Tuesday, August 28, 2012

A Tonic For Troubled Families – lessons from the Lowlands

by Gordon McKenzie

The laudable initiative to do something about the social and financial cost of supporting vulnerable families in the UK is a symptom of challenges facing government agencies over the world. In the Netherlands, it is estimated that up to one third of funds to support this challenge are consumed by inter agency collaboration, pulling all relevant facts and information together - this is a massive cost but one that highlights the issue that many agencies face, its not that the processes are broken in themselves, more that the gaps between then do not reflect the reality of life in a family struggling to deal with difficult issues. It’s a human problem, not suited to today’s systems and often ownership of the problem, or even detecting that there is a problem is a challenge for today’s silo oriented systems.

Just like a recent project we became involved in ‘Regizorg’, meaning regional care was designed to address this issue in Deventer in the Netherlands. Inspired by a visionary community leader, Be Informed used a set of knowledge models to create a way of identifying troubled families, making a risk assessment of their status, and then creating a treatment plan to help them recover under the care of the local government agency and its partners in the wider community including central agencies, private companies and local charities. The power of using knowledge models for such a solution is that they are ideally suited to cross agency information sharing and analysis, and can also ‘learn’ as new patterns or symptoms can be added readily to the system.

More information: Be Informed’s Troubled Family Solution.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

What we could learn from the Dutch, more than Total Football

by Gordon McKenzie

Director of the New Local Government Network Simon Parker’s recent article called ‘Tinkering at the margins will not kick civil service vices’ this week suggested that the UK Civil Service could learn from the Dutch and other more compact democracies in streamlining decision making processes and cutting out bureaucracy. This prompted me to consider how some of our own customers have taken advantage of radical changes in service design to reduce costs and improve their services by using a more innovative approach and new technologies. Take one example, the butt of many jokes about government services – the planning service. Like the UK the rules governing what you are allowed to construct and get permission for in Holland are complex and highly diverse, from recycling plants to railways – garden sheds to loft extensions, each has a set of rules governing the process that can enumerate many thousands of individual permits fora complex application. Also like the UK planning is and remains primarily a local government responsibility, and with such a complex set of policy rules to implement, the service levels and quality of information delivered were to say the least highly variable –so something had to be done, and was.

The Dutch government therefore initiated a new act (the so called Wabo Act) to simplify this situation. The act enables members of the public and companies to use one transparent procedure to apply for licenses for activities that have an impact on the physical environment to one competent authority. The new act has replaced around 25 separate licenses and 1.600 application forms for matters such as construction, demolition, spatial planning, listed buildings and the environment by a single one-stop-shop license covering all activities. With the new act, the complexity of the situation is the government’s problem; when someone applies for a license, it’s the responsibility of the government to sort things out. Citizens no longer need to be experts in how the government operates. The Wabo and its accompanying processes and systems came into force on October 1st, 2010, which is supported by the Be Informed Public Service Platform.

Benefits of the solution include:

  • Annual cost savings for citizens (€ 6 million) and companies (€ 53 million);
  • Government will save € 96 million administrative costs in the first year;
  • Single point of contact offering more simplicity and transparency;
  • One procedure and one license for all permit types;
  • Digital communication through the internet; saving time and costs;
  • One procedure for appeal; stakeholders present their objections in one instance;

The plea by Maude’s office to become ‘digital by default’ is to be lauded and should be seized not only by individual departments but across whole service areas, by following the Dutch example here, we can learn not only on the playing field with Cryuff’s ‘Total Football’, where every player is involved but also in government transformation to create ‘Total Service’ where every party in the service comes together to improve the overall experience for the citizen.