Expert interview: Technology and local services
From Future of Local Services to the Public
This is the summary of an in-depth interview conducted by Ipsos MORI with two leading technology experts about the future of local services as part of the LGA/HSC futures project, 2008. As all interviews and workshops for this project were conducted under Chatham House rules, the respondent's identity is not disclosed and some references have been anonymised or omitted to preserve confidentiality.
As all interviews and workshops for this project were conducted under Chatham House rules, the respondents’ identities are not disclosed and some references have been anonymised or omitted to preserve confidentiality.
The full write-up of the interview can be found beneath the Overview
Contents |
Interview Overview
Profile
• The interviewees are senior technology consultants and providers working with a wide range of partners at local, regional and national levels to enable the delivery of improved public services
Current challenges for local services
- Developing the capability and leadership skills for collaboration: local authorities need to develop the kinds of leaders, structures and forms of influence that enable them to work effectively outside their current institutional boundaries.
- Acquiring a partnership mentality and breaking down old boundaries: as local government moves into a new partnership model, this will require a cultural shift in the way they think about their role, and a willingness to experiment with new configurations of power.
- The public taking up where the professions fall short: as the state and service professions realize the limits of top-down provision, it will be up to the public to get more involved in driving successful services
- A shift from reactive to preventive services: the default assumption, that service only respond to crises and “events”, should shift towards one in which they anticipate and prevent negative outcomes as far as possible
- Thinking creatively, and acting radically, to effect transformations: The scale and complexity of the challenges facing many local areas require bold and original approaches, not “more of the same”.
- Strategic use of customer satisfaction data: local government is way behind other sectors in gathering and using customer data and insight. It needs to be processed in real-time and integral to strategic planning.
- Customer satisfaction measurement must also recognise the limits of choice in service provision: local services don’t exactly correspond to consumer products and services. There is limited choice, which must be reflected in the way we gather and interpret the data.
- Customer satisfaction should measure the whole, not just the component parts: satisfaction data is currently very one-dimensional because we only gather data on experiences with individual services, rather than approach it as a whole system.
- Understand what value for money really means to the person on the street: local government can be inadvertently guilty of prioritizing things based on institutional or corporate value, rather genuine public value
- Understand what motivates young people, and reflect it in the way you engage them: local services have yet to find a way to truly understand and engage with young people through the best channels, and in the right contexts.
- LAAs, CAAs etc are not yet the solution to the problem of performance management: new frameworks are a step in the right direction, and sound good in principle, but the targets are still too often self-serving and abstract rather than genuine performance indicators
- Establish “higher order” outcome measures alongside service satisfaction measures, to reflect the complexity of local challenges: local areas face very specific and complex challenges, for which current target regimes alone are too simplistic. They need broader ways to conceptualise and measure success in tackling these issues.
- Collaborative leaders will need to use the power of influence supported by new technology and training: organizations like Common Purpose are proving successful at training and pulling together leaders from different institutions to collaborate in successful place-shaping
- Middle management and culture can be more of a barrier to changing working practice than technology itself: cultural inertia, conservativism and power relations in local authorities can prove resistant to rapid and adoption of useful technologies and working practices
- A tightening financial squeeze: local authorities are looking at soaring service and salary demands at a time of high deficits and dwindling central funds. This is foremost in many minds at the moment as a key driver.
Formative events that shaped the current context
The propensity to be reactive, and to continue with failure, rather than focus on prevention and anticipation: money is still channeled into propping up ailing services which are actually casualties of failing services elsewhere. Rather than throwing good money after bad, local government needs to be better at looking at the interrelationships between social problems and think in terms of prevention.
Other future opportunities and challenges
- Collaboration: across many areas described above
- “Directives in Participation”: the mandate to involve the community in place-shaping and decision-making
Signs of the future…now
Suffolk pollution monitoring experiment: children were given portable pollution monitors, which attached to mobile phones and simple software. This enabled them to map pollution levels on the walk to school. The community mobilized and the results led to a rethink of traffic and emissions planning in the area
Key innovators and innovations
NB A number of innovations were suggested that cannot yet be published as they would compromise anonymity
- South Tyneside: engagement, different forms of communication, economic, planning the role, leading beyond boundaries, taking a regional perspective in terms of its approach to more of the organisational development challenges.
