Society for IT (SOCITM)

WHEN E-GOVERNMENT MEANS EFFICIENT GOVERNMENT

The government's Efficiency Review carried out by Sir Peter Gershon has set local government the target of improving efficiency by 2.5 per cent over each of the next three years.

Not something likely to make local authority managers jump up and down with delight, you might suppose. And yet many ICT managers in local government, particularly those with responsibility for implementing e-government, are quietly welcoming the efficiency agenda as a highly positive development.

Why should this be so? Quite simply, because it is widely recognised that effective ICT and e-government investment is absolutely central to achieving the £20bn or more savings Gershon has identified as being possible across the public sector by 2007/08. The efficiency review is a new driver that could be the key to re-designed e-government programmes that really do achieve what it has always been claimed that they might - a transformation in public services.

According to Barry Quirk, Chief Executive of the London Borough of Lewisham and Efficiency Champion for Local Government, achieving the efficiency targets will require "the adoption of leading-edge management practices, exploiting the potential of new information and communication technologies, and developing more focused delivery vehicles with private, voluntary and community, as well as public, sector partners".

Many ICT managers had hoped that the sort of transformational change Quirk describes might have emerged from the national e-government programme launched by the prime minister in 2000, when he set public services the target of having all their services available online by the end of 2005.

It is certainly true that the 2005 targets have given rise to change in the form of a sustained wave of activity and investment in local authority ICT. Councils have spent some £2.5bn so far, supported in England by the ODPM's National Strategy for Local E-government and £675mn of central government funding for local e-government initiatives.

Socitm's IT Trends survey, published at the end of 2004, shows that councils have used this money to invest heavily in new systems and more people, with spending on ICT up by almost 40 per cent in the last two years. New channels (like websites and contact centres) have been created or further developed to enhance customer access to services, and there is plenty of evidence to show that information provided by councils to business and the public is developing both in quantity and quality. The majority of councils believe they will have created appropriate infrastructure and bought the software needed to provide multi-channel access by the 2005 deadline.

However, to date there is little evidence that all this activity and investment has achieved the desired transformation in local authority services. The public certainly haven't noticed, with MORI research showing that satisfaction with local authorities has actually declined by 10 per cent over the last three years.

This is hardly surprising. The emphasis of the e-government programme and its drivers - BVPI 157 and the funding triggered by Implementing Electronic Government (IEG) statements - has, until very recently, been on putting services online. Doing this (by creating call centres and websites) will not, on its own, be transformational. For that to happen, e-government programmes must involve business transformation for the whole organisation, with services redesigned to be truly citizen-focused. That means not just 'connecting' citizens but rethinking everything from a citizen point of view. Ultimately, this may mean completely redefining the business model and not simply re-engineering processes within an accepted business design.

By and large this has not happened because 'e-government' initiatives to date have been concerned too much with technology and too little with change, too much with improving access to services, and too little on back-office efficiencies.

The demands placed on local authorities by Gershon will force them to change this approach. The beginning of a new and more productive phase may well emerge in 2005 within the 'information age' in which councils move from the 'mild' version of e-government to the 'strong' version illustrated below.

Mild e-government

Primarily concerned with running discrete e-government projects
Focus is on electronic service delivery and digital divide
Seen as a technology initiative
Savings minimal
Limited change
Lower risk.

Strong e-government

Concerned with developing new approaches to government
Focus expanded to incorporate whole of government
Seen as a business change (transformation) initiative enabled through ability to manage information
Efficiency savings potentially significant
Major change to public-service operations and relationship with citizens
Higher risk but higher reward.

As well as service improvement 'strong' e-government should also mean efficiency savings. But it will require imagination, innovation and an approach to managing risk that have not been sufficiently evident thus far. There will also need to be organisational and cultural change, not least so that business managers have incentives to radically review how they deliver services. And it will require political commitment, not only to drive it through but also to continue to drive it through when aspects don't work as well as anticipated. And that will need a transformation in itself.

In addition to political will, strong leadership and management will also be required from the top of the organisation. This has already happened in the most successful and most effective organisations in public and private sectors, where technology has now been integrated so that it is a core part of the business rather than merely a piece of infrastructure.

A striking example can be found in the Socitm Insight report Local e-government: Learning from the Best, which dissected what happened behind the scenes at Cisco Systems, whose phenomenal growth in the 1990s was driven by a total commitment to efficiency and the need to increase productive time. Cisco believed it critical to make effective use of its employees by supporting them with technology at all stages of their work, reducing overheads, streamlining business processes and cutting down on paperwork and administration.

This is an aspiration completely relevant to today's public sector organisations, but what, in practical terms, does this mean? Here are some pointers:

While local authorities have invested heavily in e-government, few have performance management systems in place that can monitor delivery and measure efficiency gains within a department, let alone across an entire authority and its partners.
Few authorities have cost-per-transaction information. For example, they do not know what it costs to answer each call to the authority's call centre as opposed to the cost of providing through a website the sort of information given out in many of those calls. And yet without such information it is impossible to manage a key source of efficiency gains - ie, driving customers to more cost-effective service delivery channels, typically those that are customer and employee self-service and technology-based.
It follows that local authorities need to make sure that self-service, technology-based systems are suitably resilient and attractive to customers and staff (findable, easy to use and effective) is key. And, of course, the customers (and staff) have to know that these systems exist, so marketing, both internal and external, is important.
The really major efficiency gains can only be met, however, by putting information management at the heart of the authority. Piecemeal savings at departmental level will not suffice. This requires analysis of workflows across the enterprise, and the development of consolidated cross-cutting systems to manage them. Such systems will have to have performance management built-in and deliver appropriate and accurate information to office-based, homeworking and mobile staff on a 24/7 basis.
Moving resources to the frontline means a smaller back-office workforce which can be redeployed across functions to handle hotspots and has the technology available (and the training) to make this possible.
Another possible source of back-office efficiencies is the development of a market in services between local authorities - we'll collect your council tax, you handle our HR and payroll and we'll both source PCs via a regional procurement service.

Its worth repeating that the potential for transformation described in this article will not be realised without strong leadership and management from the top of the organisation. Senior managers and chief executives need to understand the potential and limitations of ICT better than they do. At the same time, heads of ICT need to shed the role of supporting actor and take centre stage. For some heads of ICT taking on this role may require a shift of focus and attitude and the acquisition of new skills. Above all they will need to be driven by their organisation's business needs to develop strategic solutions to service problems and to continue to break down the traditional division between business analysis and IT delivery.

Chris Guest, President, Society of IT Management and Head of Technology & Improvement at Flintshire County Council