The change has been gradual, but the results have been dramatic.  Over the last twenty years – since the spread of the Internet and the dawn of what has come to be known as the Information Age – the relationship between governments and citizens has changed forever.   Citizens are no longer content to be passive recipients of government services, paying their taxes and expressing their pleasure or displeasure only at the ballot box.  Armed with vast amounts of information and near-instantaneous communications, citizens are seeking not only better service from government, but service that is tailored to their specific needs.  

The early stages of the Information Age – evidenced by personal computers, the Internet and mobile communications – brought us to this point.  Now there are signs from around the world that a new phase of the Information Age – featuring new technologies and more innovative uses of older technologies – is upon us, changing not only the way that governments deliver services, but the essential relationship between governments and citizens themselves.

What we are witnessing today is the shift from e-government to e-governance.  New technologies allow governments to deliver services more efficiently, but the change is deeper than that.  These technologies – ranging from social networking to cloud computing – enable governments to seek advice and counsel directly from citizens, to inform and educate them, and to engage them in the design and processes of governance itself.

Accenture has studied this trend in depth, identifying dozens of cases of governments adopting new strategies (and adapting old ones) to better engage the public, deliver more effective public services and involve citizens in their own governance.  At the same time, we have conducted an ongoing international study – the Global Cities Forum – to hear what citizens believe government should be doing to help improve the quality of their lives. 

These studies have led to the development of what we call the Public Service Value Governance Framework, a model of governance that connects people – as citizens, service users and taxpayers – with those whom they elect to lead them. 

The framework is built around four components:

1.      Outcomes – Governments are focusing on improved social and economic conditions for citizens, such as health, learning and safety, and not merely on the amount of services provided or on efficiency.

2.      Balance – Governments must balance choice and flexibility with fairness and common good, addressing gaps between those who are able to take advantage of service improvements and those who are not.

3.      Engagement – Governments are engaging, educating and enrolling citizens as co-producers of public values by seeking their views and helping them make the best use of government resources.

4.      Accountability—Governments must not only be more transparent about their actions and performance, they must provide accessible means for citizens to remedy problems with government and public services.

In our global research, we have identified many examples of governments at all levels – national, state, provincial and local – that are adapting innovative technologies to put this framework in place.  In Canada, for example, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public service provision, the Federal Government has launched a government-wide pilot for a new internal collaboration platform called GCpedia, an internal version of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.  The service allows federal employees to post articles as well as comment on and edit articles posted on GCpedia by their peers.  The federal government is using GCpedia to enable informal collaboration between federal employees within and across organizations.  

Tomorrow at GTEC, Greg Parston, the Director of Accenture’s Institute for Public Service Value, will be sharing these research findings on e-Governance. Greg will be speaking on Tuesday October 6^th at 9:15 in Theatre 1.

In our last blog entry we discussed how Accenture’s research in government service delivery revealed that service excellence and a greater impact on societal outcomes can be achieved when services are constructed and delivered in a way that makes the most sense for the citizen—irrespective
of agency boundaries, in the manner of citizens’ own choosing and with the backing of considerable communication and readily available support. We said that we would expand on the results of the 2008 study in more detail.

In this year’s Leadership in Customer Service research – conducted in 21 countries in 2008 – Accenture found that citizens in most countries are highly critical of the extent to which government seeks their opinions. In 15 of the 21 countries we surveyed, less than a third of respondents thought their governments did a good job of seeking the opinions of its citizens.

Only in three countries – Canada, Singapore and Ireland – did more than 50 percent of respondents rate their government as “doing a good job in delivering a better quality of life for themselves and their families.”

In fact, our research showed Canada to be one of the more high-performing governments when it comes to understanding that stakeholders are more than just “customers.” In fact, Canadian citizens were more likely to have positive attitudes about the job their government is doing in building trust in seven of the eight areas we surveyed, including

• Government being accountable for what it achieves
• Informing citizens about policies and services
• Targeting resources to people who need them
• Providing equal access to government services for all citizens
• Seeking the opinions of its citizens
• Tailoring services to meet individual needs, and
• Delivering a better quality of life overall

“Providing equal access to government services for all citizens” topped this list – citizens were three times more likely to express positive opinions (60 percent positive versus 20 percent negative) – followed by “government delivering a better quality of life,” where citizens were two-and-a-half times more likely to feel positive (53 percent) than negative (21 percent).