- Bournemouth: active leadership looking to change the associations with Bournemouth and reinvent it.
Longer Interview report (paraphrased)
Profile
“X” and “Y” are senior strategy and technology consultants working with a wide range of partners and customers in diverse aspects of local service delivery. Partners span local authorities, regional development agencies, strategic partnerships and central government. Their work encompasses design, planning, delivery and innovation of a wide range of Information Communications Technology (ICT) and infrastructure programmes to shape, improve and support the delivery of local services to the public.
They were interviewed in person in August 2008 by a member of the Ipsos MORI Horizons team following a loose discussion guide. Interviews were recorded and transcribed for accuracy. Excerpts from the interview are provided below.
Known challenges for local services
Developing the capability and leadership skills for collaboration
X - I think one of the areas which is something that we experience daily, and I think it’s one of the things that SOLACE would highlight as being a major issue …is the whole issue of capacity, ability, and propensity, to partner, and I don’t just mean with the private sector, I mean necessarily public partnerships as well. If nothing else I think that’s important in the current context of the change in the performance regime towards collaborative and collective performance measures - be it comprehensive area assessment, or local area agreements, or multi area agreements - which are frameworks of performance targets which are not defined by a single organization, they’re multi- organisational.
Although the Audit Commission has requested consultation on this, there seems to be kind of a void at the moment in terms of discussions on how to really tackle the organisational development implications of this; the leadership challenges of this. I think it’s recognized, for example amongst London Chief Execs particularly, that there’s a real lack of ability of leaders in local government to lead, well even manage, but certainly not lead, beyond their organisational boundary.
I think we, and those in local government generally think it’s going to be interesting how some high CPA performing authorities struggle under a CAA regime, because while they’re actually very good at bossing their own organisations, some of them are pretty poor in developing collaborative approaches with fellow sub-regional and regional organisations.
Acquiring a partnership mentality and breaking down old boundaries
Y – I think that the main change that we’ve been seeing over the past few years is a movement away from local government as a service provider to local government as a commissioner of services, and, if you like, a convenor of partnerships. I do think we are close to a tipping point, because many local authorities I think have tried to carry on doing naturally what they’ve been doing for the past ten years while either studiously ignoring, or grasping only partially, the agenda that X has just been talking about.
I do think we’re now getting to the stage where there are enough sticks, probably not enough carrots yet, but enough sticks, to mean that local authorities are beginning to realise they can’t do it all any longer, and the skills that they need to think about how to shape places are very different to those that they needed to provide services. And consequently I think we’re at the doorway of a very different configuration of what the public sector might look like.
And I think what you’ll see over the next few years, and certainly what I’m seeing now, is to try and take this rather uneasy coalition of professionals which have always made up local authorities, and begin to break them off. Government of course is now saying, that ‘here are services that need to be integrated’. Well after a while then their parent organisations probably need to let go of them. I suppose what I’m talking about is a situation where the old boundaries really begin to melt and new configurations emerge. So I think that’s going to be some of the future stuff.
The public taking up where the professions fall short
X - If you look at the last 40, 50 years of development in the public sector, it’s all been about professions, and the best configuration for particular professions. And I think those professions are now up against a situation where they say, ‘well actually just in terms of providing services we’ve done all we can. Now we need to move it to a different phase where the public take much more responsibility for health, for education, for crime, for all of those things, because actually we can’t [do everything]’.
A shift from reactive to preventive services
Policing, and healthcare, and all of those sorts of things, have become services which are about mopping up after the event, and doing very little actually to prevent problems occurring in the first place. And that has been the persistent failure of the public sector for the past, certainly post-war era I think.
