Success in ‘transformational government’ demands time, shrewd use of scarce resources, and a great deal of effort to change embedded civil service cultures. Whitehall has many technological, administrative and legal hurdles to overcome, but transformation is achievable. These are the views of senior public sector practitioners managing one of government’s most challenging reform programmes: the attempt to transform the relationship between the citizen and the state through the use of new channels and emerging technologies.

On September 17, Whitehall & Westminster World – with the support of Serco Consulting – convened a round table of senior civil and public servants charged with delivering transformational government within their organisations. Chaired by Alexis Cleveland, director general of transformational government at the Cabinet Office, the discussion set out to disentangle genuine ‘transformational’ reforms from the wider requirement to modernise central government and public services. It was held under Chatham House rules, meaning that quotes could not be attributed.

So, what is transformational government? While the term has bounced around Whitehall for several years, it was first used to real effect in former government Chief Information Officer Ian Watmore’s 2005 report, Transformational Government. Watmore used the term to refer to the public sector’s need for a step-change in performance, driven by technological advances.

He was not just looking for ‘improvement’ – after all, that will always be needed across Whitehall. Watmore wanted new technologies introduced to revolutionise service delivery. The interplay between the citizen and the state would be reinvented, producing dramatically better services at lower cost.

This thinking was developed by Sir David Varney, the former chair of HM Revenue and Customs, in his 2006 report, Service Transformation. Varney observed that interactions between the citizen and government required drastic simplification and integration. If Watmore highlighted the need to overhaul old-fashioned systems, Varney noted that there were too many interfaces between the citizen and the state – too many websites, too many call centres – and that this multiplicity of channels complicates and confuses the customer’s search for information, advice and assistance.

Varney called for radical simplification of these interfaces, demanding the use of integrated approaches that better reflect citizens’ needs. Like Watmore before him, Varney insisted that reform should be no respecter of departmental silos, which he blamed for stifling integration. Greater collaboration is required between departments, he said, and more services should be shared across organisational boundaries.

This is where transformation differs from simple modernisation – and why it is such an important agenda. As one of WWW’s round table guests said: “Getting departments to roll out productivity improvement programmes, such as ‘lean’ processes, might save you 10 per cent from your bottom line. That’s an essential part of modernising government.

“But let’s not kid ourselves; it is not genuinely transformational. Transformation comes from bigger steps forward: changes that bring you 50 per cent savings, triple citizens’ points of access to a service, or improve service productivity by 300 per cent. Putting all of your services online, and upskilling your workforce so that they can deal with a range of back-office functions that support services: that is an example of genuinely transformational services.”

On this point, there was unanimous agreement. But there was similar agreement that, under this definition, Whitehall and its partners have taken just a few steps down the long road to transformational government.

Four themes
So how do public bodies achieve transformational government? Paul Connolly, head of policy and strategy at Serco Consulting, set out four themes that emerged from debates Serco facilitated ahead of the round table.

First, the term ‘transformation’ needs clearer definition to stop it becoming a blanket term for government reforms. Second, greater channel ‘interoperability’ – meaning the ability of the various systems through which the citizen and state interact to ‘speak to each other’ – is needed to promote a fully integrated customer experience. To do that, however, a third theme needs to be confronted: public bodies have different understandings of their responsibilities to client groups and interested parties, and this lack of common assumptions is constraining the development of shared access points. Finally, the role of third-party providers needs to be fully understood and explored.

Clarity on what is transformable
Our experts felt it was essential that decisions about which government functions and services should become the focus of transformational projects be made on the basis of strong evidence. This is all the more important because transformational government is culturally challenging and resource-intensive, and – following years of record investment in public services – public bodies are being asked to transform their businesses at precisely the time that their budgets have been frozen or reduced.

Many departments face five per cent annual budget reductions throughout the current spending review period. Transformational government needs to be sensitive to this, developing initiatives using sound ‘invest to save’ principles that use upfront investment to reap greater savings over the long-term.

