By the end of 2005, it is claimed, central and local government had achieved 96 per cent of Tony Blair's target of 'e-enabling' all government services. In November, he and the Cabinet Office launched the next phase of its strategy to use technology to transform government services. This time around, the plan is 'to join up and share services rather than duplicate them', thereby unlocking around £1.4 billion (10 per cent of the current spend on technology), and releasing some of the 50,000 IT staff currently tied up in developing departmental computer systems. These savings will be on top of the 86,000 jobs supposed to be cut by Sir Peter Gershon's 2004 Efficiency Review.
New ways to access government
Now that new channels, like the web, are replacing form-filling, the strategy plans to take a hard look at those channels. It will reduce the number of government call-centres from 130. It will look at having a single telephone number for non-emergency calls. The 2500 separate government websites will be converged on DirectGov and Business Link, and made more consistent to navigate. Mobile phones and red buttons on TVs will be new ways to access government services.
The policy implies other transformations: 'professionalising' the IT staff in the public sector. As well as career development, professionalisation focuses on skills, which, although commonplace in the private sector, are relatively new to the public sector, like 'portfolio management', 'reliable project delivery' and 'supplier management'. This will be done through the Programme and Project Management Framework of the Office of Government Commerce, which provides centres of excellence across government, as well as the IT academy set up in the summer by Ian Watmore, then head of the e-Government Unit, with the support of the NCC, BCS and IEE.
Sharing services
Because each department has so far done its own thing, each has reinvented the wheel continually, and each has, for instance, its own Human Resources and Finance functions. There are rolls of fat in the duplicated departmental systems, and the strategy aims to reduce this fat. It aims to do this by using common infrastructure and common off-the-shelf software. Again, to reduce duplication of personal data, the strategy also calls for data-sharing between departments, recognising that this is a 'major cultural shift'. To drive all this through, a Shared Service Director has been appointed in the Cabinet Office.
Groups of citizens
A major innovation is the appointment of Customer Group Directors: to look after the needs of groups of citizens across departmental boundaries. To start the process off, the Government will initially appoint directors for one citizen group (e.g. older people), one policy group (e.g. offender management), and one business group (e.g. farmers). Other groups will follow, once the role of the Group Directors has been honed down by the experience of the first three.
Steering the Customer Group Directors will be a Service Transformation Board of officials from the wider public sector who run major services and have operational delivery responsibility. The task of the board will be 'to set overarching service design principles; promote best practice; signpost the potential of technology; identify common design and development needs; and challenge inconsistency or deviation from agreed standards or best practice.' It will be tough to find senior civil servants of sufficient clout with the necessary skill-set to achieve such tasks.
The success of the whole strategy will depend on the effectiveness of the Transformation Board and the Customer Group Directors. They will be in a difficult position, with responsibilities crossing departmental boundaries. The strategy is attempting what the private sector refers to as 'matrix management', not something that the public sector has been very familiar with.
How the private sector can help
It is in this area that private sector training companies and consultants can help, to teach the planners how to find out the real needs of their end-users: businesses and citizens. They will have to teach the dark arts of market research. Lower down, they must teach the staff to operate outside their departmental silos, to implement the joined-up systems. This means not just the IT staff, as part of their 'professionalisation', but the regular civil servants in the departments as well. They need to be made much more aware of what computers can and cannot do, so that they can be more proactive partners than hitherto with the IT staff in the joined-up projects.
Finally they will have to teach the civil servants how to sell the new systems to the citizen. So far, the lack of these selling and marketing skills has meant that many of the expensive web-based systems written over the past five years remain under-used.
The private sector will also have much to offer in advising on the right mix of channels; telephone, internet, mobile and new ''channels yet to come. The private sector might well run, as intermediaries, some of these channels itself.
The joined-up strategy will depend on effective data sharing. But at the moment, according to the Council for Science and Technology, 'Personal data stored by government is often of low quality - both inaccurate and incomplete - and very expensive to keep up to date'. The Government will need help both in providing the database and information management technology, and in cleansing the data.
The strategy also calls for an holistic approach to identity management, based on a suite of identity management solutions that enable the public and private sectors to manage risk and provide cost-effective services trusted by customers and stakeholders. Much of this all-embracing identity management expertise will necessarily come for the private sector.
In return for these opportunities for the private sector, the strategy demands better 'supplier management'. This includes an agreed forward sourcing strategy, including action to ensure capacity and competition in the market, an agreed performance plan for each major supplier to improve that supplier's delivery, capability and partnering with current and future public sector customers, and the use of standardised contracts, services and service boundaries, and contracts and service management models. What seems to be intended is a more stable but tougher supplier regime.
A long and winding road
The transformational strategy will not be implemented immediately. There is still unfinished business to be completed from the last spending review and the massive programmes already under way, including the reform of the Criminal Justice System, and the troubled Connecting for Health project in the NHS. And, although government services have been e-enabled, not enough citizens actually use them. A massive marketing effort is still needed to popularise the e-services, and thereby release the Gershon 80,000 staff. The strategy foresees that these tasks will take the whole of 2006.
Therefore it will only be from 2007 onwards that the transformational agenda will kick in. The plan is to have embedded the new cultures, and to have made the process irreversible, by 2011. After 2011, ' the time will be right to roll out newer technologies', and 'the culture of government will have changed to one which embraces - rather than shuns - sharing, which will continue to breakdown the silos perceived today.'
This is exactly the same aim as that held by the e-government pioneers who launched the 'government.direct' initiative way back in 1996. What has been achieved in the last ten years is the easy bit. The next steps are going to be much more difficult. The Government will need all the support it can get from the private sector and the NCC, if it is to implement its strategy, albeit 15 years late.
Autor: Richard Sarson
Quelle: Principia, 01.02.2006
