The Expert View: Modernising the Public Sector Through Technology

Using a government service, such as claiming benefits, used to involve dealing with a trained advisor who understood the process and accessed the service from a standardised desktop, said Duncan Gillingwater, Principal Strategist with Dynatrace, opening a Business Reporter dinner briefing at the House of Lords in London. The transition to digital services now sees citizens as the end user – who are not experts, with a varied spectrum of digital literacy, and access services from a wide variety of devices.

Confusion arises when people can’t get the outcome they want, they often turn to social media to complain or, worse, they go to the newspapers. The result is damage to the reputation of the organisation providing the service, and a return to non-digital channels. Mr. Gillingwater asked the audience, who were all senior experts from a range of public sector organisations, how we can use digital technology to deliver world-class services.

Creating world class services

The starting point, said attendees, is to remember that there can be different measures of success for the organisation and the user. The organisation might want to save money, for example, whereas the user’s goal is probably to access a service in the simplest way possible. For some services, the user might expect a digital solution. In others, they might resent it, such as when their aim is to speak to a doctor.

However, as one delegate pointed out, a good service is not necessarily one that gives the user what they want: it’s about giving them what’s appropriate. A patient who wants to speak to the doctor might not need to, so a digital service can solve their problem while ensuring the doctor’s time is given to someone who really needs it.

Digital services can be more efficient, but only if they are well designed. Digitising a bad service simply replicates the problem in a new medium. That’s why it’s important to design the service around the user’s needs and what the whole service journey should look like. If they can complete their task successfully, first time, then they are happier, and the service does not have to divert scarce staff resources to help them.

Artificial intelligence advantages

A significant technology for enabling new capabilities is artificial intelligence (AI), said Evrim Tekeșin, Regional Director at Dynatrace. Although it is not a silver bullet, it can accelerate many existing objectives of public sector organisations.

The experiences of those at the briefing backed that up. One attendee said his small department would soon be losing 10 percent of its headcount so he was exploring how AI could take on some of the workload. One promising approach has been using AI to surface information on government policies from a database. AI can do this up to 40 percent faster than a person. However, the project has currently stalled because of the cost of the AI tools.

Others reported more successful outcomes. Examples included using AI to identify and combine duplicate records and improving search outcomes by showing results for related terms. For example, someone who searched for “housing” would also see the results for “accommodation”. Another delegate described using AI to transcribe consultations with citizens and then recommend appropriate actions. Often, the AI suggested options the human expert had not considered.

Removing obstacles

AI is an enabler for accelerating “time to results”, said Scott Hamilton, Head of Central Government at Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, AI relies on data, and in many cases the data is siloed. People are often surprised to discover that one hospital cannot access their records from another hospital, one attendee said. Patients would probably support increased data sharing in those cases. In other areas of their lives though, people tend to be suspicious of the government collecting data. Connecting services and tackling siloes would mean convincing the public of the benefits, one delegate said.

Even then, there might be obstacles, because siloes are often the result of legacy systems that won’t connect with newer platforms. There’s a tendency to assume this means old systems but, as one person at the briefing noted, new platforms can also become legacy if investment in them ceases. Attendees recommended two approaches to legacy systems: first, to think carefully about which old systems are being maintained and why. And second, to design new systems with the ability to evolve and progress as needs change.

One reason why these problems arise in the first place, delegates said, is that the public sector can often be too risk averse. “We focus on reasons why we can’t do something,” one attendee argued. That kills innovation before it can begin. Solving this requires a cultural shift, rather than a technological one. Indeed, Mr Hamilton said that at AWS when engaging with public sector customers there is less talk about technology in isolation than ever before. Instead, they talk about technology, together with mindset, culture and process.

Addressing these challenges is not easy, said Mr Gillingwater, at the close of the briefing, but they are not unique to the public sector. Technology provides more options than ever before, with AI in particular creating the opportunity to ‘take the robot out of the human’ and allow people to work on higher value tasks. With the right culture and good planning, public sector organisations can use technology to deliver truly world-class services.

To learn more, please visit: www.dynatrace.com and www.aws.amazon.com