A successful transition to online public services doesn’t need to be about big bangs and mega bucks, but it could completely transform the business of government. Ruth Keeling reports on a fascinating round table discussion

Shifting the majority of transactional services online, according to the government’s recent ‘Smarter Government’ strategy, will produce cheaper and better services. Of course, there are many potential pitfalls. Is the money available to do this? Can departments achieve the level of collaboration required? What will happen to customers who aren’t comfortable online?

But these challenges are in no way insurmountable, according to the senior IT experts that attended last week’s Civil Service World round table – which was sponsored by online services specialist EzGov, a division of CACI.

In fact, the participants said, the lack of money in coming years should be seen more as an opportunity than as a barrier to progress. Barry Glassberg, an e-business consultant and former civil servant who was once responsible for HM Revenue and Customs’ e-services, argued that IT strategies which might have been rejected in the past will now be embraced.

Budget cuts are “a heaven-sent opportunity” because ideas that have always made operational sense now also make financial sense. “Departments simply aren’t going to have the money they used to, and that is going to drive channel strategies,” he said.

Finance will still be a challenge, however. The Department for Work and Pensions’ self service manager Bob Mount argued that the requirement that the return on investment be made within the same four-year spending period means that departments have more of a cash-flow problem than an investment problem.

Private sector investment is one possible solution, suggested EzGov vice-president Simon Tyrell. Online public services have proved their worth, and companies might be interested in arrangements that reduce up-front revenue in favour of sharing the savings generated by online services. If EzGov had requested a transaction fee when it built the very successful online tax self-assessment system, Tyrell joked, “we’d probably all be in the Cayman Islands”.

Yet, currently, there are concerns that the government isn’t always getting the best deal. Chris Kendall, director of the department for Communities and Local Government’s Planning Portal, said better IT and procurement skills within government will help, while Westminster City Council chief information officer David Wilde wanted to see more competition between suppliers.

Meanwhile, people agreed, development costs can be kept down. Tyrell advocated the incremental approach, picking a project to showcase how things can work: “There is nothing like success to bring further success,” he said.

It isn’t always necessary to spend millions on new hardware to launch an online service, said John Yard, interim chief information officer at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; bolting on a new front end that takes data from the legacy system will normally do the job.

And it might be significantly cheaper to re-type the information into a new system, rather than try to get old and new to integrate, said Sharon Cooper, director of strategy at DirectGov. What is important, said Glassberg, is that people are not allowed to use the existence of legacy systems as an excuse for inaction.

Ultimately, when arguing for investment, the business case for moving online should speak for itself: the IT bill might go up, said Wilde, but the cost of providing public services will go down. However, the public sector must accept job losses in departments and local authorities, he continued. “This is going to be about significant head count and estate reduction”, he warned.

Leadership required

Getting the funding for online projects demands the support of an organisation’s leadership; it won’t work if it’s left as the baby of communications or IT professionals, said Andrew Nelson, chief information officer at the Ministry of Justice. “You have to get the project to the top table,” he explained.

Although examples of engaged leaders were given – at DWP and the passport service, for example – Nelson was concerned that some, while interested, don’t really understand the online agenda. He also contrasted the public sector with more flexible private sector organisational structures, where an IT specialist might join the board temporarily in order to lead the agenda.

IT bods have to take some of the blame for the leadership’s lack of understanding, said the Planning Portal’s Kendall. “People talk in a language that is not understood by policymakers and the people who hold the purse strings,” he said; that explains why projects that can deliver serious benefits have been cut, he added.

As well as addressing the language barrier, Wilde warned everyone not to “overhype” the benefits. It is also important, Kendall added, that IT professionals are involved in policy thinking as early as possible, because otherwise they will “find it difficult to get in to the loop in terms of decision making”.

As well as internal department politics, many online service managers must deal with the complexity of cross-departmental action; the fact that there are more than 200 different username and password systems for government services, said Grassberg, is “of shame to us all”.

Central government simply isn’t set up for cross-government work, said Nelson, with very little in the way of structures or incentives. The creation of the chief information officers’ council (CIO) and other such bodies has helped and revealed that “there is some good cooperation”, he added, but ideas generated in such forums do not necessarily translate into departmental policy. “I get back to my own back yard, and the priorities in my own ministerial building, and nobody is giving me a budget to do this,” said Nelson.

One of the key differences of opinion at the round table concerned central direction. While Ann Underwood, director of operational design at the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), felt there is room for bodies such as the CIO to be a bit more proscriptive, others argued against the idea.

The demands of the public are a much better driver, claimed Yard. He compared the anarchic development of the web, and the successes that has produced, with the “rules and regulations and very tight processes” of government. Perhaps such a prescriptive approach isn’t appropriate on the web, he implied.

Getting people online

The primacy of the service user was mentioned again and again; services which aren’t designed with the customer in mind will flop, said Mount at one point. In fact, argued Yard, government could be more radical about online services if it forgets about its boundaries and looks at things from a citizen and event point of view. Then it would be obvious that, before a new business is registered with Companies House or the tax office, the entrepreneur needs a bank account.

