Innovating service delivery
Ideally, governments want their citizens to have the best possible public services, however those services are provided. At the same time, as we have seen, many governments around the world face challenges that have an adverse impact on service delivery. As a result, innovative approaches to service delivery are urgently needed to help maintain or improve service standards. Large organizations, well known for their innovation capabilities, are increasingly partnering with the public sector to deliver technological and organizational solutions for service delivery.
The US is ring fencing funds to government agencies for innovative public service delivery. Out of a budget of around US$150 million, the Education Department’s i3 fund provides grants for the discovery and testing of new ideas to improve education delivery.68 There is encouragement to try new ventures that are less likely to work, but would have better pay-offs if they were successful. It has resulted in ninety-two unique i3 projects to provide innovative solutions to common education challenges. A total of over $900 million has been awarded since the fund began in 2010.
Innovation of service delivery is likely to touch on a number of areas. So, for example, governments will increasingly provide one-point solutions for services, and use modern technologies such as mobile communications and cloud-based computing services to make services more easily accessible and convenient. They will use Geospatial Information Systems technology to personalize services and adapt them to the needs of groups and individual users. And governments are also starting to unlock the potential of social media for innovative service delivery.
One-stop solutions
One-stop solutions provide a way for people to access government services in one place, whether that is a physical location, an online route or a combination of both.
Typically, physical one-stop shops take two forms. One type provides a wide range of government services and the other focuses on a specific policy area, such as job seeking and employment, or social services.
Of the world’s 1.1 billion households not connected to the Internet, 90 per cent are in the developing world, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. But even in the developed world, Internet access is far from comprehensive. As a result, governments use physical one-stop shops to provide individuals with Internet access.
Service Canada takes this a step further: it provides integrated services for users online, by telephone and through 600 physical service locations.69 Finland opened a number of State Service Centres employing 800 people in six cities.70 In Italy, local authorities are required by law to have a one-stop shop for business licences, paperwork and registration. In Australia, the Department of Human Services acts as a conduit for the provision of welfare services by a variety of national government departments. Citizens access these services through Centrelink offices.71
Enabling more effective service provision is not the only benefit of the one-stop shop. Governments gain directly in a number of ways – greater efficiency of service provision, for example. What used to be several points of contact for citizens interacting with different government departments can now be consolidated into a single point. That means reduced office costs as well as other savings, such as those made through joint staffing, IT and collective procurement in other areas.
A customer-focused approach also enables better cooperation between agencies on individual cases. Bringing the different elements of a service together forces departments to collaborate and become better at collaborating. Reduced paperwork means there is time to give individuals more attention and select the most appropriate intervention.
It may even allow preventative action that reduces the need for further services, and thus saves costs. Through a one-stop shop approach, it might be possible to provide advice on finding cheaper accommodation to a newly unemployed person. Without the advice, that person may well become homeless, need emergency accommodation and cost the state more.
Other potential benefits include better governance – reducing the number of government interactions necessary for citizens can reduce the likelihood of corruption. Better division of labour is also possible. So in some circumstances, such as when a single department handles service provision across the government, interaction with citizens can itself become a professional skill, while expert professionals in other areas can concentrate on what they do best.
Delivering a one-stop solution requires political will. The different government departments involved in service delivery must be prepared to cooperate. In practice, ministers responsible for individual strands of public policy may be wary of initiatives that require cross-departmental collaboration in case that collaboration leads to loss of control and weakened accountability.
There are solutions to this problem. In Canada, for example, the Minister of Employment and Social Development is directly responsible for the policy and management of Service Canada. This ensures that somebody is committed to seeking sufficient resources for the service and can also resolve interdepartmental disputes through a framework of collective ministerial responsibility. Accountability and transparency are further supported by a service charter with measurable targets, while complaints are handled by an independent Office for Client Satisfaction. An independent audit committee and advisory council resolves internal operational disputes and supports the wide-ranging changes necessary at a managerial level.
