The report was commissioned by the then chancellor of the exchequer, and now the UK prime minister, Gordon Brown. Therefore, Mr Varney’s appointment does not come as a surprise and is a welcome one as it signifies the prime minister’s support for the findings of the report.
However, its excellent ideas seem to have been simply converted into yet more performance targets for the public sector. What is needed is guidance and proofs of concepts to help the sector with the many technically complex IT challenges that it faces in turning the Varney vision into reality.
In his report, Mr Varney wrote about the disjointed way that public services are delivered to citizens. He likened government departments to islands, with the citizen having to join them up in order to meet his or her needs. The report went on to make a number of key recommendations, including increased standardization in data capture, and use of better co-ordinated business delivery and process redesign arising from the use of shared data.
One of the key objectives is to deliver efficient processes by grouping service delivery around common service ‘themes’ that are meaningful for citizens and businesses, starting with change of circumstances associated with bereavement, birth and change of address. Citizens should be able to notify public bodies only once of a change in their circumstances. Another key objective is improving public sector contact center performance with a key target of improving the flow of communication, while at the same time reducing operating costs by 25%.
The Citizen and Business Contact Council (Contact Council) was established as a result of the Varney report, and has oversight of public sector contact centers and the government’s response to the report’s recommendations, including performance management. On the latter, the Contact Council is working to establish best practice performance indicators and benchmarks to assist centers to perform to the level of best peer performance in the public sector.
This recommendation is to see a common framework for measurement of contact center performance established across the public sector, and work practices shared in a meaningful way. However, at the moment, public sector organizations are having to find their own way of using technology to implement the recommendations.
Implementing the Varney vision is not going to be easy for public sector organizations. The sector has at least 30 years’ worth of IT investment that has been largely made in isolated business systems with little integration. Each has its own reference and transactional data captured and stored with varying degrees of quality. Most public organizations do not have a single view of the citizen.
Therefore, firstly, much work has to be done internally, within each public body before it can share data externally to make Mr Varney’s single notification of a change in circumstance possible. To do so, data quality and integration issues have to be addressed, and a standardized, single view of the citizen accomplished using solutions such as master data management (MDM). That standardized view could then be used as part of a bigger and extended information-sharing protocol for inter-agency data sharing.
Soon, public sector organizations will have to report on a set of standardized key performance indicators (KPIs) for their contact centers. There are many business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM) solutions that can help with these requirements by providing a 360 degree view of performance, with dashboards and scorecards to allow the sector to monitor performance and identify problem areas. There is also much that can be done for integration: web services, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and developments such as business process execution language (BPEL) are changing the way that software applications and their related processes are defined, packaged and interact with one another.
Furthermore, many software vendors have already published XML schema that enable interactions and exchange of data between their products and others. However, using these technologies requires technical expertise and know-how, with much to consider and evaluate. The public sector would need guidance, advice, and proofs of concept with funding to be able to benefit from them. We hope Mr Varney will see to it that his targets are accompanied by practical technical advice and pilots to help the public sector achieve the required improvements.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
