NDL

Phil Murray, Executive VP Lagan

In the next of our series of interviews with leaders in technology for the public sector, we talk to Phil Murray, Executive Vice President UK & Europe for Enterprise Case Management (ECM) & CRM provider Lagan. In particular, we explore service transformation and the likely impact of the economy.

What is your view of the current state of local authority service transformation?
In the late 90s, a small number of pioneering unitaries and counties began to embark on major transformation programmes in conjunction with one from a handful of large outsourcing organisations, and we’ve worked with many of them. In these early days, the decision to outsource was driven more by service vision than by pure economics. Cost savings were often stated as a goal, but it was recognised not only that transforming the way in which a council delivers its services needed external help but also that external specialists would often have more capacity and more flexibility in delivering those services once they had been transformed.
Now the emphasis has changed. Transformation has gone mainstream and cost reduction is often the dominant driver. Yes, councils still want to improve services, but essentially they want to deliver those better services at lower cost. Also, transformation no longer presumes an outsourcing partner in every (or even in most) cases. Internal transformation programmes are becoming increasingly common, with new appointments to key posts of candidates with commercial transformation experience, and programme support coming from a much wider variety of commercial organisations, consultancies and systems integrators, as well as from the major outsourcers.

What is the key to a successful transformation project?
You might expect me to talk about technology here, but in all honesty technology decisions, though important, must follow the business and service goals of the programme. Specifically, I think there are four key factors to have in place before you think about choosing your transformation tool(s): clarity of vision and goals for the programme; unequivocal sponsorship from members and executive; a willingness and understanding of how to realise a long-term and quite radical change in the culture of the organisation; and an effective process to critically review, rationalise and streamline the processes that determine how the council serves its community.
Only once you have these in place can you move on to choosing the right technology into which to embed your new service processes. Transformation has a lot to do with breaking down service silos, joining up the service experience and surfacing information helpfully to those who actually deal with the customer. So Case Management and CRM technology, with its ability to look across departmental boundaries and to integrate with legacy applications, makes a very logical transformation tool. I’m clearly biased, but I firmly believe that the best recipe for success for a transformation programme, whether internal or driven through a major strategic outsourcing partnership, is to combine these four ingredients with an appropriate choice of transformation technologies - and that CRM/case management solutions are the best answer.. But technology should never lead any decision: clarity, sponsorship, culture and methodology must come first.
One minor thing I’m surprised at is that a few authorities are still opting to develop their own in-house CRM systems, but I think we will see less and less of this. While this approach might look like a good way to ensure you get exactly what you want, it’s hard to see in practice how a council with limited resources can support a broad and quite complex application with a customer base of one. Commercial organisations will typically have invested hundreds of man years into their solutions and will have large customer bases across which to spread costs. It may be no accident that the recent NDL CRM report has shown a year-on-year reduction in the number of councils pursuing a DIY policy.

What are the key areas which are dictating the transformation agenda at the moment?
Apart from the economic and service improvement drivers discussed above, one of the main catalysts at the moment is the move towards the personalising of services around the needs of individuals and communities. This will inevitably drive councils to invest more in understanding their local demographics and the effectiveness of what they provide today; and then in targeting their limited resources more accurately at the people who need them most.
Top of mind for many at present is the national transformation agenda for Adult Services: between now and 2015 the way in which Adult Social Care is provided will be turned on its head. It’s going to be all about allocating personal budgets and enabling self-directed support, putting choice in the hands of individuals. Processes and systems will have to be re-oriented to support this: they will have to support a shift to matching the specific needs of individuals and communities.
There’s also increased interest in the concept of ‘life events’. This concept has been around for some years, but many transformation programmes view services grouped around life events (bereavement, moving house etc), as a practical way to break down departmental silos and deliver a more responsive service.

Where is NI 14 fitting in this mix?
I’m not sure there is a strong direct link. NI 14 is a cross-government initiative to reduce the waste of inefficient interactions between public sector organisations and the public. This waste or ‘avoidable contact’ comes in many forms: calls to the wrong department, complaints, contacts to chase up services not delivered correctly in the first place, etc. NI 14 is clearly about both improving service and reducing the cost to serve. Currently a lot of emphasis is being placed on making contacts less expensive by shifting them to other, cheaper channels (most notably from telephone to self-service over the web), but it’s equally important that enough energy is spent on understanding the root causes of avoidable contacts and ensuring that service failures are addressed.

Lagan is active in the US: what’s different over there?
US municipalities are generally well behind the UK in their application of CRM technologies – only a small percentage of the city and county 3-1-1 services (roughly equivalent to our Local Government CRM) employ CRM today, though many of the larger cities have deployed it and the number is growing fast. (Lagan is now incidentally market leader).
On the other hand, the US is a long way ahead of the UK in the maturity of its performance management regimes – mayors have been using operational service statistics to drive performance for years now - and in the use citizens make of self-service over the web. I guess the UK has taken longer to embrace the internet. Of course, in both countries it is often the most vulnerable who are both the biggest service users and the least able to use self-service, so there is no question of completely replacing the more expensive telephone and face-to-face channels.

What effect will the current economic situation have on technology for the public sector?
Because of the longer-term approach to planning in local government, councils (and the public sector generally) are probably better placed than the commercial marketplace. There will inevitably be a net decrease in discretionary spend over time, but it’s not likely to fall off the cliff in the same way as, for example, in the retail sector. There will inevitably be redundancies – we are already seeing announcements to this effect from quite a number of councils - so one consequence will be the need to ensure that staff faced with increased workloads after colleagues have left are equipped with the right tools to do their jobs even more efficiently than before
Councils will continue to invest in areas where this can reduce their ongoing delivery costs. So I expect them to continue to implement technologies which will underpin their newly re-engineered or transformed processes. They will also look to rationalise their physical infrastructures and the number of applications (often hundreds) they run, so that they can significantly reduce their support budgets. Front-to-back integration will continue to be vital to ensure key data is available to front-line staff. Where competitive product suppliers fail to cooperate effectively to provide and support standard integration ‘adapters’, I believe approaches such as NDL’s universal adaptors will provide an excellent non-invasive and cost-effective alternative.