Perhaps the banks could help provide access to all these online services, Yard suggested. DirectGov is already doing this kind of events-based thinking, said Cooper, including the development of “widgets” that allow people to access public services from non-government websites. “The more we can do that, the more we will encourage take-up,” said Yard.

The design and placement of public services online is one way to encourage take-up – but how is the government to get 100 per cent of people doing it this way? Young people might prefer to do everything online, but there are others who need persuading. Even the great online success story – the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency’s road tax renewal – is only used by 60 per cent of customers, pointed out Cooper.

Advertising is one way to get people online; and this could mean cost-effective methods such as Facebook rather than expensive television adverts, said Richard Nutt, apprenticeship vacancies manager for the Learning and Skills Council.

Departments and agencies should also use their traditional channels to promote online services, said Cooper, with helpline messages that explain that online access will be quicker and job centre advisers who can show claimants how to use a new website. The most important factor in getting 100 per cent take-up is that online offers something more – that it’s faster, easier and more convenient – than the normal channels, said Cooper. “If they have a really nice face-to-face service, why would they go online?” she asked.

Some services have solved this problem by switching off all other channels – tax returns from employers who pay PAYE, for example. The financial downturn makes online-only more likely for other services, the passport service’s Underwood said, as she explained that the traditional presumption that there will be a residual paper system is being rethought.

The switch-off debate raises concerns about groups that will be excluded from services, but that did not seem to be a prohibitive problem for those at the round table. Mount pointed out that, while people might expect DWP customers to be at risk of exclusion from web access, 80 per cent of them are online.

Just because someone doesn’t have a laptop in their home, that doesn’t mean that they can’t get online at libraries and after-school clubs, said Wilde; on the computers of friends, added Yard; or on their mobiles, said Nutt.

Keith Gilbey, Citizens Advice’s strategic development director, said the barriers are more often things such as age or disability, rather than the lack of a computer; his charity is expecting and planning for increased demand for assistance in accessing services as the government moves more and more of them online.

Intermediaries such as Citizens Advice and the Post Office are seen as extremely important by departments, said Mount, and investments are being made to make sure they will be able to help the government make a success of the online transition.

It is this involvement of intermediaries in providing public services that is “a revolutionary opportunity”, argued Yard. It is not just voluntary organisations that can play that role, but also the private sector, he suggested. For example, banks might decide it’s worthwhile providing advice or a loss-making service because it may create future customers – as they already do with student bank accounts.

"That is where we will get a genuine understanding of what customers want because they choose where to go, rather than us thinking we know what they need,” Yard argued.

Moving services online might seem a daunting prospect, but it shouldn’t be, the group felt. Rather than viewing a wholesale shift online as some unwieldy behemoth, it is possible to do things bit by bit, creating small successes that can be copied and built on. Indeed, the government’s ICT strategy supports these trends, with its open source commitment and its applications store.

In true internet fashion, the debate concluded, users will vote with their feet online; and that should inform government policy. So if people want to get tax advice via their bank’s website, then go for it.


The people at the table, and their key message

Sharon Cooper, director of strategy, DirectGov
Self-service means trusting that the public are not out to fleece government. Remember that the data will be better quality when users have provided it themselves

Keith Gilbey, director of strategic development, Citizens Advice
Channel shift does not need to be ‘big bang’. Have a vision; be prepared to drop what doesn’t work and pick up new things that do; and move faster

Barry Glassberg, former civil servant and e-business consultant
Don’t expect wholehearted support for projects; there are a lot of old attitudes out there. Identify the roadblocks and throw your weight behind the work

Chris Kendall, director of Planning Portal, department for Communities and Local Government
Be honest about the costs and benefits of channel shift, and share them as widely as possible. Don’t be protectionist about information

Bob Mount, self service programme manager, Department for Work and Pensions
Do it well, and don’t let a rush for efficiencies result in a less-than-optimal product; and invest as much as possible in customer-driven design, otherwise it won’t get used

Andrew Nelson, chief information officer, Ministry of Justice
The top table are interested in the agenda, but don’t necessarily understand it. They have to be as engaged as the communication and IT bosses if it is to succeed

Richard Nutt, apprenticeship vacancies manager, Learning and Skills Council
There is good practice out there. Before you start developing a brand new system, see if there is something already running that you can build on

Kevin Seller, head of government services, Post Office Ltd
Intermediaries can play a role, but government has to remove statutory barriers that complicate online services, such as the need for a signature on paper

Steve Smith, director, EzGov Europe, a division of CACI
The majority of the cost of developing online services is programming for the customers who are the exception to the rule. Avoid doing this if you can

Simon Tyrell, vice president, EzGov Europe, a division of CACI
Transition to online services can be incremental. Pick one aspect to put online, do it successfully, and investment will then be available to do more

Ann Underwood, director of operational design, Identity and Passport Service
Don’t assume you know what customers want: people thought we shouldn’t reduce the hours of our 24-hour call centre, but we’ve not had a single complaint

David Wilde, chief information officer, Westminster City Council
Government needs to get better value from its supply network. There is not enough competition and public bodies often fail to use frameworks set up by organisations such as the Office of Government Commerce

John Yard, interim chief information officer, Dept for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Online services should be an opportunity for government to provide simpler services and for non-government intermediaries to get involved – the private sector as well as the third sector