With widespread publicity about security issues relating to use of the Internet, governments must be able to reassure citizens and give them the confidence to hand over private and personal information. This may not be easy. At the very least, governments must demonstrate that the underlying technological infrastructure offers secure connections to all government departments participating in the scheme. Over time, once a one-stop service is well established, citizens are likely to grow more comfortable about using the service.
Transformation at work: kiosk citizens72
In 2004 a study by Andreas Mylonas, Director of Labour Relations at the Ministry of Labour and Social Insurance in Cyprus, found that the country’s civil service was bureaucratic, overly centralized and beset by organizational inflexibility.
The government’s response was to create a number of one-stop shops known as Citizen Service Centres. The centres first appeared in the capital Nicosia in 2005, and rapidly expanded to six across the country. At these one-stop shops, citizens can access sixty-four services from six departments: the Ministry of Finance (which established the centres); the Ministry of Road Transportation; the Ministry of Health; and the government departments dealing with social insurance, the civil registry and land tenure.
There are also kiosks where citizens can go online to access other facilities and forms not immediately available at the centres. Equipped with modern technology, the centres’ staff can provide certain services on the spot, such as residence certificates and the renewal of driving licences. For other services, such as passport renewal and certain government benefits, they can accept applications and act as intermediaries with the appropriate government officials.
A Ministry of Finance survey found that 89 per cent of users reported a waiting time of less than ten minutes – 65 per cent said they had waited less than five minutes. Not surprisingly, 92 per cent called the length of their wait ‘very satisfactory’. Over 90 per cent of users were ‘very positive’ about the knowledge of the staff, their behaviour and the overall operation of the centre. Ninety-five per cent were also satisfied with the opening hours. The centres close at 5 p.m., two hours later than the government offices. The government is looking to expand the number of centres.
Transformation at work: Tas’Heel
In the mid-2000s the Ministry of Labour in the UAE was not only responsible for making policies, but also for a number of other tasks, including conducting inspections, issuing work permits and registering employers.
The additional activities, beyond its policymaking remit, placed a considerable burden on the Ministry. This was particularly the case as the activities included issuing work permits and registering employers, and the UAE has a large immigrant workforce with a reasonably high turnover of employees. That meant Ministry officials were diverted from the strategically important task of policymaking. In fact, 80 per cent of their time was dedicated to dealing with the administration related to work permits and employer registration, and only 20 per cent on policy development and inspections.73 The situation was exacerbated by many immigrant workers preferring paper forms to submitting documentation online.
Something had to change, and so the Ministry hived off some of the more time-consuming administrative activities to a private service provider under a franchise contract. In 2007, many of the activities relating to the work permits and registration were absorbed into a new system of one-stop shops called Tas’Heel. The name Tas’Heel means ‘make it easy’ in Arabic.
The solution made things easier for both the immigrant workers and the Ministry officials. The one-stop employment services centres were franchised, with the franchisee receiving a payment for each completed transaction. Information that the Ministry required was transferred electronically to the ministry for further approval and processing. The result was cost reduction, faster processing, reduced workflows at the Ministry, and increased transparency and accountability.
Five years after the project began, there were twenty-five service delivery centres across the UAE. About 85 per cent of labour-related requests were submitted to the Ministry via the Tas’Heel system. The volume of requests has risen considerably from 25,000 in 2007 to 4.8 million in 2011.74
Harnessing new technologies for service delivery
One-stop shops make governments more accessible. Many governments are also using the latest technological developments to improve performance and to gauge and raise the quality of their services. They are extending and supplementing their e-government offering by leveraging new technologies such as the cloud, mobile technologies and geospatial information services, for example.
The use of new technology can transform bureaucracies. Well-run businesses, for example, do not see customer complaints as a nuisance; they use the data gathered from websites and call centres to fine-tune products and services. Governments can do the same.
