What lies ahead for the Council of the future? Resident’s expectations of their council are changing, and the way residents interact with their council is evolving. In 2018 nine in ten people had access to the internet in their home and the majority (62%) of time spent online was on mobile devices (Ofcom, communications market data 2018).
Whilst some people and services will continue to rely on traditional channels; most are moving to digital. In response, the council of the future needs to change the way it delivers and offers services. It needs to provide the digital channels residents want and exploit the opportunities this brings to reduce its costs and maintain or improve the quality of its services.
90%+ of CEOs in Local Government believe technology will enable them to engage with communities in new ways (read more).
This paper will introduce you to the challenges we believe councils are facing and ways to help address those challenges and be ready for whatever your future resident demands.
Challenges in Councils
A recent survey of council chief executives and leaders showed 74% of respondents believe that some councils will get into severe financial crisis in the next year (read more). Technology can’t provide the whole answer but will play a key role in enabling new lower cost delivery models that help keep councils financially stable.
Rising expectations of residents in terms of faster response times and progress updates are also starting to drive up contact demand and drive down satisfaction levels. This rise in demand can result in council staff performing more low-value work in response and draws resource away from the higher value tasks which residents ultimately need. This ‘digital disruption’ means that, even without the issue of cost, councils have to rethink how they operate in a more digital world where the old operating models struggle to cope. Councils will increasingly have to automate low- value simple work to allow personnel to focus on the high value and complex tasks, as outlined here in Figure 1:
Figure 1 –As-Is Employee utilisation
Eight in Ten CEO’s believe that technology will improve service delivery (read more), but while many accept these challenges exist, and that technology is key in solving them, they often find it difficult to engage. The pace of technological advancements, coupled with their complexity, mean councils often struggle to implement and exploit technology effectively. In addition, councils often have limited resources to invest in change. This can lead to either ‘option paralysis’, where nothing fundamental changes in service delivery, or poorly considered change that can actually push costs up and satisfaction down.
However, these challenges are not new. Commercial entities have been addressing very similar challenges for many years and have developed successful approaches to digital service delivery. The move to online sales, increased competition on price and fast- growing customer expectations have all driven change in the commercial sector.
Eight in Ten CEO’s believe that technology will improve service delivery (read more), but while many accept these challenges exist, and that technology is key in solving them, they often find it difficult to engage. The pace of technological advancements, coupled with their complexity, mean councils often struggle to implement and exploit technology effectively. In addition, councils often have limited resources to invest in change. This can lead to either ‘option paralysis’, where nothing fundamental changes in service delivery, or poorly considered change that can actually push costs up and satisfaction down.
However, these challenges are not new. Commercial entities have been addressing very similar challenges for many years and have developed successful approaches to digital service delivery. The move to online sales, increased competition on price and fast- growing customer expectations have all driven change in the commercial sector.
The goal should be to automate the end to end process, automating tasks, providing decision management and automated workflow and being able to manage content throughout an entire process.
Integrating customer-facing and back-office systems to achieve true work-flow automation is where the most value is derived, where the user experience is significantly improved, and the burden and cost of tedious low-value tasks are removed from your employees day.
There is also a need to align this operating model with a council’s service delivery strategy, its technology strategy, digital skills, change management processes and benefits realisation management.
Figure 2 – The elements of true Automation
How can we Help?
Responsiv have been helping clients through the challenges of Digital Transformation through integration and automation for many years, it is what we do day in day out for our clients. We have captured decades of experience and intellectual property from the commercial sector and created offerings aligned to the budget constraints and unique requirements of local government, which still deliver the benefits and capabilities you would expect of market-leading technology.
RedQuadrant are a specialist public sector digital consultancy with ten years of experience in implementing digital change in local government, housing associations and central government. We have the knowledge and skills needed target change to optimise benefits and align technical changes with your people, skills, processes and service users.
With RedQuadrant and Responsiv working together in harmony you have an end to end partner who truly understands the unique challenges Local Authorities face and can deliver the right technological solutions to resolve those challenges.
