ORGANISATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

 

                                         GREAT ACCESS TO GREAT SERVICES

 

SUMMARY/PURPOSE

 

The purpose of this report is to review the current way in which the Council deals with its customers and to make proposals about the future shape and direction of the organisation.

 

The report takes into account the requirements of the electronic government target to have all services available electronically by 2005, as well as the results of a number of pieces of work that have been undertaken recently, and proposes that the Council recognises its need to become a truly customer-centred organisation as a focus for its future development.

 

BACKGROUND

 

Electronic Government

 

As part of its overall modernising agenda, the Government has embraced the concept of e-government with the following key components:

 

·    services based around citizens choices

·    more accessible services

·    social inclusion

·    better use of information

 

As part of this, the Government has set a target for all local authorities that all transactions capable of being provided electronically should be available electronically by 2005. This requirement formed the basis of the corporate ICT strategy approved by Members in May 2001 and underpins all ICT related work.

 

The Council is making steady progress towards the 2005 target as described in the  Implementing Electronic Government Statement (IEG 1 – October 2001) and more recently in the updated Statement, IEG 2 (October 2002) which can be viewed on the Council’s website at http://wightnet2000.iow.gov.uk/ict/strategy/. The District Auditor has reviewed and commended the IEG2 as being “a vast improvement on the previous document”.

 

The IEG Statement sets out the potential costs associated with achieving the Government’s target as being of the order of £31m over the next ten years, regardless of the way in which services are provided. Financing this will be a challenge for the Council but the real challenge lies in delivering a modernised service centred around the four key components of the modernising agenda.

 

Evaluating Progress

 

The Local Government Association has just published its national strategy for local e-government and this includes a number of useful questions to assess the progress being made by individual authorities. A copy of this document has been placed in the Members’ room.

 

Other Related Work

 

Implementation of the ICT strategy to date has focussed on the key enabling work approved by Members in May 2001. This includes work on network upgrades, desktop systems and critical corporate projects such as Document Image Processing, the Land and Property Gazetteer and research work around Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Substantial further work is still required but it is clear, in particular from the CRM work, that things have now reached the point where there needs to be a clearly defined vision of the future shape of the organisation to guide investment and technology decisions.

 

Alongside this work has been the Best Value project on Communicating with the Public. This project has been split into three parts as follows -

 

            i.          How the Council connects with the public (Customer Services)

            ii.         How the Council consults on major issues (Consultation)

iii.        How the Council provides information to the public (Communication)

 

The first part of the project has now been completed and again the very clear picture that emerges is that the Council needs to set a clear strategy on how it wishes to deal with the people it serves.

 

Our current arrangements, whereby different services are dispensed from different locations and where callers are diverted to a large number of separate telephone extensions, produces, as we are all aware, considerable dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the services we provide. 

 

There are individual exceptions to this but the general picture painted throughout the CRM and Best Value projects is that the Council needs to radically re-think how it deals with members of the public so that the majority of the public’s contacts with the Council are resolved at the point of first contact, regardless of the way they get in touch with us.

The External Perspective

 

As part of our approach to Best Value reviews, each review is now exposed to external challenge and Pascoe Sawyers of the I&DeA was engaged to undertake the external challenge of the Connecting with the Public review. Pascoe’s report has been made available to Members on the Best Value Steering Group and can be made available to any other Member on request.

 

Amongst Pascoe’s recommendations are four critical issues which reinforce the conclusions of the CRM and Best Value projects and the conclusions reached during work on the implementation of the ICT / IEG strategy. These are as follows:

 

i)          the Council needs to set out a clear vision for what customer services  should feel like and then explicitly include that as one of its key priorities;

 

ii)         the Council needs to invest in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.  The Council has no current method of capturing and sharing information about customers or their needs; this needs to be in place within the next 18 months;

 

iii)        there needs to be a customer access strategy; the current provision of customer services across the Council is very inconsistent and disjointed;

 

iv)        there needs to be a clear champion of customer services at senior officer and Member level.

