If governments are going to fully realise the value of their information communication technology (ICT) investments they are going to have to bring greater coherence to the way different agencies deliver citizen service. That was the key message of Weng-Yew Lai, Solutions Director for eGovernment with Oracle, who was discussing the next stage of development for government service delivery. The past couple of years have seen many governments in Asia Pacific extend their activities into new delivery channels, but much of this investment has retained an agency-by-agency approach to service delivery. Lai cautions that the subsequent improvement in citizen access and participation could yet be offset by long term inflexibility in how services are delivered, and dwindling returns from the agency silo-based ICT infrastructure. Only those governments that take the decision to provide a coordinated service delivery architecture will be able to cost-effectively meet citizens’ continually rising expectations of government service.
Citizen-centric service delivery
“There certainly has been a general raising of the quality of government services,” explains Lai. “Service delivery to the public has become more reliable and available. These are the positive aspects from the citizens’ view. Internally, it has also got the civil service warmed up and receptive to the idea of technology helping them with their work. So it has been an important learning stage that governments have had to go through. But service delivery remains agency-centric, and if you’re arranged by agencies, then you’re forcing citizens to interact with you the way you are organised, rather than in the way that best makes sense from the citizen perspective. Citizens really need to be able to interact with government more effectively than the agency-centric model allows, otherwise governments will reach a citizen satisfaction plateau.”
According to Lai true collaboration extends far beyond the front end aggregation of services. The emphasis to date has been on better presentation of the breadth of government services, through single government portals and citizen helpdesks – but the reality is that behind these interfaces, service delivery remains entirely silo-based. Citizens’ intentions would be better served if government agencies collaborated in the act of service delivery.
“Our vision at Oracle is to see collaborative services extend beyond this presentational front end right into the end-to-end processes that support service delivery. It will always be easy to create a unified front end. But what we’re talking about is having the ability to collect information from the citizen, and then determine pragmatically, and in what sequence the services need to be initiated, and then following through that process to completion. At the end of that citizens can be notified through a channel of their choice, and at any time the status can be made visible to them.”
Lai acknowledges the progress governments have made in presenting their services according to need – for example, it is now increasingly common for national portals to arrange services in different categories, for citizens, businesses and non-citizens. But if at the end of the day all you find is a link to an agency-specific URL, or a downloadable form, then it indicates that beyond the façade the service delivery processes remain the same – and that the government is gaining limited leverage from its investment in ICT.
“The current silo-based approach to government service delivery lacks scalability, and represents a poor use of government resources. On the other hand, collaborative agencies working together to deliver a single service that meets and exceeds citizen expectations, sometimes in collaboration with the private sector – this represents a new paradigm of thinking. This will require an architecture that is sensitive to ‘turf issues’ between agencies, but ultimately you cannot simply focus on the effectiveness of individual agencies. There needs to be a vision of a wider national objective. I’m sure that this will require a change in the way government agencies conceptualise and fund their projects and train, motivate and reward their people.”
Managing change
There are a lot of technical implications for any move to collaborative service delivery. Governments will need to find a way to represent a single, authoritative view of individual citizens, and their interactions with government, regardless of the agencies involved.
“Although individual agencies should retain control of their rules processing and business logic, governments should not be seen as a consortium of different agencies,” Lai adds. “The future enterprise architecture of government needs to be designed in a way that reflects the individual processing responsibilities of agencies, but which also allows for the creation of a definitive customer profile to ensure a consistent government view of the citizen that is being served. Government agencies will need to develop appropriate multichannel strategies, so that regardless of how citizens interact with you the information will be consistent.”
As you might expect, Oracle has a suite of products that substantially covers the footprint necessary for collaborative service delivery. Above and beyond this the company’s eGovernment specialists can assist Governments to define implementation roadmaps that substantially minimise execution risk, says Lai.
“Collaborative service delivery doesn’t have to be undertaken in a ‘big bang’ approach,” he says. “One of the key highlights in our approach is that it is possible for agencies to collaborate in service delivery without necessarily having to do significant business process reengineering first. This is a departure from the mantra of ‘before you do anything, reengineer’. Streamlining certain work practices to enable more collaborative service delivery can be separate from wider reengineering.”
Lai believes that by focusing on delivering politically necessary outcomes quickly – such as a tangible improvement in the citizen service experience – government agencies can buy themselves time to proceed through clearly-defined business process reengineering exercises. This staged approach will enable inefficient work practices to be phased out in favour of more ‘open’ work processes.
“What takes a bit of lubrication is speeding the flow of information within agencies,” Lai explains. “They may retain internal processes for now, but attention to better information flow will enable agencies to collaborate on service delivery very quickly.”
The prohibitive cost of inaction
Lai says that whilst there are few examples of collaborative service delivery currently in operation, the more advanced administrations are already heading in that direction – and other governments will inevitably follow.
“Unless a government plans to put a collaborative infrastructure in place it will not be able to protect its investment in ICT, and its progress to cross-agency collaboration will be impeded,” warns Lai. “In the best case scenario the government concerned will have lost precious time as it seeks to reorganize its ICT infrastructure. In the worst case scenario some agencies may become so entrenched in the way they do things that moving towards genuine collaboration with other agencies will be very difficult for them to achieve.”
Collaborative service delivery lightens the burden of compliance on citizens and businesses, and reaps maximum value from the underlying ICT infrastructure. In these ways greater government collaboration between agencies will serve to be a catalyst for economic growth.
In all of this the key thing is for government to have a blueprint in mind as it proceeds with its e-government programme.
“It does not mean that there is only one way to achieve collaborative service delivery, but you do need to define this very clearly upfront, so that when government agencies proceed with their own ICT projects they do so in a coordinated manner," he says.
“I think the ultimate message is that there are many tangible benefits to adopting a whole-of-government collaborative service delivery approach. I acknowledge that changing the current model to focus on collaboration will be a challenge, but it is one that government needs to take on in order to elevate the public sector's contribution to the country, from administration to being a catalyst and direct contributor to economic growth," Lai concludes. "Not to do so, when agencies in other countries have already embarked upon this process, is to run the risk of slower economic development as other countries move ahead."
Autor: James Smith
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 27.05.2005