Responsiv Unity
Unity provides a complete business transformation platform encompassing business automation, systems integration, API management and more, all delivered through a single management and monitoring infrastructure. It is built using IBM’s market-leading technology, giving you the assurance of scalability, reliability and functionality at a price point that reduces barriers to entry.
Responsiv Solutions have a combined experience of over 100 years of architecture, development and system administration on IBM middleware technologies. We have brought this experience to Unity which provides a “Solution in a box” platform based on these best practices. You can find out more about Unity here.
Example of results achievable
One of the councils Responsiv are currently engaged with identified the waste collection process as a “problem”. It was heavily manual and time-consuming and taking up 60% of their contact centres resources. Responsiv Unity was installed on-site in one day and within two weeks their in-house team, with our support, integrated systems and mapped the initial as-is and to-be processes. Within 4 weeks they went livewith a new waste management process, resulting in a staggering 66% of waste requests handled without human intervention, allowing staff to focus on higher value tasks.
In collaboration with Bristol City Council, RedQuadrant designed and delivered an applied development programme for over one hundred managers and leaders. This was to support real-time delivery of business objectives, identify and deliver savings and opportunities, encourage greater challenge and support, build capacity to lead complex service redesign and embed disciplined sustainable continuous improvement. The overall aim of the work was to deliver £22 million savings and increased ongoing transformation capability. The programme has been hugely successful with all 120 Service Managers and many of their teams now actively using the tools and techniques and even promoting the ‘Bristol Way’ to external partners. The first four development cohorts identified savings of over £11million and were cascading actions almost immediately. Critically their reliance on us has reduced and ownership is firmly in their business and substantial savings and improvements have been delivered.
Customer Testimonial: “RedQuadrant has been partnering Bristol City Council in the design and delivery of a substantial and complex leadership and culture change programme since Autumn 2014. RedQuadrant’s contribution and inputs to the programme span the range of technical and adaptive leadership challenges. The quality of their contribution is rated highly by service manager participants. They offer intensely practical approaches which managers can immediately apply and which produce tangible results. Their style is characterised by flexibility in sequencing the learning in relation to project work to derive maximum value for the participants and the organisation. They are exceptionally responsive and our experience of working with them over the last twelve months has fostered a high level of confidence in RedQuadrant’s ability to deliver to our needs.”
What next?
We understand that it can be daunting for clients starting out on a automation based digital transformation journey. Our approach would be to help you in the first phase of adoption. We have the expertise and technology acumen to ensure your processes perform optimally. We can use the best practices from all our previous engagements and apply them to your unique business processes. With clients just starting their journey we encourage them to think big, start small, grow fast. We do this with an approach that begins with careful analysis that is focused on business value, and then expands slowly leveraging incremental successes along the way. Through thorough analysis working together, we can identify the processes which will deliver the most business value, the processes that when improved will deliver the most significant return on investment. One way we achieve this is through Minimum Viable Product (MVP) planning. With the “fail fast” approach we can work with you to build familiarity and confidence using the new technologies and techniques.
We would always recommend starting an engagement with a process discovery workshop. The primary reason for this is that there may be different processes within the business which have a better value to effort ratio. Ensuring the optimal process is selected as the “pilot” process is key to providing council-wide buy-in for the new strategy and employee take up. The discovery workshop would involve Responsiv, RedQuadrant and all stakeholders from the authority to understand as many perspectives as possible and gain information around current processes. Together we will do a process discovery session, identifying as many processes as possible creating a process catalogue. We will create a project definition report which both parties will agree to, which will document requirements and detail/agree on the project approach and establish success criteria.
If these issues resonate with you or you’d like to find out more about what we’re doing in local government get in touch via either of the emails below: thomas.redhead@responsiv.co.uk, gerald.power@redquadrant.com.
27-29 South Lambeth Road
London
SW8 1SZ
United Kingdom
London
SW8 1SZ
United Kingdom
Telephone: 020 3664 6712
Email: gerald.power @ redquadrant.com
Tel: 01344 266 980
information@responsiv.co.uk
Responsiv Solutions Limited
9 The Courtyard
Eastern Road
Bracknell
Berkshire
RG12 2XB
United Kingdom