 

The need for a clear vision of what success should look and feel like was also a theme in both the District Auditor’s review of the Council’s progress on e-government in August 2002 and in the recent Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) inspection. Taken in total, the evidence for such a requirement is now overwhelming.

 

SETTING A VISION

 

The CRM project and the Best Value work have both concluded that the Council needs to commit itself to the vision of becoming a truly customer-centred organisation and it is recommended that the authority adopts this as its vision, together with the supporting slogan of Great Access to Great Services.

 

Such an approach would ensure the proper provision of appropriate access channels as well as service delivery mechanisms and avoid the risk of great access to poor quality services and poor access to great quality services.

 

Implementing such a vision would enable the Council to better serve the people of the island and become an ‘excellent organisation’ in terms of the Modernising Government agenda. The Executive are asked to consider this proposal and recommend it to the Council as the basis for our future development.

 

In addition, the Best Value and CRM projects have drawn up four key principles around which that vision should be set. The external challenge provided by the I&DeA has commended these principles to the Council, and the Executive are now being asked to consider these as core principles which will underpin future work.

 

The principles are as follows:-

 

i)          80% of enquiries should be dealt with at the first point of contact;

 

ii)         all customer facing points should be managed and act in a consistent way;

 

iii)        there should be a wide choice of methods of contact designed to meet customer needs – these should include electronic and traditional services as appropriate and all services should be available at all service points;

 

iv)        information should only be captured once and then be made available across the organisation and to appropriate partners.

These principles cannot be achieved without some significant changes in the way in which customer service functions are currently managed and provided. The investment that the Council makes in pursuing its e-government strategy and organisational development will also be key as our current systems and processes will not permit this transformation.

 

DELIVERING THE VISION

 

Great Access to Great Services

 

In order to deliver Great Access to Great Services, the organisation will need to invest significantly in new computer systems and technologies. But this in itself will not be enough. The e-government agenda is about using ICT in new and creative ways to support different ways of working and to achieve the vision of a truly customer centred service, we will need to re-engineer the way we provide services to customers to gain the maximum benefit from our investments.

 

To enable information to be captured once only and to get anywhere near the 80% target will require significant investment in our information, ICT and business processes to provide effective ‘front’ and ‘back’ office functions.  ‘Front line’ staff - wherever located - will need access to all relevant information at their fingertips and the duplication of tasks inherent in our current systems and processes will need to be eliminated to deliver the service improvements and efficiencies that are envisaged. ‘Back office’ staff will be freed up more to concentrate on improved service delivery.

 

A considerable number of local authorities have embraced this approach in recent years.  The I&DeA have pointed the Council to a number of Councils - of which Brent, Lewisham,  East Riding and Swale (in Kent) are the best examples - which need further investigation and follow up.

 

The Council will, almost certainly, require further external advice before committing itself to the next phase of ICT investment towards this strategy. A comprehensive CRM system which is fully integrated with the organisation’s back office systems, for example, is likely to be very expensive over its life time – and therefore potentially high risk - although it will deliver substantial service improvement benefits. Appropriate advice will be taken on the steps that the Council needs to take and these are likely to include some form of strategic partnering or other procurement for the future provision of ICT and other services.

 

Organisational Development

 

The re-engineering of the Council’s ‘front’ and back office’ systems and processes is a key part of the organisational development agenda that the Council is facing.

 

Allied to this is the active involvement of all Council staff and this will need to be underpinned by customer care and other training across all staff groups.  Changing the organisational culture to meet the demands of modern front-line customer service delivery has been key to the strategic approach adopted by the leading local authorities and this work, and the training and development associated with it will form a key part of the Human Resource Strategy which the Head of Personnel Services and Training is to produce by April 2003.

