The purpose of our G-Cloud Enterprise Solutions guide is to establish the relationship between new Cloud services and their ability to support the implementation of Transformational Digital Government, how the technology can be used to radically change how business processes work and the benefits they bring.
As experts like the Policy Exchange are describing the concept of e-government has moved on from simply creating online interfaces to existing processes without changing them, instead the more strategic use of the technology is to harness it to achieve new organizational models that weren’t previously possible.
Implementing the Value Agenda across government
This is the essential factor, because as we start to consider organizational transformation this brings us to methodologies such as Michael Porter’s ‘Value Agenda‘.
As the name suggests this literally organizes transformation around the delivery of value, and by doing so highlights how these new technologies can be key to achieving the models required.
Fundamentally this means a holistic design approach that organizes around maximizing patient value for the least costs, the goal that Michael Porter describes for the Value Agenda.
This may sound obvious however Michael describes situations where management programs may be designed in a piecemeal fashion, such as emphasizing one goal that is too narrow, such as ‘Increasing Access to Care’ or just cost-cutting without appreciation of the impact upon the ability to achieve the desired goals.
Without a holistic design perspective these can be interpreted in such a way as to be counter-productive to the overall system goals, and so the Value Agenda provides a means for regulating this aspect and instead building all activities around a core goal of patient, citizen or customer-centric measures for management.
Integrated Practice Units
Michael describes the key foundation is the use of an enabling technology platform. including specific working models for implementing the design notably including IPUs – Integrated Practice Units – These are virtual teams that span multiple organizations and departments, and define specific ‘process pathways’, project teams drawn from multiple disciplines dictated by the needs of the patient treatment. Porter highlights that most healthcare delivery is organized around the traditional hierarchical approach, with costs and resources tied to departmental units.
As he described in his article The Strategy That Will Fix Healthcare these have been pioneered in Healthcare but could be repeated in any other areas of government indeed any enterprise organization.
They are being tried for diabetes treatment, in rural healthcare and form the basis of value based commissioning in Camden.
Healthcare wrestles with the same challenges all large organizations do – How to best optimize and organize their resources to achieve the best outcomes for the customers they serve, with an overly rigid hierarchical management approach often impeding this goal. IPUs use more dynamic networked enterprise models to better achieve a citizen-centric model, an effect starting to be documented for other parts of government.
In their paper ‘Small Pieces Loosely Joined‘ the Policy Exchange explores these challenges in detail, highlighting the case study of Greater Manchester implementing the Whole Place Community Budget:
“Greater Manchester’s pilot focused on changing the way services were delivered to families with complex needs. In two neighbourhoods – Wythenshawe and Gorton/ Longsight, a new delivery model was tested with 240 families, and compared to a ‘business as usual’ approach for another 240 families.
The new model involved establishing a single virtual team (including representatives from the council, health organisations, schools and work programme providers), to take care of all referrals for complex families. The families were given one individual to work with who agreed with them what kind of help they needed, including referrals to other services. Having just one team helped stop the duplication of effort and counter-productive results of working in bureaucratic silos. “
Cloud IPUs – Collaborative Conversations, as a Service
Cloud services offer the ability for other government bodies to repeat these best practices, such as ‘UCaaS’ – Unified Communications as a Service.
These applications enable organizations to join together securely through ‘federation’ so that staff in one can easily see the contact details of their peers in partner organizations, and easily invoke process collaboration environments from simple voice conferences through to more sophisticated group video sessions.
Alcatel describe this in their white paper ‘Collaborative Conversations‘:
“A communication-enabled business process (CEBP) is intended to optimize business processes by reducing the human latency that exists within a process flow. CEBP leverages unified communications capabilities/ services – such as reminders, alerts, notifications, escalations, etc. – by embedding them into the business process flow to eliminate response latency. CEBP can be applied horizontally across various lines of business and different industries.”
Critical they then add “The result is a more efficient, more automated closed-loop which creates measurable business value.”
Government as a Platform
The benefits don’t stop there, with these systems becoming software rather than hardware based it makes ‘CEBP’ possible – Communications Enabled Business Processes, meaning that these features can be utilized by software programmers, who can integrate and use them as part of automating business processes through dynamic new applications.
Alcatel offers a developer API program for these UCaaS systems, meaning that app developers can integrate these communication functions directly into their business systems. For example a social welfare case management application can make this dynamic collaboration a part of the case management process.
Making government workflow systems programmable this way is the essence of the power vision of ‘Government as a Platform‘.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Neil McEvoy
Quelle/Source: Cloud Best Practices, 08.05.2015
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