This is not the use of new technology for the sake of it. Instead, citizen and business needs are driving the use of technology. It is about finding out what kinds of communications citizens want and then designing an appropriate system. A good technological initiative scheme starts from the citizen’s perspective, not that of the bureaucrat. For example, someone registering a newborn baby should not have to worry about the way in which the tax authorities, social benefit administration, healthcare service, education system, census department and local government may use the information.
New technologies can deliver savings, although achieving these may not be straightforward. Online communication may be cheaper and faster, for example, but it may still be necessary to maintain the physical infrastructure that enables older communication forms. New technologies may bring additional costs without eliminating the expense of earlier technologies.
An easier goal is more effective communication with a larger number of citizens. The Internet, mobile telephony and other technologies allow governments to disseminate information and receive feedback and other input more effectively than ever before. They also make it easy to tailor the information that is provided. Swedish government websites, for example, all have two versions: one in standard Swedish; and one in simplified text, which is easier to understand.
One of the reasons for the extensive number of mobile-phone-related examples of government–citizen interaction in Africa and South East Asia is the wide and spreading presence of such technology among citizens in these regions. Even Myanmar, which greatly restricts ICT usage, allows online visa applications for foreign nationals. Some developing nations are pioneering mobile government initiatives. Online government portals are now ubiquitous. In Estonia, for example, citizens can log into and correct data in their government profile.
As governments adopt new information technology platforms for services interaction with citizens and for back-office infrastructure, state interaction with individuals is fundamentally changing. In 2010, the EU estimated that 82 per cent of the basic national services of member countries were available online.
The use of three technologies in particular – mobile telephony, cloud computing and geospatial services – deserves attention.
The M in government
Mobile government, or m-government, is already a reality, with many countries using mobile phone technology to help deliver services. It is an inextricable part of e-government.
The use of mobile technology to communicate and interact with citizens has benefits and constraints similar to those of e-government overall. It is convenient for those who have mobile phones, but difficult to make universal – unless the technology becomes universal and the preferred means of interaction with the government for certain services.
But there are important practical differences between e-government and m-government. Mobile telephony is much more widespread than traditional Internet coverage, especially in the developing world. Some three-quarters of the world’s population has access to a mobile phone. Subscriber numbers for mobile phones, pre- and post-paid, has grown from fewer than one billion in 2000 to more than six billion (and rapidly rising), of which nearly five billion are in developing countries.75
The result is a huge number of SMS-based information-sharing initiatives in the developing world, ranging from basic healthcare to commodity prices, and with many citizens benefiting, from farmers to fishermen.
The approach to m-government is not set in stone, but adapts and evolves as technology allows it to be structured in better ways to meet the needs of citizens. Technological differences lead to fundamentally different mechanisms for m-government in different countries. For example, governments provide increasing numbers of free apps for smartphones to facilitate citizen interaction. The US federal government even has an apps directory (http://apps.usa.gov/).
This link between the level of technology and the shape of m-government has major implications. As mobile telephony converges with portable computing in the shape of smartphones and mobile-enabled tablet computing, m-government will grow less distinct. Instead, it will look more like web-based service provision – or e-government – done over wireless devices. The increasing use of apps in the developed world is the first step.
The exact shape that e-government and m-government will take as they converge is unclear. Culture will play an important role. In Sweden, for example, citizens are comfortable about providing information to the government. This enables the authorities to calculate someone’s income tax bill and formally agree it with the individual concerned using a simple two-way SMS.
Transformation at work: m-government in the UAE
One government on its way to implementing a comprehensive mobile government strategy is the UAE. In May 2013, the UAE leadership announced the UAE’s ‘Mobile Government’ initiative. The aim is to provide services to people wherever they are and at whatever time they require those services.76 It is another step towards better public services in the UAE. Indeed, the UAE was ranked twelfth globally for online service delivery in the UN’s E-Government Survey 2014.