Thinking creatively, and acting radically, to effect transformation
X - I think certainly over the last two or three years, I think it is probably only of that timeframe, if you look at the kinds of demographic, social, and performance, and new regulatory demands: in effect they all require “out of the box” thinking. Up until now you can achieve your 1, 2 and 3% efficiency savings by delegating down two or three layers in the organisation, then aggregating up the savings and saying that you’ve done it, but you can’t achieve 25, 250 million pounds worth of efficiencies over a region, as stated in a multi-area agreement, without thinking and working outside of the box.
I think the demands are a different scale. When most large urban metropolitan areas can see a 50% increase in demand for service over the next five years, you can’t deal with that with little changes, what we call “arms and legs” type changes. It’s the fundamental, I hate to use the term, transformation, that now people have to think about.
Strategic use of customer satisfaction data
X - Another challenge… which is also a big one, is the whole demand side, the customer demand side
I guess my view from the heart is that I really don’t think local government’s ever really ‘got’ customer satisfaction. I think it has viewed it in the form of satisfying certain KPIs. Its whole approach up until very recently has been, ‘well we need to do something else, so let’s do some consultation’ and really local government’s approach to consultation I think is laughable in contrast to many other sectors, and the way in which customer insight and information is collected and used.
I think that’s one area that local government is woefully behind. I’ve spoken to a number of Chief Execs who admit that they’ve got masses and masses of data, they’ve actually got masses and masses of analysts who seem to work on this data, but there’s never any real-time information that seems to have any relevance at a strategic level to do anything significantly different before either that data is useless, or doesn’t quite meet the agenda of a senior management team. And I think there is a recognition, but it doesn’t seem to be joined up, I think it’s quite a fragmented view.
Customer satisfaction measurement must also recognise the limits of choice in service provision
Y - I suppose I see it quite differently. I think customer satisfaction for local government is difficult. It’s a difficult issue in the sense that most of the services that local government provides are not things that people would choose to go and shop for. So I understand it around pure transaction services like refuse and benefits, and council tax collection, and housing benefits, and all of those sorts of things. I do think that local government could be very complacent around that, and I think it can very often use very crude measures of customer satisfaction, which it then doesn’t know how to influence.
Now if people are very often saying, well it’s OK, but actually if somebody else provided it better I would go there….Well one of the great difficulties of course around customer satisfaction measures in local government is people don’t necessarily have a choice, so they can’t really go anywhere else.
And then the second thing that masks of course is that actually some people were highly satisfied with the service, and they were probably the more able bodied, and the more technologically, and skilled, and the more literate, and the more intelligent, and all of those sorts of things. There were some people from minority communities, and people that were highly dissatisfied with what they were getting.
So, and I agree with X to an extent that local government has never really taken on customer satisfaction with any level of sophistication, and really I, and I say that as an ex local government person. But I also think that there are services where people are never going to be that satisfied, and that is, but that’s because a lot of local authority services are about rationing things, are about policing things, are about taking things away from people, or about stopping people from doing things, and it’s difficult in those circumstances I think for us to talk about measures of satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction should measure the whole, not just the component parts.
Y - The other thing that I think is problematic about this whole debate though is whether satisfaction with services is a particularly good measure? Because throughout this whole conversation we’ve talked about service provision, and I could give you hundreds of examples where people are highly satisfied with individual services for example, but the overall impact on their quality of life is very poor.
I used to work with kids with disabilities years and years ago, and they would say, well what I get from Social Services is fine, what I get from health is fine, what I get from education fine, what I get from the third sector fine, and they would give the services individually some quite high ratings. But then when you said to them, what’s the impact on your life then, do those services come together to make your life better? The answer is, no they don’t, and we spend all of our time moving between one service to another trying to find someone who’s responsible for this big need that I have that nobody seems to be responsible for this, but nobody talks to me as a person and says, how’s your life, and how, what’s the role of services in your life?
People just keep on forever talking about “am I satisfied with this bit?”, “or this little bit?”, or another part?
What we tend to talk about is satisfaction with services, but we don’t talk about people’s lives, and nor do we talk about people’s areas. I think that’s a reflection of the organisational nature of the way in which organisations provide services, and are viewed to provide.