Transformation also takes place against the backdrop of moves to reduce civil service numbers. The 2004 Gershon Review called for a 70,000-strong net reduction in posts, while departments and agencies must continue to reduce numbers throughout the current review period.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the panel felt that – provided it was handled imaginatively – headcount reductions could complement and support the transformational agenda. One expert said: “One way to transform services is to drive down staffing costs to free up resources. We should all have a lot fewer staff in future. I don’t necessarily mean through outsourcing or off-shoring – we’ve simply been told that staff numbers will come down. But this creates opportunities. As we transform our IT and services, we can create better quality jobs.

“At the moment, we have a lot of staff who are very good at one little bit of a service, but their roles are often repetitive and that leads to high staff turnover. With fewer staff, we’ll need to focus on making jobs wider-ranging and more rewarding, and configure roles so that they make a measurable difference to services.”

Other panellists were still more candid on staffing issues. One said that their sector was still “desperately over-populated”, and urged the Cabinet Office to review Whitehall’s severance packages to assist organisations “bogged down” by complex and costly redundancy arrangements.

Channel interoperability
One contributor noted the positive and negative sides of the multi-channel nature of public services. The different ways in which people interact with the state – by letter, phone, email, or through tailored channels designed to assist disabled people’s access – do not currently yield equal results. Yet when channels are truly integrated, they don’t just work together; they ensure that the experience for service users is the same, no matter how they enter the system. Currently, she argued, there can be significant variation in citizens’ experience of using direct online services compared with their experience of advice provided face-to-face.

One panellist said: “The sector is a million miles away from this [common experience]. But we have to target improvements carefully, because targeting often means putting up new systems and processes – bespoke IT systems, for example – that hinder longer-term transformation such as the ability to share services across departments.”

This call for a pan-Whitehall approach to solutions cropped up repeatedly throughout the debate; yet the panel felt that cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell’s recent establishment of the Permanent Secretaries Management Group and the Civil Service Steering Board would serve as ideal co-ordinating forces.

One participant felt that there had already been major successes in providing channel interoperability. Whitehall’s DirectGov and BusinessLink websites – which have merged hundreds of disparate departmental sites and services into easy-to-use, single-access formats – have led the way, he said. “In that context, efficiency is merely a spin-off benefit. We derived a big benefit from getting services right for taxpayers and staff. That’s one of the answers to the question ‘what is true transformational government?’ It’s about improving the customer experience, as well as improving efficiency.”

Government and its relationship with the public
Despite these successes, some panel members agreed that it is still “too easy” to find citizens whose experience of public services have been less positive. One argued that a failure to make services and public organisations “user-facing” arose where reorganisations of government business within and between departments hadn’t been conducted with a clear and shared agenda focused on citizens’ needs; public services and their staff have, he said, often been “crashed together” in confusing ways.

The panellist added: “As a result, some organisations – including some that have already been reconfigured – still need to focus on key questions: who is your customer and what exactly do they want from your service?” As another contributor noted, this is often a more difficult question for public bodies to answer than it is in the private sector, where ‘active’ customer demands are more clearly discernible.

One panellist called for improved “demand measurement” by departments. “Use of information about demand is unbelievably poor across parts of government. Public bodies have much to learn about how to gather good data on our customers; turn that data into information; turn that information into knowledge [about users]; and then turn that knowledge into intelligence that informs improved services.”

Use of third parties
Some contributors spoke about the perceived imperative to improve Whitehall’s commissioning functions and to import external expertise to transform services. Whether this would extend to radical measures, such as off-shoring channels, was a moot point. One senior panellist indicated that: “The focus now is on ‘right-sourcing’ of services and support – making careful and correct decisions about how to use external partners.”