The Mobile Government initiative uses mobile phones, mobile devices and other advanced technological tools to deliver services and information to the public. A good example of progress in this area was the 2014 launch of a smart government app store. The idea was to ‘make smart services part of the daily life of society’, according to the UAE leadership.
The app store is part of the UAE’s strategy to become a smart government by the middle of 2015. The store has over a hundred apps developed by local and federal agencies, and can provide 700 customer services in a single location on both Android and iOS enabled smartphones. The project was launched in collaboration with Google and Apple.
Transformation at work: Africa calling
There are many examples of the innovative use of mobile phone technology to improve service delivery in the developing world.
In South Africa, Rhodes University computer science professor Hannah Thinyane addressed service delivery issues in the municipality of Makana. Thinyane’s research looked at the use of mobile phones for development. She linked up with research associate Debbie Coulson, who had worked for the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM) at Rhodes University. PSAM systematically monitors public resource management.
PSAM’s social accountability monitoring (SAM) methodology involves citizen engagement in five basic governance processes: strategic planning and resource allocation; expenditure management; performance management; public integrity management; and oversight.
Thinyane and Coulson created mobiSAM, a mobile-phone polling framework and platform that tied in with the SAM framework. This allowed people to engage with the government in real time.
For example, the municipality might ask residents whether they had adequate water pressure. Their responses are automatically collated and visually displayed, and registered residents receive regular updates about the service and any problems. Thinyane and Coulson have extended the MobiSAM tool to cover the monitoring of all basic services provided by the local government.77
In the cloud
One technology helping governments to improve service delivery is cloud computing, which will make the relatively constrained computing power of mobile devices much less relevant. Cloud computing is the provision of computer software, platforms and infrastructure as services over the Internet in an on-demand and rapidly scalable way: akin to being able to access a computer no matter where you are, and on an as-you-need-it basis.
Users pay for what they use and nothing else, and benefit from always having the most up-to-date technology. The cloud can be public, with services sold over the Internet, such as Google Apps; private; restricted to one organization; community based; or restricted to a group of related organizations, such as government departmental services – or a mixture of these.
Use of the cloud is growing. Research firm Gartner predicts that public cloud offerings will account for more than 25 per cent of government business services in domains other than national defence and security by 2017. A number of consequences flow from migration to the cloud, suggests Gartner. By 2017, as many as 35 per cent of government shared-service organizations will be managed by the private sector. Government jobs will change or be eliminated as a result, with Gartner expecting at least 25 per cent of government software development positions to go in order to finance recruitment of business intelligence and data analysts.78
Several governments, including the US, the UK and Australia, are in the process of migrating a variety of services to the cloud – either a government-run one or a hybrid. Service providers, such as IBM, AT&T and HP, are competing for billions of dollars’ worth of government cloud services contracts.79
In January 2014, the Hong Kong government launched an internal cloud platform to host e-government services shared by its bureaux and departments. For the time being, Hong Kong’s Government Cloud Platform, tagged GovCloud for short, is only for internal use rather than for procurement. Initially, it will be used to support electronic record-keeping and collaborative working systems, with $242 million (£147.28 million) to be spent on adding new services over the next five years.80
Use of the cloud is increasing exponentially, and cloud-based government strategies are expected to increase dramatically in line with global usage. The use of the cloud in developing countries may take more time.
There are internal barriers associated with the user or purchaser of cloud services. These barriers include, for example, concern over data security and privacy issues; the geographical location of data from a security and jurisdictional perspective; service reliability; contractual lock-in and inability to upgrade; and poor organizational collaboration between government departments.
External barriers, related to the wider economic and communications environment, also exist in developing countries. An UNCTAD report clusters these into three categories: inadequate infrastructure, legal and regulatory barriers, and weaknesses in the wider business environment.
In 2011, developed countries had a thousand times more secure data servers per million people than the least developed countries (LDCs), while developed countries accounted for 85 per cent of data centres, according to UNCTAD.81 The lower speeds of the mobile networks make them less effective for cloud computing. However, organizations are still finding innovative ways to combine mobile networks and cloud services.
