Consulting Manager's Blog (02.04.2010)
It is clear that some councils are already well down the road to becoming a true council of the future, while others are still stuck with the mindset that savings means cuts in service, random cuts in staffing, and concerted publicity about how difficult it all is for them. Only this morning my local paper carries headlines about the services which the local council plans to cut - yet this is in a council where internal inefficiencies remain untackled, and where the opportunities for achieving the benefits of self-service delivery over the web are ignored. Even something as simple as reporting a street lighting fault requires no fewer than ten data fields to be completed on a bland an uninviting form, and results in no feedback about the action being taken. All the information requested is about the individual reporting the fault, not about the street light affected! And there is more information on the page about warnings on data protection and internet security than on the subject in hand - so here clearly is a council that does not welcome people on the web! Little do they realise that every transaction they discourage on the web costs them an average of £5 - and this is a council that handles upwards of a million transactions a year - so as much as £5 million is being thrown away. How useful is that?
Well, some councils are never going to get the message. For the others, we see enormous strides - only last week I visited a council and talked to them about the Council of the Future, and the framework we have developed for it. "Come with me", the Head of IT said, and took me up to his office to show me a chart on his wall showing all the activities within their current council transformation programme - and although they had developed it themselves, it almost exactly matched the Council of the Future framework. There's a council that is clear about the investment it has to make, and about the savings it expects to make (it as estimating a rather modest 5:1 return on investment - planning to spend £5 million to save £25 million.
To help councils along we have prepared a free self-assessment questionnaire - a simple questionnaire which, once completed, gives you a report on how far down the Council of the Future route you have travelled, and where your strong and weak points lie. Councils which have used it in its test form have commented that it is a valuable means of identifying where they need to focus their efforts.
We are also going to be launching a new version of the Council of the Future framework at the Socitm conference in April - a framework more aimed at Chief Executives and Council leaders, but still giving the same message - that money spent on tackling the basics of service delivery reaps substantial benefits, not only in cash savings but in customer satisfaction also.