Exploiting technology in times of change

An exploration of the role of information technology in delivering transformational change, with examples from Ashford Borough Council.

By Rob Neil

Technology as a supporter of business change
The past five years has been a time of intense change for the UK public sector, particularly local government.

The combination of tightening budgets – (especially for councils in the south of England) and the modernisation agenda has meant a fundamental re-examination of the way local authorities conduct their business – from both an internal and external (customer-facing) viewpoint.

It is a fact of life that people are uncomfortable with change. Doing things differently is perceived as risky and, often, unnecessary. While the need to stay safe and warm inside your own personal comfort zone is understandable, it is simply no longer an option in the 21st century public sector. Change is here, it’s here to stay and unless you are prepared to take a lead and control the change, then it will be something that happens to you – and not for you.

A good example of this is the ‘Implementing Electronic Government’ (IEG) programme, which is now coming to an end after five years. These five years have, in general, been a productive time for local government IT managers, who have suddenly had the excuse (and, perhaps more importantly, the cash) to kick off projects that they knew were of immense importance to their organisation. But let’s be frank for a moment. How many local authorities’ IEG programmes were driven by the IT department, because ‘the business’ wasn’t really that interested? And how many IEG-funded projects were subjected to the same scrutiny of their business case than internally funded projects? Because after all, every IT or e-government project we ever perform is built on a cast-iron business case, isn’t it?

Now the honeymoon period is over, the ‘electronic’ in IEG has changed to ‘efficient’ and more than ever, organisations are looking to extract the maximum value from their IT investment. And therein lies a problem: the efficiency gains claimed for the IEG programme are tiny compared to what needs to be delivered if local government is to operate within the financial constraints of the next decade. And these new efficiency targets can only be met by some fundamental changes to the way we all carry out our business.

Technology has a role to play here, because if organisational change is to be successful, it needs to be supported by better, smarter ways of working. And that is the new role for IT.

At Ashford Borough Council in Kent, the start of the IEG programme coincided with the launch of a major change initiative aimed at transforming the customer experience, as well as delivering a better working environment for staff and significant cost savings.

Every one of these aspects was a major project in its own right for a small district council with limited resources – taken together they formed a massive change programme for the council to handle. This was exacerbated by the particular pressures Ashford faces as a growth area, under the office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s ‘Sustainable Communities’ plan. The town’s population is expected to double over the next 20 years, so all service units have to explore more efficient ways of working so that they can deliver quality services to an expanding population, without undue increases in the level of council tax levied by the borough council.

The IEG funding enabled Ashford to make some fundamental changes to the way it delivers customer services to the public. In came customer-relationship management (CRM), a multimedia capable, voice-over internet protocol (VoIP) equipped call centre, transactional web services and a range of automated systems. These, we hoped, would enable the public to self-serve, as well as make life a little easier for the customer-service advisors, who are trained to resolve enquiries at the first point of contact for all council services.

This programme is the ‘front end’ of a wider, transformational change that is under way. To deliver real benefit, any change programme needs to be successful at three levels – it needs to take your customers, organisation and supporting systems on a journey to excellence.

Customer-driven transformational change
To be successful, change has to be planned and implemented on a number of levels. It’s helpful to think of these as separate ‘journeys to excellence’, involving your customers, your organisation and your systems.

The ‘customer journey’ is about changing the relationship a citizen has with your organisation over a period of time. This may involve a qualitative change in the service they are provided (with an accompanying shift in the way they view your organisation) or a shift in the way they choose to access your services. In any event, this is about giving customers a warm, cared-for feeling, and real choice about how they interact with you.

To make the customer experience pleasurable, your organisation must be configured to deliver joined-up customer service. To the public, their local council is one organisation: they don’t realise that it is in fact a loose collection of a dozen or so feuding businesses, all vying for budget and headcount. Nearly half of all the customers that contact Ashford Borough Council want to resolve more than one enquiry at once, normally involving different service units – council tax, benefits and housing or the planning and building control teams. In common with most public sector organisations, the council is structured along professional lines, so these enquiries need to be co-ordinated across different parts of the organisation.

The ‘organisation journey’ is about putting in place channels, processes and structures to facilitate customer contact and support the customer journey. This is often viewed as being akin to business-process re-engineering, but in this case the customer experience is as important as delivering process efficiency.

Finally, we have the ‘systems journey’. This is about ensuring that the information infrastructure you have in place is flexible enough not to constrain you in the future as your organisational and customer needs develop. This infrastructure should deliver the potential to reduce operating costs while increasing your ability to respond to your customers.

Managing the role of IT
As a result of working in a dynamic, fast-moving environment, IT teams are usually good at handling change.