Initially, adoption of the cloud is likely to be about back-office infrastructure improvement and cost reduction. In time, the cloud will deliver new service models. Finding them, however, will be the result of experimentation. The real beneficiaries of the cloud will be those who let employees across government departments experiment with the best ways of using it.
Mapping the future
The route to improving government services is not only via mobile telephony and the cloud. Innovative analysis and use of geospatial data combined with modern communication technologies is creating opportunities to closely tailor services to the location of the citizen. (Geospatial means to be concerned with the relative position of something on the surface of the earth.)
Governments have provided some types of geospatial data for centuries. The British government ordered the mapping of the country in 1791, and the first US government national atlas dates back to 1874. The surprising thing is how much, until recently, government geospatial offerings resembled – indeed consisted of – maps and atlases. Vast amounts of data are held in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), sometimes with data structures that were incompatible with other systems. The major benefit of digitized GIS was that geographic information could be easily overlaid and viewed.
This allowed for advanced analysis, with a dramatic impact on service provision. Many militaries use such data for risk assessment, as do many police departments. New York City led the way here, using local neighbourhood data as part of its shift to risk-based policing under William Bratton, who introduced a number of initiatives credited with causing a significant drop in crime in the 1990s.
The promise of geospatial services, however, extends much further, allowing a host of applications to use geographically based information. Traditionally, the obstacle was the computing power needed to sort through such information, but the emergence of the cloud and of common geographic data standards is starting to make this possible. Eventually, geospatial data services will be included as an element of the cloud.
At present, governments are still working out the technology around information sharing. The EU’s INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe), originally designed to help environmental studies, is increasingly active in creating standards for geographic data sharing.82 Meanwhile, the US Federal Government Geographic Data Committee has been running the GeoCloud Sandbox Initiative.83
A good example of how governments can practically apply geospatial data is the Food Environment Atlas. This provides a geospatial view of people’s access to healthy food and is an initiative of the Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture. It includes ninety indicators covering aspects of people’s food environments such as access to healthy, affordable food, expenditure on fast foods, demographics, income and proximity of grocery stores. Citizens can see what is happening where they live, and the data can also be used for research projects.84
Transformation at work: Singapore’s GeoInnovation Fund
In November 2013, the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) launched the GeoInnovation Fund. The fund’s aim was to increase innovation through the use of Geospatial Information Science and Technology (GIST).
Awards from the GeoInnovation Fund help provide individuals with resources to develop creative geospatial applications and services. In launching the fund, the SLA referenced students, application developers and start-up entrepreneurs with ‘an avid interest in the design and creation of geospatial applications and services’, while at the same time noting that anybody with a great idea for the application of GIST in benefiting society and the economy could apply for up to S$50,000-worth of funding per project.
The launch document offered examples of other innovative applications of GIST. One was EcoFinder, a geo-social app promoting green behaviour. The app allows people to find recycling bins near them, check in to the bins, unlock achievements, rack up points and compete with other individuals.
Another example was the LOO (Let’s Observe Ourselves) Connect mobile app from the Restroom Association. The app allowed the public to locate clean toilets and provide feedback on the state of public toilets.
Emphasizing the importance the Singapore government attaches to GIST, Ng Siau Yong, director of the SLA’s GeoSpatial Division, said ‘GIST is recognized by the Government as a key enabler of effective decision making and public service delivery. We are confident that the GeoInnovation Fund will help drive geospatial innovation and nurture talent in this industry.’85 86
The precise shape of applications that integrate geospatial information, as opposed to those shaped by an analysis of such data, is still unclear. They will emerge as innovative solutions for service needs are developed. So, for example, rather than simple maps and location-specific data, they may integrate analysis that could warn users of heightened risk or adjust service provision levels based on location.