 

Organisational Characteristics

 

As part of the background work to this paper, the CRM project has prepared a comprehensive paper which describes many of the characteristics that might be expected in a fully customer centred organisation. These will need to be reviewed and considered in due course if the proposals in this paper are supported.

 

A Mechanism For Future Delivery

 

Until recently, the Council has tended to see the e-government agenda as an ICT issue rather than as a key part of the ‘Modernising Government’ programme. Our future approach to both customer focused service delivery and to e-government needs to be seen as part of the same organisational development agenda rather than as distinct or fragmented projects. Electronic government is about customer-centric services and these cannot be successfully achieved without a well co-ordinated strategy.

 

This needs to be led from the very top of the organisation as the District Auditor noted in  August 2002:

 

‘Successful e-government projects depend on re-engineering business processes and these will fail if the engagement and commitment of Members, senior officers and staff are not obtained. It is essential to ensure that the e-government strategy permeates the organisation from the top down and is driven by senior management.’

 

In order to achieve this top level commitment, the Executive is asked to recommend to the Council that a Member-Officer group is established as a Programme Board to oversee the delivery of the vision and principles proposed in this paper and the associated organisational development work that will be required.

 

To ensure high level commitment, this group would be headed up at Member level by two Members from the Executive, one member from the Resources Select Committee (as being the relevant Select Committee for this area of work) and one other member appointed by the Opposition groups on the Council. At officer level, the work would be led by the Head of Paid Service together with the Heads of Finance, Personnel, Property and ICT to provide the necessary levers required to convert the vision into reality.

 

The remit of this Group would be :-

 

a)         to make recommendations to the Council on the required programme of projects, activities and actions and to report on progress as required;

 

b)         to ensure the effective development and management of a range of integrated customer service, organisational development, ICT and other projects as necessary - including the development and implementation of a customer access strategy - to deliver a truly customer centred organisation;

 

c)         to evaluate and prioritise investment to achieve ‘front’ and ‘back office’ re-engineering and then to proceed with that investment within agreed budgets;

 

d)         to investigate partnerships and other procurement approaches for the future provision of ICT and other services as appropriate; and

 

e)         to produce a critical path timetable to ensure the delivery of e-government by 2005.

 

To be effective, the work of this group will need to ensure the effective operation and integration of a range of stand-alone and interdependent projects, and will thus oversee, all relevant financial, human resource, property, ICT and other strategies and projects which can be used as levers to convert the vision into reality. How this fits together strategically is shown diagrammatically in the Appendix  to this report.

 

Conclusions and Recommendations

 

Delivery of this programme will test the determination of the Council to achieve change, both to respond to the 2005 deadline and, in particular, to become a truly customer centred service which delivers Great Access to Great Services.

 

Organisational change is always difficult and challenging. However, the Council’s ambition is to be seen as one of the best performing local authorities in the country and to move towards this objective requires leadership and commitment.

 

Agreement to the following recommendations will be key steps along this route: -

 

a)         that the Council’s commitment to become a truly customer centred organisation is recognised as part of its core priorities as set out in the Corporate Plan and reflected in the adoption of a vision of ‘Great Access to Great Services’ as part of the proposed Annual Action Plan;

 

b)         that the Council adopts the following four principles as part of its vision:

 

i.                    80% of enquiries should be dealt with at the first point of contact;

 

ii.                  all customer facing points should be managed and act in a consistent way;

 

            iii         there should be a wide choice of methods of contact designed to meet customer needs – these should include electronic and traditional services as appropriate and all relevant services should be available at all service points

 

            iv         information should only be captured once and then be made available across the organisation and to appropriate partners.

 

c)         that the Council establishes a member-officer group as a Programme Board as set out on page five and with the remit identified;

 

d)         that the Member representatives on the group report back as required to the Executive and Resources Select Committee;

 

e)         that the Head of Paid Service and the Deputy Leader be designated respectively as officer and Member champions of our vision of ‘Great Access to Great Services’.

 

Text Box: APPENDIX