Interview with Andrew Sheffield, director of service transformation, U.K. Cabinet Office
Q. You attended this year's Lac Carling Congress, I'm curious to know what meaning do events like these have in the work that you do?
A. Well, we're very much learning from Canada, and if you were to look at our approach you'd see lots of Canada. For example, two blogs that are run by our chief information officer's council, our boss in Watmore brought back the notion of that when he was over in Canada in April 2005. And we don't have a Lac Carling Congress in the U.K. and I've always felt that we should, because service design until probably about nine months ago, has been seen as peripheral and rather fluffy, the kind of stuff for marketing people.
Q. So it's not seen as having very much value?
A. Exactly, it was a sort of nice-to-have, and although there were plenty of people in the U.K. public sector who understood it, and wanted to work on it, they were kind of out there on a limb. A lot of the really good stuff that we've done has involved bringing those people together, so we had a thing called a Customer Insight Forum, where we brought together the people in departments who were responsible for customer insight. Individually, they felt a little bit marginalized. They weren't terribly powerful in their own departments, but bringing them together, we suddenly realized that there are other people out there doing this stuff. We've had Ralph Heintzman and Charles Vincent here talking to those groups, and saying this is legitimate, and other people are thinking the same way; it does have a value in business.
For me, Lac Carling has always been a gathering of the clans, people from all over Canada who've come together in one place and met each other and talk about things of common interest, and I think we will go that route. The time hasn't been quite right for it, but when we have that delivery plan published we're working towards the first consolidated annual report and I would love to see some event like Lac Carling in the U.K. bringing together the people from the U.K. public sector. The interesting thing about all of this is Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the U.K. are all basically trying to do the same thing, but in slightly different ways because we have slightly different systems.
Q. Tell us about your role in the U.K. government.
A. I work in the cabinet office which is basically a fairly small central department. Our role is to provide governance, carry out program management, and develop policy. It's all about setting a framework within which things happen, rather than actually delivering stuff.
What we do is governance standards, program management, policy, all that kind of stuff. We also incubate particular projects, so for example if you spot something that needs to be done in a particular area of service transformation, we will work with it up to a certain degree, but once that turns into a fully-fledged project we will pass it over to a lead department.
For example, a project (Tell Me Once project) that is finding out whether it is possible for citizens to tell government once about particularly complicated changes in their circumstances, and having government deal with that. A particular thing we're looking at there is what happens if you suffer bereavement.
We had one case where someone had to contact 44 different parts of government, just to tell them that their father had died. The hypothesis is you should be able to go to one place in government, say my father's died, and have it dealt with there and then. So that was a project we helped develop, and then passed over to the Pensions Service for delivery.
Q. What is the status of the Tell Me Once project?
A. The feasibility study was launched in Jan 2007. In the summer we will be going into testing and pilots because there's different ways we can do it, and in probably around October we will form a view as to how it will be rolled out.
But strategically, it is a very important project, because if you can do that sort of thing for having a baby, dealing with bereavement, moving, you can do all sorts of other things. If you establish identity and share data and bring services to one single point, the implications of that for how you run government are profound. We're not rushing it out, we're being very sensible about it, and we'll consider it properly and make an announcement in October.
Q. Did you use focus groups for Tell Me Once, and did you consult with citizens as to how many points of service they would want?
A. We did use focus groups for this project, but focus groups tell you what you already know, partly because it's very difficult for people to project themselves into those sorts of scenarios. So you ask people who have gone through them. But either way, you're asking people for views of things that they're not particularly close to at that point, so what they will say is, 'Yes we want it to be efficient and simple and quick, but it's kind of what you're doing now.' What we're doing on this is really much deeper than that. We're sending people out and spending time with the sorts of people we're trying to reach here, and trying to understand what matters to them, and that involves making some sort of translation.
Next:Integrating citizen service delivery
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