Some obstacles must be overcome. Funding and budgets need apportioning appropriately. Government budgets tend to be assigned to departments. The pooling of those budgets to acquire common technology or provide unified services to the citizen can be problematic, given institutional habits.
Legal structures may need changing as pooling of back-office resources is restricted or forbidden in some jurisdictions. There will also need to be some process redesign, as the provision of services by several departments working together requires new sets of processes which must be designed and implemented without interruption of essential services.
It is not enough to have people with the necessary expertise, either. Great communicators are needed to explain the possibilities created by new technologies to a non-technology-savvy audience, whether that audience is policymakers, citizens, businesses or other organizations involved in service creation and delivery.
Social tools
Social media is a part of everyday life for billions of people living in both developed and developing economies. These people have discovered the power of sharing. Businesses too are embracing social tools; people get things done better, faster, together.
Most governments have yet to unlock the opportunities that using social tools provides to the same extent that their citizens or private sector firms have. Many are catching up quickly, though, whether for collaboration, sharing information, collective problem solving or communication and message alignment.
Understandably the US, where many of the world’s most popular social media applications have been created, is leading the way. The majority of its federal agencies already use popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
There are more in-depth examples, beyond the standard Facebook page or Twitter stream. So, for example, a combination of public wiki, blog and open-code facility were used to help construct a National Health Information Network. Over sixty companies participated and the project progressed from identifying goals to pilot implementation in the space of a year.
Another example was the use of Facebook to identify fish species in a diversity study sponsored by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. A team of ichthyologists were tasked with undertaking a survey of fish diversity in the Cuyuni River of Guyana. With only a week to identify over 5,000 specimens, they used crowdsourcing via Facebook to enlist the help of colleagues and identified some 90 per cent of the specimens posted up to at least the level of genus in less than 24 hours – revealing two undocumented species.87
Enabling citizens to interact with government via social media allows government to adopt a more proactive approach to service provision. Using collaboration and other social tools allows for better-informed policymaking and implementation. This extends from disease control to traffic management.
As with the Smithsonian example, a good place to start using social tools is with a project or policy objective which has a broad stakeholder community. With fish identification, it was specialist technical experts, but with policy development, it might be citizens, or with resilience planning, it could be the third sector.
It is important not to let existing systems and processes limit thinking. The key is to think about the desired outcomes and how social tools can help deliver those outcomes, then identify barriers to those objectives and design social solutions to circumvent them.
Careful consideration should be given to constructing the social networks that can be used to achieve government goals (i.e. deliver the needed services). It is not enough to identify the main constituencies and communities that will be useful. It is also necessary to track down the decision makers and people of influence within these communities. It may be necessary to incentivize people to participate.
Once objectives are set and networks identified, it will be time to consider the many social tools that can be adopted. There will inevitably be a variety of disparate initiatives underway already. Being careful to create a consistent approach, with clear standards providing overall governance for social interaction, means these can then be incorporated into the overall approach.
Governments should introduce effective mechanisms to keep pace with the evolution of social tools and technologies so that they can realize their full potential in supporting better service delivery.
In a nutshell: innovating service delivery
Citizens’ expectations from governments are rising: they expect high-quality, quick, personalized and on-demand service delivery. To meet these expectations, governments need to understand better what people expect and need by putting them at the centre of service design and involving them in shaping innovative services to their local and individual requirements.
In the past, citizens accessed and obtained a range of services by dealing with many different parts of government. Now innovative public service is enabled by new delivery models – such as one-stop shops joining up government services where multiple transactions are carried out efficiently for customers – and by harnessing cutting-edge technologies such as mobile government, cloud computing and geospatial services.
Mobile government, the extension of e-government to mobile platforms, as well as the strategic use of all kinds of wireless and mobile technology, services, applications and devices, will play a key role in improving the accessibility and impact of government services. The rising tide of social media will also need to be properly understood and harnessed by governments.