The great failing of local government at the moment I think, is that it doesn’t hold that perspective, it doesn’t hold that citizen’s perspective, and say, “are your lives getting better?”, or “is your area getting better?”, or “are your children’s lives getting any better?”
Because everyone is obsessed with measuring tiny little bits, and beavering off and measuring government performance indicators, and all of those sorts of things. Understand what value for money really means to the person on the street
X - I think there’s a sense that, I think value for money’s interesting, I think very, very few people in local government would have the same definition of value for money than people on the street, I think there’s kind of a corporate view in local government of perception of value for money, but it’s not quite the same as people on the street. But I think there’s been some real attempts to, real good examples to try and fix this, and the work that Ben Page and Irene Lucas have done in South Tyneside to really take a very confusing agenda and turn it into a very easily understood interpretation of what’s meaningful in terms of the cost of things. But again that’s a very narrow view of value for money as well, it’s still quite narrow.
Understand what motivates young people, and reflect it in the way you engage them
X - The whole customer satisfaction area, the whole customer engagement area ….should also be very interested to understand what the youth of today are interested in. They don’t seem to be interested in local government, they don’t seem to be interested in queuing up for services, they don’t seem to be even interested in, well it’s obvious they’re not interesting reading leaflets and newspapers, but they seem to be less and less interested in actually going through local authority websites.
And I think one area that’s of interest to us - not just from the technology perspective - but the different ways in which local authorities have actually got to engage, collaborate, and not just on a one off basis just because it’s the time of the year to engage and get information.
LAAs, CAAs etc are not yet the solution to the problem of performance management
X - I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the performance culture, the accountability regime, and the outcomes really that local government aspires to, or is required to aspire to. I’m very sceptical, I’ve been involved in a number of LAA negotiation processes, and in theory they sound great: agreements to collaborate amongst sub-regional local government organizations.
But most of the time they’re nothing more than common interests, statements of common performance indicators that those organisations happen to be both funded to deliver against, and actually there’s very little new joint activity on top of it. So I think for CAA, LAA, multi-area agreements etcetera it’s still early days. A step forward but not the answer.
Establish “higher order” outcome measures alongside service satisfaction measures, to reflect the complexity of local challenges
X - I think there should be measures. I think there should be customer satisfaction measures of services, all those sorts of things, I don’t have a problem with that. But there should be a different set of measures as well which are separate to service provision, and which are a higher set of measures if you like, which is to do with people’s life experience in your area, all of those sorts of things, which then inform all of the different service providers. But the key here is, as you’re probably gathering, is that I think to place-shape well, and to hold the lines, and think about those things, I think probably councils have to step out of being service providers.
And I think a really good example of that is there are many authorities – and I’m thinking of rural authorities here - which may be high performing. They may be delivering good services. They may be well thought of. But the problem that they will probably fail to tackle is the fact that people live there, learn there, as soon as they’re in university or they graduate, they go off somewhere else, they live their life, and they come back to retire.
Those are the kinds of lifestyle challenges that local authorities are dealing with, and it’s a fundamental blockage to their place-shaping agenda, their whole social well being, the whole economic prosperity of that area. They have to get their head around, “how do you tackle this problem?”, “how do you measure success at tackling that kind of a problem?”
And it’s a very qualitative issue isn’t it? Getting people who would normally not think of living their life, having their children go to school where they went to school, starting a business, getting them to actually want to do that locally rather than going off somewhere else, maybe into the city, to earn their money and come back to retire?
I think that’s a really good example of the kind of really difficult challenges that actually the current set of performance indicators - it just doesn’t matter how good you get at them - you’re never going to fix those kinds of problems.
Collaborative leaders will need to use the power of influence supported by new technology and training
X - if you look at the way the European Foundation for Quality Management’s (EFQM) model defines leadership, it is as people who are present and active in their community so that they are the eyes and ears of systems really, and they have a way of feeding that back, not just into their organisations.