Some panellists claimed that the public sector’s heavily-unionised workforce hindered rational decision-making over the location of staff and services. One was bold enough to predict a new “huge outsourcing drive” across their sector, but others said that retaining positive industrial relations necessitated caution in the pace of change.
No matter how far this agenda is pushed, though, it is clear that stronger commissioning skills and frameworks will be required within the civil service.

A fifth theme? Sharing services, expertise and information
Several contributors spoke about the need for better sharing of services, roles and information across departmental boundaries; this, it emerged, is absolutely crucial to the transformational government agenda.

One participant commented that departments should see their key role as setting the framework within which citizens receive services, rather than as directly providing them; and that this idea should extend beyond the use of non-governmental suppliers to cover the shared services agenda. Departments, they argued, should do more to commission from each other and collaborate on common service challenges.

Panellists agreed that while there have been successes in merging back-office functions across some organisations, progress on “citizen-facing” shared services is more patchy. This silo working, one panellist said, is “infuriating”. “It reflects the attitude that an organisation is somehow unique. Most public bodies are not unique at all: many of their functions are common to all public bodies.”

Other attendees warned that problems also emerge because departments don’t talk to each other. One panellist explained how a long-overdue lunch with his counterpart at another department revealed that, in seeking to manage their transformational programmes, the two were pursuing the same six-point plan – and one of them had progressed significantly further than the other.

“That lunch meeting probably saved me weeks, because I was able to learn from the successes and problems encountered by my peer. That sort of information-sharing should be happening in a co-ordinated way,” he said. “We hear a lot about the problems of working across organisational boundaries, but we make too many excuses,” another panellist added.

Limitations to sharing are sometimes blamed on the existence of individual accounting officers, separately accountable to Parliament for what happens on their patch. However, as one panellist argued, Sir Gus O’Donnell’s requirement that permanent secretaries meet regularly to discuss Whitehall’s cross-cutting policy agenda, combined with the joint-working forced upon departments through the Treasury’s cross-cutting Public Service Agreements, means that senior staff should not be hiding behind that explanation.

One participant urged the use of “more command and control from the centre” and the “imposition of co-ordinating staff at senior level” in order to push this agenda within slow-moving departments. But others held that – unlike in the private sector, where ‘head office’ issues binding instructions to its branches – within the public sector command and control is a more subtle business. Change requires more than just instructions from on high; it means encouraging successful initiatives and their sponsors.

In moving towards greater collaboration, some panellists noted, officials must handle data-sharing with great sensitivity; last year’s loss of child benefit payment details at HM Revenue and Customs highlighted the risks. But all agreed that identity management – providing appropriate staff with access to a pan-public sector pool of information on citizens – is important for public bodies in achieving improved services, defeating silo working, eradicating duplication and achieving savings.

Here, progress is complicated by public concerns over ID cards, which have overshadowed the identity management debate. Our panellists generally believed that the business of enabling citizens to access benefits and services with the minimum of bureaucratic fuss would be enormously aided by a common system for managing, collecting and storing essential data on citizens.

One panellist observed: “There are huge gains to be made from a system in which information on every person is stored centrally and secure access to it is provided to a restricted number of public staff. An official processing welfare payments, for example, could automatically access information telling them whether the same citizen is entitled to other benefits from the Department for Work and Pensions, tax credits from HMRC, free school meals at school, and alert them. That is genuinely transformational government.”

Panellists noted that the Walport-Thomas Report on data sharing is being considered by the Ministry of Justice, and expressed hopes that the complexities and legislative barriers to data sharing will be reduced. They hoped that it wouldn’t all get “caught up in the debate about ID cards, immigration and lost discs”. One panellist suggested that the media cared more than the public about lost discs and data security, and would support information-sharing if it led to better services.

From job cuts and service-off-shoring to identity management: WWW’s round table debate covered much that is controversial about the apparently innocuous concept of ‘transformational government’. But one thing is for certain: senior civil servants believe that achieving these transformations will leave both public agencies and Britain’s citizens much better off.