower cost base. But big bang IT projects tend not to live up to expectations. A consortium of technology specialists has therefore come up with a route to transformational services without the transformational challenges.
Kim Thomas finds out more.
Transformational government is a great idea. Instead of travelling from office to office, or being passed around different council departments on the phone, the individual citizen has a single point of access to the council, regardless of whether they’re asking about their housing benefit or complaining about a pothole.
And from the council’s point of view, when a request comes in from a citizen, whether by phone or email, they know who that person is, when they last had dealings with them, and what progress has been made since the last contact.
In practice, of course, it’s not that easy. For years, council functions, such as social care, housing, education, planning and leisure, have regarded citizens as customers of the particular function, rather than of the council as a whole. Plus, over the years, those functions have invested in IT applications tailored to meet their own specific requirements. The different applications didn’t talk to each other, because there was no perceived need – and in any case, if the technology to hook systems together was affordable, the custom development required was not.
But since the launch of the transformational government initiative in 2005, councils have been tasked with integrating their systems to provide a single customer view. The cost of ripping out what they have and starting again is prohibitively expensive, but often the technology they do have is hard to adapt to the new requirements, says Daniel Reardon, of Microsoft partner Ascentium: “Many councils have contact centres already, but a lot of them will have been put in place years ago. Councils are finding it hard to find resources to support those applications let alone extend them. Those applications are not flexible enough to adapt to the workflow and business processes of local authorities – they tend to be generic and inflexible.”
Introducing the Transformational Government Accelerator
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This difficulty was what motivated a group of Microsoft gold partners to create the transformational government accelerator – a set of software applications based on Microsoft’s citizen service platform that enable the different functions to talk to each other. Charlie James of Microsoft partner K2 , explains how it works from the customer perspective: “I start off being a customer of education or children’s services, and as I grow I become a customer of housing, of planning, of adult social care. The idea of the accelerator is we break down the barriers across each directorate, because what you can do is access all these systems through the accelerator.”
The members of the transformational government consortium, which include the Microsoft partners Morse, K2, Charteris and Solidsoft, all have applications dedicated to specific council requirements, such as records management, contact centres and citizen relationship management (CRM). The applications are based on Microsoft software, such as SharePoint, that many councils will already have invested in, and so represent much better value than the purchase of new enterprise-wide software.
What makes the consortium’s offerings different is their flexibility. The key is Microsoft’s BizTalk, a technology that uses service oriented architecture (SOA) to enable the exchange of information between applications. James explains what happens when a citizen calls with a request to the housing department: “A call centre operative can get a single view of what’s going on – not just that one request, but all the other requests. When you’re talking, you say, ‘I’m dealing with you for a planning application but I see you’ve also got something going on with housing at the moment – do you want me to get you an update on that?’” This sort of service makes for happy, possibly even astonished, citizens.
The beauty is that councils don’t have to implement multiple new systems all at once, says James. Instead, they can make changes incrementally: “If you ever want to change something, then what you have is a wrapper where you can unplug one technology at the back end and put a new one in. It doesn’t disrupt the workings of the local authority.”
Instead of one big project to implement change, councils can therefore choose to adopt new technologies in a time frame, and at a cost, that suits them. BizTalk allows new applications to share data with existing legacy applications, so councils will see a more integrated view of the citizen, says Nick Cassidy of Microsoft partner , Morse: “At the front end of the business you’ve got the CRM, but behind the CRM you’ve got genuinely joined-up processes. Underneath your systems, you’ve got one common repository for all the outputs from those processes, but with the appropriate permissions, all that information can be shared up through any of the service departments.”
K2’s workflow software, based on Microsoft Dynamics, provides an example of how this works in practice. Many applications already have internal workflow functionality, but K2’s offering is different, says James: “It allows one piece of workflow to travel and be reported on, and go down to another piece of workflow in a totally different product.” So if a call comes into the contact centre about a pothole, a fault report can be sent to the highways services department, and when the fault is fixed, notifications are sent automatically to both the contact centre and the customer that the case is closed.
Customer satisfaction – and added efficiency
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An improved service to the citizen means greater efficiency for the council, says Cassidy: “You can automate the customer experience, so they know who’s working on their case, and they know the date by when they can expect a response. That drives down the number of enquiries and complaints the council receives.”
This joined-up approach also enables councils to derive rich information about how well they are doing against key performance indicators (KPIs), for example how quickly queries are answered or how many queries are successfully closed after the first point of contact.
Because the consortium partners are committed to working together, they intend to build on their shared expertise, so useful processes they have developed can be part of the offering to new customers who come on board. For councils, says Cassidy, the accelerator represents two wins: “It’s all about a better customer experience from the lowest possible cost base.”
- Most local council departments operate in silos – they don’t talk to each other
- Existing applications are hard to integrate, but large-scale implementations of new software can be expensive and time-consuming
- The transformational government accelerator, based on Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform, provides integrated solutions that can be implemented incrementally
- Because the accelerator uses Microsoft software already licensed to many councils, the cost of implementation represents excellent value for money.
- The result is a single view of the citizen, enabling councils to offer a better service, meet performance targets and cut costs
[Current] applications are not flexible enough to adapt to the workflow and business processes of local authorities – they tend to be generic and inflexible.
Daniel Reardon
Ascentium
The idea of the accelerator is we break down the barriers across each directorate, because what you can do is access all these systems through the accelerator.
Charlie James
K2
You can automate the customer experience in terms of being involved and informed, so they know who’s working on their case, and they know when they’re going to get a response by.
Nick Cassidy
Morse
Kim Thomas is a freelance journalist, who specialises in writing about technology, business and education. Her clients include the Financial Times, the Economist Intelligence Unit and The Guardian as well as a number of B2B publications.