I’m thinking if you look at the Chief Exec of, for example, Lewisham, he’s very clever at working with the Police Borough Commander, and the Head of the PCT, and all of those sort of things, and he influences them a lot. He doesn’t have any control over them, but he’s very good at saying, ‘here are the issues which probably link to us as locally elected, democratic representatives, and we’re the only part of the public sector which has that democratic justification if you like, and these are the things that people are saying’, and using those views then to drive change in services which he doesn’t lead but has enormous impact over.
So I think that being around, listening to people, being close to the real concerns, understanding the different narratives of an emerging community, knowing how to intervene in them, and not just in terms of your view as a service provider, but you being able to go to the police, and to health, and to the other agencies, saying, “this is what we need to do”.
I think the root cause of this is the way our institutionalised education process works. When you become a manager and a leader, and then you look back at your education and your training, that very little of what you know today came to you in terms of structured learning, and they are so far behind even in terms of functional management.
But then when you look at the kind of types of leadership that we’re talking about being necessary here, it’s no wonder that organisations like Common Purpose have been created for just this theme, and this organisation just operates solely on this theme,. It just works with private sector, public sector, and third sector organisations to mash them together, to bring their experiences together, and put them in different situations so that they learn to open their eyes to different challenges.
They learn from each other so if you’re running a social enterprise that has an annual budget of £1.5million, and you’re a chief exec of the local authority that’s got a £2billion budget, and they’re struggling to get two directorates to talk to each other, they can somehow facilitate and engender the broad collaboration across a whole region. It really puts in contrast the kinds of different leadership styles and capability.
Personally I actually think there’s some great examples of leadership in the third sector because they actually have to work together. They have to collaborate far more. And I think Common Purpose is a really good organization. They are part of the London Collaborative. What they actually do is that they actually, as I say, mash people together in these scenarios with that sole purpose of improving this characteristic of leadership, and they use the physical local environment to expose you to these kinds of challenges, and it’s done very much on a local regional basis.
Middle management and culture can be more of a barrier to changing working practice than technology
Y - To be honest we never really see the challenges as associated with technology. I’ll give you an example. We’re constantly wracking our heads as to why the very simple, very cost effective technology solutions and services around flexible working, home working, mobile working, are not adopted and accepted by local authorities when they have a clear desire to rationalise their property, a very clear need to get people to reduce their accommodation rates, particularly in high cost urban areas. But it’s not a technological challenge. It’s that middle management permafrost challenge of, “sorry, I hear that there’s a strategic objective to do this, my staff want to do it, but I’m going to block it”.
And I think that sometimes comes across as a whole series of technological obstacles in terms of integration of applications, and ability to use certain devices, and, but I think a lot of the time these are excuses for what’s really a middle management resistance to pretty big organisational change.
A tightening financial squeeze
X - To be honest I think the ongoing financial challenge the most authorities find themselves in now, in that most counties will be facing a registry deficit of at least £100million around now, and most districts will be facing a budgetary debt say of at least 1million, 1, 2million, which is typically about 10%, 15% of their annual budget. And I think that that’s something that’s slowly crept, and is really changing the focus.
I think prior to that every initiative, every programme, be it e-Government, or whatever it was, was driven by the needs of efficiency, was just saying, “yes we’re following Gershon, and aren’t we great, we can deliver this”.
But I think the real financial crisis here, well it’s not a crisis, but the real financial driver, is really as a result of capping council tax, and the combination of what we said earlier on, the demographic increases in demand, increases in complexity, higher salaries as a result of higher skills and higher leadership demands, and one way or another, different things at different places. You’ve pretty much got that kind of a situation, so most authorities are looking at this new driver.
Formative events? What, if any historical events were key to shaping current situation
The propensity to be reactive, and to continue with failure, rather than focus on prevention and anticipation
X - Well I think it would just say that the, again the propensity for public sector to problem solve or problem avoid, that it spends less of its budget mopping up, and less of its budget actually on failure, on the failure of other services. So a lot of Social Services budgets etc, etc, etc, get pushed into dealing with things which are actually really failures around education and housing, all of those sorts of things.