The only area where Canadian citizens were more likely to feel negative about the job the government is doing is in its openness and transparency in making policy decisions. In this area, only 36 percent of Canadians had a positive attitude, while 43 percent had a negative attitude. It is becoming clearer than ever that Canadians want to talk to their governments – to explain to politicians and policy makers what they want and need, and to know that their government is listening and responding.

In the next weeks I’ll discuss how government can share responsibility for outcomes with their citizens, build more productive relationships between citizens and governments, and bridge the gap between expectations and reality.

By: Michel Rene de Cotret and Darren Nippard, Accenture

Once policy has been set, programs have been designed, and services have been defined it’s down to how services are actually delivered and how Canadians end up interacting with their government – the last mile of service delivery – that has a large impact on whether outcomes are actually achieved.  Ultimately, services which are organized in a meaningful way, easy to access, linked to other programs or initiatives end up being used by those who need it most and increase the level of satisfaction people feel toward government. 

For the past eight years, Accenture has conducted research in more than 20 countries to gain perspective on how governments can excel at serving their citizens.  Over years of extensive interviews, public opinion surveys, and a methodical review of government services, we have found that high performance and a greater affect on outcomes can be achieved when services have four critical elements in place:

They are citizen-centric; that is, they organize their services and information around their citizens’ needs and circumstances.

They use a variety of channels to provide information and services to people and strive for seamless coordination between these channels.

They work together at the local, regional and national levels to provide integrated services.

They actively reach out to their customers; working to ensure that people are well informed about the services they offer so that customers can use their services easily, and understand what is expected of them in return.

Although many governments have been striving to put the above four elements in place and build trust through better services, our research shows that in many countries, citizens are still far from satisfied that government services are helping to improve the quality of their lives.  In our research conducted in 2008, we surveyed 8,600 citizens around the world to explore citizens’ expectations of and experience with government in more detail.  In the next weeks, I’ll discuss the results of our research and provide insight into Canadian survey findings in particular.

Dear bloggers,

I am proud to announce that Accenture will be participating in the 2009 GTEC Blog.  It was a great experience last year and our hope this year is that the feedback will be much more interactive and therefore current and relevant.  Over the next six months, my colleagues and I will present points of view that aim to help public service organizations create value and improve social and economic outcomes for their citizens.  It is clear that the government landscape is changing and that the current political and economic climates call for a more streamlined way of interacting with and soliciting citizens’ viewpoints, concerns and feedback. Innovations in technology and rising citizen expectations are causing governments to re-approach the way they deliver services and increasingly must now operate as a business, where management, flexibility and a strong customer focus is key.  Accenture’s Public Service group helps government agencies, institutions, and nonprofit organizations in the face of these complex challenges and helps to differentiate those high performing governments who look to break down cross government boundaries to better serve their citizens. This year, my colleagues and I will cover a variety of topics related to public service management, service delivery and improving social outcomes, including transforming the public service workforce, leadership in customer service, government 2.0, and social collaboration tools, to mention a few.  We encourage you to share your ideas with us in this blog and hope you find this collection of thought leadership valuable.

Darren Nippard

Managing Director

Accenture Canada Public Service

Over the past few weeks, I have discussed the challenges governments face in balancing the needs and expectations of the individual being served, the collective needs of society, the concerns of taxpayers, and political agenda of government.  To provide context for these challenges, I have shared insight from our recent Global Cities Forums (GCF) which focuses on what citizens are actually saying about what they want and expect from their government and how it should improve the quality of their lives.  We have just completed a Canadian GCF program in Toronto and over the coming weeks I will talk more about what we have learnt from this process and how governments can better respond to citizen needs and improve interaction through a renewed focus on public service human capital.

