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Putting People at the Centre - Substantially Improving Support and Services to Citizens

Strategies

• Improving all government services
• Creating services without borders
• Creating services that recognise and respond to individuals
• Creating services that can be packaged by the user

People's needs are infinitely varied, but the number of services governments can offer to meet those needs is finite. As a result, governments have historically tried to make the citizen fit the service rather than the service fit the citizen. The internal organisation of departments, the division of portfolio responsibilities among Ministers and the budget process all tended to favour the development of stand-alone services, rather than integrated ones.

This has required citizens to navigate their way through the public sector in order to carry out their business. They had to know which part of the bureaucracy ran the service they were looking for, where it was located and how to access it. If their business involved more than one agency, they had to know who to see first. If a department had been restructured or a service relocated, they had to know that too.

Even if each individual service was excellent, citizens faced inconvenience in having to deal with multiple people at multiple locations, when they had to provide the same information over and over again, and when they had to grapple with internal government processes of no interest to them.

Until recently, practical obstacles, financial constraints and the requirements of public accountability made it awkward to do things any other way. The few integrated services that were developed — such as coordinated care programs in the health and human services sector — have proven difficult to organise and costly to maintain. Nonetheless, they have demonstrated the improvement in services that can be achieved by taking a holistic approach.

The Victorian Government has come a long way to address these issues, particularly with the advent of the internet and allied technologies. Further progress can now be made with strategic application of networked technology to extend capabilities and remove more of the limits.

Networked technology allows genuine two-way communication between citizens and government — enabling citizens to express their wishes about the services they need and the way they want them packaged, and the Government to facilitate individually tailored responses the community can afford.

These more citizen-centred services are modular, so that users are not forced to perform tasks or meet requirements irrelevant to their particular circumstances.

Underlying all services and interactions between the Government and Victorians, whether online or not, will be smarter management of technology and broader integration of resources to bring together related, relevant services. The benefits that networked information and communications technology brings will mean that the Government can be more responsive to citizens, make organisational borders invisible, personalise services and provide more choice.

Improving All Government Services

One of the fundamental benefits of eGovernment is the support it can offer to all government activities. eGovernment is not simply about building more convenient, more efficient and more relevant electronic services. It is about much smarter use of information and communications networks to improve all government interactions with Victorians, whether online or not.

Already technology has been an essential part of government operations for many years. It makes it possible to manage large amounts of information dealing with economics, education, land, water, health services and much more. It facilitates effective and secure electronic communication across the State. This support is now taken for granted as a routine capability within government. The more recently evolved capacity to connect government systems more effectively gives us the potential to achieve more in government operations than ever before.

With strategic use of networks and communications technology, eGovernment will become a method of better government. While technology will never replace core government services for example in health, education and policing, it can make these services better, more efficient, more cost-effective and more relevant. The lack of a physical dimension in electronic services means that smarter use of technology is not going to get you from a car accident to the hospital — but it can tell the doctor you're allergic to penicillin. It can't arrest the thief who took your television set, but it can reduce the time it takes to get him convicted. It can't drive you to the races, but it can compare and tell you the best methods of transport to get there quickly.

eGovernment means exploring and using new capabilities to deliver benefits to Victorians. It is no longer enough just to bring a greater variety of services and information online. It is time to test, recognise and exploit the new connections made possible by technology — in all operations of government.

Creating Services Without Borders

Victorians should have access to services collected from different areas of government and combined with services from outside government through a convenient, single entry point.

When services are delivered in this way users will not have to understand or navigate their way through different organisations to find what they need. The technology already exists to link disparate services behind a common interface; the real challenge lies in the continuing institutional reform needed to realise the full benefits.

A number of potential benefits lie in the harmonisation and combination of services from federal, state and local governments and from the private sector. There are obvious areas for integration, such as health, where people often rely on a mixture of state, federal, local and private services. It is widely accepted that closer coordination between health care providers — and a clearer focus on the specific needs of each patient — is the key to both improving care and containing costs. Information networks and communications technology can make the organisational boundaries dividing different providers in different sectors invisible to the user. Integrating these services would achieve these administrative goals and, at the same time, simplify the experience of the user.

Some collections of services already exist, for example, in change of address facilities. In this case, the user visits a single website, enters their new details just once, and the information is disseminated to all the businesses and government authorities the user specifies. Services moving to this capability include movinghome.com.au and changeofaddress.gov.uk.

The Victorian Government will encourage the emergence of smarter, better integrated services. At the same time, it will ensure that accepted community standards for the collection and transfer of information are kept high, particularly where information held by government is involved.

Creating Services That Recognise And Respond To Individuals

The eGovernment interface can acknowledge that every individual user is different.

It will be possible to remember individual users, allowing interaction to be personalised. For example, many fields in standard forms could be completed automatically using data provided by the user just once, rather than requiring people to endlessly repeat basic processes such as proving who they are. More significantly, users could select a suite of information and services to appear automatically on their individual version of an entry point. The system could even suggest service options based on the user's previous transaction history.

Citizens will also be able to decide just how personal they want their user-experience to be. It is important to realise that unnecessary personalisation could make using services more complex and timeconsuming, add to the cost of service provision, and erode privacy by creating unnecessary data trails. These issues need to be effectively managed— for example, by allowing users to remain anonymous whenever circumstances permit.

Creating Services That Can Be Packaged By The User

Unique assembly describes the power of the user to gather the services and information they want from government from one convenient contact point. Individuals should be able to assemble services in unique combinations according to their precise needs.

These services need not be reduced to the lowest common denominator — it will be possible to create a much better fit between the user's needs and the services provided, and to let users decide for themselves what kind of service experience they want (more in-depth or more arm's-length, for example).

This goes beyond the established life-event model, which is still based on the Government's view of what makes up a typical event. eGovernment can allow citizens to define life-events in their own way and assemble services accordingly. The Government will be able to create services that present a pool of options to the user in a convenient form and allow the user to select the services and information relevant to them. In this way, two people dealing with the same life-event could assemble very different service packages.

For example, there are many things a person going fishing might need in the way of maps, licences, accommodation, weather information etc. The government could work out the average person's requirements and put a representative package of services and information together — that is how many electronic services work now. However, the better service is to let people decide for themselves what they need and give them the means to assemble their own package from a variety of public and private sources.

Unique assembly means users get more appropriate services and service providers get better value for money — improving the fit between each citizen's needs and the services they consume reduces waste and increases the overall efficiency of the service system.

Last updated: 20 October 2011

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