So I think local government’s become slightly addicted to predicting problems and providing solutions to them, rather than really do anything about them. Well how do we avoid that problem arising in the first place?
Other opportunities and challenges
Collaboration
Well I think all the things we’ve already been talking about. Certainly collaboration will be a huge thing.
“Directives in Participation”
I think that what I call “directives in participation”, will be, I think will be a major issue.
There’s quite an emerging literature now on what people are calling the age of directives in participation, which means real time involvement in organisation of governments, and the means of how also real time involvement in giving views about their community, and in taking part in debate with politicians and political interest groups. I think that’ll be a huge issue really in terms of citizen participation generally.
And that includes things like community and individual budgeting. Is that part of that same theme?
X - Possibly. I think the whole stuff about people becoming involved in determining what the budget of the local authority should be doing I think is overplayed actually, because people a lot of the time don’t necessarily have the information to go on. I think there are other ways of determining that. But people giving their views about their local area, and about what needs to happen for people participating in direct debate with each other and across different sections of the community, about activities in one section of the community that are affecting them, and so on, and so forth.
I think that kind of interaction will become quite substantial in the next ten years. And again I don’t think it’s a local authority’s job necessarily to provide solutions to any of those things, but it’s certainly its role to facilitate that debate, facilitate that interaction between different sections of the community.
And I think that’s got to happen. It must happen not just within the context of increasing pressure to localise governance, localise the whole, take the whole inefficient, ineffective cycle - which isn’t working in many cases - to take the local requirements through a whole process, and mechanising it, and providing information. But closing the loop on that, and delivering more local governance, and down to a level that, I guess once you’re heading into where you’ve pretty much got mainly unitary authorities, then the force not to improve that process, but the force to really engage with parish councils and communities, community groups, that will exist I guess in new forms, and varying forms, not just geographic forms, but social forms as well, that they haven’t engaged with in the past.
And there’s going to be a whole process of engagement and understanding, and support, there that’s quite interesting, and it’ll be interesting to see where that goes.
Innovations and innovative places
(NB A number of innovations which cannot be cited as yet without compromising participant anonymity)
Can you see any signs at the moment of things happening in … is there a test case, or a particular place you have in mind, where that, the future’s already here essentially. Where that’s happening now?
Well there was one tiny experiment, which is currently ongoing in I think in Suffolk, where …. put pollution monitors around kid’s necks, and attached them to fairly standard mobile phones, and then got them all to walk to school, and then transmitted data from the pollution monitors to the mobile phones into a central resource which mapped pollution levels along all of the streets, and as people approached the school place. And what it showed was it was almost like you had a large, a bar chart graph that went down each street, if that makes sense?
So, showing hotspots?
Yeah, and I think it worked. So what you’re doing is facilitating people’s awareness of the ways in which their own behaviour is causing issues for other people in the community. And then you’d play that back to people as a way of attempting to galvanise some kind of behavioural change, not the local authority saying, “you must get out of your cars”, you could say that until the cows come home really.
It was only really where an individual school, a community, could show people the impact of what people were doing on each of their lives, that people were in any way moved to change. And I think that’s a really good example of what I’m calling directives in participation. It’s not a, it’s not government saying, you must not do this, it’s government acting to make people aware of the consequences of their actions.
South Tyneside
So I think South Tyneside in terms of the engagement, different forms of communication, economic, planning the role, leading beyond boundaries, taking a regional perspective in terms of its approach to more of the organisational development challenges.
Bournemouth
I think Bournemouth for it’s size is pretty visionary isn’t it?
I’d say it’s getting there, certainly it is in terms of their aspiration and their current leadership. Well he’s trying to re-invent the place really. And you can imagine Bournemouth has traditionally had a very, what they call “God’s waiting room” reputation?
What they’re trying to do now is to completely change their brief from that and become a much younger place. I think that again is quite a good example of a council trying to move to re-invent an area again.