I believe there are two essential components of public value: outcomes and human capital.  As I recently discussed on this site, in measuring outcomes we shift the focus away from measuring outputs such as exam results, arrest rates or hospital wait times to measuring improved learning, public safety or health for improved public service value that meets citizen needs.  However, our research shows that to truly create public value, government organizations must align human resources with desired outcomes.  For example, we found that high performing governments work hard to engage their workforce through realignment and more targeted performance measures linked to outcomes.  In doing so, these governments ultimately succeed in improving social outcomes for citizens.   

Firstly, our research shows that high performing government organizations continuously review their ways of working, reviewing the structure and skill sets of their workforces to ensure that they are operating at an optimum level to deliver benefits to citizens and communities. As a result, high performing governments will challenge and change the configuration of their workforce to continually improve public value.

Secondly, we found that a robust performance management system is key for public service value creation.  To ensure that performance management is effective, our research shows that it must be bound to an organization’s mission and outcomes, including responding to citizen needs, and to be intimately linked to its strategy.  In doing so, managers, executives and staff can work together to develop performance related metrics which result in improved outcomes and a better experience for the citizen.

Finally, we concluded that even with a well aligned workforce and performance frameworks linked to outcomes, successful public service value creation rests largely on an organization’s performance culture.  It is one thing to have outcomes, strategies and operational plans in place, it is quite another to have the behaviors, beliefs and attitudes that will realize these with a sense of purpose, ambition and enthusiasm.   

To put this into context, we can see how the Ontario government has changed its approach to improved citizen services.  Service Ontario recently introduced “money back guarantees” on birth certificates if not delivered within 15 days.  To meet this objective, the government had to realign its workforce and internal performance mechanisms to make this priority a focus area for staff and enable them to reach a new goal. By using ‘pizza delivery’ philosophy, the organization was able to work through processes, become culturally challenged and stay focused on outcomes.

I will continue to expand on these research findings and go into more detail on the potential to improve citizen outcomes through a government focus on human capital.  As I prepare for these discussions, I am interested in understanding from you how you think governments can more effectively align and engage their workforces for improved citizen outcomes, or how the culture of government organizations can impact citizen results.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the challenges governments face in balancing the needs and expectations of the individual being served, the collective needs of society, the concerns of taxpayers, and political agenda of government.  My last entry expanded upon this by sharing some insights from our recent Global Cities Forums on what citizens are actually saying about what they want and expect from their government and how it should improve the quality of their lives.

This week I want to continue this discussion by outlining a framework we have formulated as a result of these forums to promote a more active relationship between citizens and their governments. We’ve introduced a Service Value Governance Framework representing a more publicly engaged model of governance, one that truly connects people—as citizens, service users and taxpayers—with those whom they elect to lead them and to shape and direct their public services.

Derived from the common concerns and ambitions of all of the groups of Global Cities Forum participants and the principles of public value they defined, the framework is built around four components:

1.       Outcomes—  The purpose and mission of public service provision should be the actual improvements they produce in the lives of the people they serve—such as better health and wider learning—and not simply the amount of service produced or economic efficiency achieved. Traditional measures of public-service performance—such as student-teacher ratios or arrest rates or numbers of hospital beds, for example—no longer satisfy the public demand for improvement. What matters is the actual difference public-service organizations make in the lives of the people they serve.People—certainly the participants of the Global Cities Forum—want the realities of their lives to shape government services and to provide the strategic direction and operational alignment across government organizations.  Managing through a focus on outcomes is a means of ensuring that multilateral strategies and holistic solutions are applied to the conditions or issues that most affect local people.

2.       Balance – The people with whom we spoke believe that governments should tailor service provision to meet the wide range of different needs across the population. People are increasingly accustomed to private-sector services that respond flexibly and discriminatingly to their individual demands and see little reason why government cannot do the same. As service users, people want more choice in the type and means of service delivery.However, it is also important to make explicit the challenge of balancing choice and flexibility with fairness and common good. It will not happen intuitively; it requires clarity and analysis, even if political judgments have to weigh one side of the balance more heavily than the other.

