The UK’s e-Government initiative in the 1990s moved the public sector toward adopting e-services throughout. Local and central Government promptly set up thousands of web sites and e-services. Many were examples of innovative, citizen-centric thinking, but ‘joined-up’ Government was not always a priority.
The Gershon report, published in July 2004, called for a £6.45bn saving from local Government by 2008, presenting a huge opportunity to rationalise e-service developments, realise further savings and improve the delivery of services through Transformational Government.
The strategy has three key requirements:
- services enabled by IT must be designed around the citizen or business, using modern, coordinated delivery channels;
- release efficiencies through standardisation, simplification and sharing;
- a broadening and deepening of Government’s professionalism in planning, delivery, management, skills and governance of ITenabled change.
The latter is a key failure point in many public IT projects. A structure has been put in place to guard against this. It calls for Ministerial, business and technical leadership, as well as individual working groups to address business and technical issues in detail.
This is a new situation for Government, but the private sector has already undergone these profound changes and learned many lessons, including many of Mason Communications’ clients. For instance, economies of scale drove consolidation among the 12 UK Regional Electricity companies privatised in the 1990’s.
Contact centres
While the 2006 Varney Report suggested that local Government contact centres should have at least 200-seat capacity, not all communities can support larger contact centres. Transformation adopters also need to consider the skills needed to support common processes. Strong corporate governance and project controls through senior sponsors and wide stakeholder consultation is key.
Mason, working with Catalyst IT Partners, also part of the Analysys Mason Group, has helped many organisations plan the consolidation of contact centres, always taking processes, people and supporting technologies into consideration.
Infrastructure
Many of Mason’s clients have also undergone major change programmes following acquisitions and mergers.
To gain business integration and reap economies of scale, infrastructure must support shared services, although there are many hurdles to clear, such as: disparate platforms and architectures; IP addressing; log-in and access rights; security policies; back-up and recovery; and support functions.
Transition planning needs collaboration through working parties or workshops within the IT departments. This must not to the exclusion of business needs and, in the public sector’s case, must accommodate the wider business aspects of the sharing parties involved in e-Gov.
For Mason, establishing the needs of different organisations by allowing all parties to assess objectives in a structured way is critical. There are compromises, but they have to be measured carefully against collective benefits. ‘Do nothing’ is never an option.