This may not be the case if your IT department is concerned solely with maintaining suites of COBOL programs on a mainframe. But if you have spent your money wisely and replaced all those legacy systems, we’ll assume your staff have been modernised too.

At Ashford, this change was painful and drawn out. Following a series of reviews over a five-year period, the IT unit was subject to a change programme starting in 2000. This involved changes of staff (including a new head of ICT services), re-skilling where appropriate and the dissolution of a long-standing joint-service provision with a neighbouring authority. However, such drastic action was the catalyst for the transformation of the team. Now heavily involved in change management across the authority (and beyond), it is viewed as being an asset to the organisation rather than the collection of unhelpful geeks that seems to epitomise IT in the public consciousness.

This new-found respectability brings its own problems in that the role of the IT service needs to be carefully managed to avoid capacity problems. Since 2000, the reach of IT at Ashford has extended into areas that are not the traditional preserve of a chief information officer (CIO) or chief technology officer.

If you are to be successful in managing the role of the IT function, you first need to be aware of what it does, what it is supposed to do and how it is perceived. Even if the role of IT is purely an internal support function, you will have customers paying for a service (directly or indirectly), who have particular needs and a clear opinion of what that service is like. There are five key elements to success here: knowing your customers, your product, your service, your image and your culture.

Customers
It sounds obvious, but do you know who your customers are? You need to be able to recognise what is important to them and work closely with them to deliver real benefits. If you can involve your customers (do things for them, rather than to them) and build partnerships rather than manage contracts, then you are well on the way to success.

Product
You do have a product. It may be a stable production platform or application support, but it is a product. Know what you core products are, identify what you are really good at and be clear about the value you add.

Service
You probably don’t deliver your service in isolation. You may rely on maintenance contracts or telecoms companies to deliver networking and internet access. You need to be able to identify your whole service-delivery chain, as well as understand potential ‘moments of truth’ – times where you have the opportunity to either delight or frustrate your customers.

Image
Your IT department portrays an image. Do you know what that is? Are you aware of whether you customers’ experiences are positive or not?

Culture
We’ve identified that you have customers and you provide a service. Put them together and you have ‘customer service’. Do you have clear customer-service measures in place? There’s also a need for management culture here – management of an IT department is about building an environment in which people can perform – not necessarily being the best techie in the building.

Once those five elements are in place, IT is ready to become part of the business and a key supporter of business change. And about time, because the Gershon and Lyons reviews (independent reviews of public-sector efficency and relocation) have made more business heads alert to the fact that technology can help deliver ever more stringent efficiency targets. Post IEG, it is not ‘e-enabling’ services for the sake of it that is the key business driver, rather organisational and operational efficiency. And the days of being able to claim that improved services alone is sufficient justification for a project are gone – now, cashable savings are all the rage. To put this into context, Ian Watmore, the government CIO, estimated that the annual public sector IT budget is around £14bn – of which it should be possible to deliver at least £1.5bn of savings, solely by reducing spend on legacy systems. This is not a small amount of money. Similarly, shared services models have the scope to deliver significant savings, if organisations can be persuaded to join together to deliver back-office efficiencies.

That’s not to say that all savings have to be astronomical to make an impact. Going back to contact centres and one- stop shops, few implementations have been accompanied by true business change and even fewer have delivered the level of savings or efficiencies that were claimed at the outset. But at least the service is better.

Looking at quantitative measures, an effective deployment of CRM into a customer services team can make a measurable difference – by presenting a common interface to users, automatically ‘screen popping’ caller details. A history of each enquiry that the Ashford contact centre’s average transaction time has reduced by about a minute, can then be maintained. That directly translates into cost savings by needing fewer staff (or by enabling the same number of staff to deal with more customers) as well as improving service quality to the customer. Similarly, by the careful introduction of self-help facilities, you can avoid having to deal with a range of common enquiries altogether. Ashford’s use of voice-recognition technology has enabled it to handle 44 per cent of calls to the customer service team completely automatically – another significant impact.

So in summary, getting IT to support business change is not really a technology issue – it’s about managing roles and expectations. The key word in all this is ‘support’ – IT leaders should be looking to do things for the business, not to it – although this can be difficult when so much energy is expended by departments fire-fighting, rather than being proactive exponents of change. Customer engagement is all-important. Buy-in to change is much easier when everyone wants to move in the same direction – as is all-round communication. In short, from a leadership point of view, it’s about seeing yourself as a CIO rather than an

IT director – a subtle difference, but these days, an all-important one.

Rob Neil is head of ICT and customer services at Ashford Borough Council. He can be contacted at: rob.neil@ashford.gov.uk