SUMMARY/PURPOSE
1.
To
invite the Executive to make recommendations to the Council about the way in
which the Council deals with its customers.
BACKGROUND
2.
The
report attached entitled ‘Great Access to Great Services’, sets out all the
background to this item.
STRATEGIC CONTEXT
3.
The
strategic context to the report is described within the body of the report and
demonstrated diagrammatically in its Appendix.
CONSULTATION
4.
The
report and its recommendations arise from extensive consultation within the
Council and, as part of the Best Value project ‘Connecting with the Public’,
with a wide range of people and bodies external to the Council. The report and its recommendations have been
reviewed by an external consultant and are commended to the Council.
FINANCIAL/BUDGET IMPLICATIONS
5.
There
will be significant financial implications of implementing the strategy being
recommended. The estimated costs of
implementing electronic government are put at around £31 million over 10
years. The Programme Board, the subject
of one of the report’s recommendations, will be given authority to commit
expenditure only within the budget approved by the Council.
LEGAL IMPLICATIONS
6.
There
are no particular legal implications arising from the report.
OPTIONS
7.
There
are a range of options available to the Council in tackling the e-government
agenda and the needs of customers. The
report attached argues that whichever option is chosen to deliver e-government
targets, there is a need for a clear vision of what the Council is seeking to
achieve as set out in the report’s recommendations.
EVALUATION/RISK MANAGEMENT
8.
Given
the significant potential costs, there is a very high risk attached to this
project. For this reason, the report
recommends that external advice is taken before further investment is
contemplated.
|
RECOMMENDATIONS 9.
The recommendations to the Executive are (a) to (e) inclusive on Page
7 of the attached report. |
BACKGROUND PAPERS
10.
(a) District Auditor’s report on e-government
– August 2002
(b)
Best
Value project work on ‘Connecting with the Public’.
(c)
External
challenge report from Pascoe Sawyers of the Improvement and Development Agency.
Contact Point : Mike
Fisher, ( 823102,
e-mail: [email protected]
|
M
J A FISHER |
P HARRIS Deputy Leader |
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’.