3.       Engagement— An overwhelmingly consistent finding from the Global Cities Forum is participants’ desire to see government offer more opportunities to involve people in setting priorities and plans for public services to deliver improvements in their own lives. Moreover, they want to be able to do this on an ongoing basis—not simply through rare public consultations or superficial user satisfaction surveys. Further, when government enables people to play a greater role in setting priorities and planning public services, and as people have increasingly more means to engage with government in a consequential manner, individuals will be empowered to assume more responsibility for improvements in their own lives.However, engagement must go beyond asking people what they want. It must also include active programs of educating people about their rights and responsibilities and initiatives to enroll them as active partners in improving outcomes.  Governments must work to ensure that the engagement they have with people is as consequential as possible. Deliberative events such as the Global Cities Forum empower local people to consider and discuss issues with others from their wider communities. Consequently, such events can provide richer and sometimes surprising insight. Clearly, the Global Cities Forum reached only a tiny subset of the population of each city, but as governments extend public-engagement activities more widely and more frequently, greater numbers of people will become involved and the benefits of their engagement will multiply.

4.       Accountability—Across the eight Global Cities Forum events, we found that all people want more information from government. Our research also shows that high-performing public-service organizations are using performance management data as a powerful tool for engaging people and other stakeholders.  Sharing performance information with people can help build understanding of government’s constraints and limitations.Therefore, our findings indicate government must move beyond simple information sharing and make information such as performance and budgeting data available and actionable. In making the right types of information easily accessible to the public and implementing mechanisms to help people take action, the public is able to play an active role in holding officials accountable, improving service delivery to the community and supporting program funding.

These four components provide meaning and a language with which to clearly articulate a relationship that is about genuine engagement of people in their governance—not one that is merely about voting in elections, answering surveys or paying taxes, as important as these things are. We consider this type of engagement critical to governments achieving high performance

I’d love to hear your thoughts on both the various components of this framework and how emerging technology could be applied to further benefit Canadian citizens in future. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the challenges government face in balancing the needs and expectations of the individual being served, the collective needs of society, the concerns of taxpayers, and political agenda of government. 

This week I’d like to expand on this theme and share with you some insights on what citizens are actually saying about what they want and expect from their government and how it should improve the quality of their lives.  We recently conducted a quite unique research project where we brought together residents from all walks of life in eight cities around the world to discuss the role of government in their lives.  These were eight individual one-day events in London, Sydney, Singapore, Berlin, New York, Paris, Madrid, and Los Angeles, where 60 to 85 residents met in each city to discuss how their government can improve the social and economic conditions of the people in their city.  In addition to these events, we commissioned a market survey of 1,000 residents in each of the seven countries where we conducted our city forums.  We have analyzed the discussions from each of the events as citizens debated various issues, questions, experiences from the perspectives of citizen, the user of services, and taxpayer. 

While there were some differences which reflected the different characters, cultures, and uniqueness of each individual city, some general themes emerged.   Some of the insight gained and key findings from the research include:

• People want service delivery that comprehensively meets their needs – which requires better integration and collaboration among government departments, private businesses and non-profit organizations.  Overwhelmingly, citizens from around the world wanted government to do more consultations with them in order for government to understand citizens’ needs and expectations better and to design services that meet these needs.
• Citizens seek greater engagement with government on quality of life and quality of service – and elections are not enough.  The majority of participants want to opportunity to participate in an ongoing fashion in the public policy process. They claim that aside from casting their vote on election day, very few mechanisms exist for them to be engaged in a meaningful way.
• Government can and should do much more to educate citizens – helping people to clarify their own needs and perceptions of government.  Many felt that if there were systems that provided easily accessible information in a clear, understandable way, people would be better able to demonstrate real influence on the policies and actions of government.
• Citizens want much more clarity and accountability from government; the absence of it increases perceptions of waste and inefficiency.  Value for money, channeling resources to the right priorities, treating public funds as if it were their own, more transparent reporting, where themes that were clearly articulated in all the cities surveyed.  At the same time, many participants acknowledged that they may simply not know whether government is spending on the right outcomes.  They felt that government can do much better to communicate how their tax dollars are spent and what they are getting in return.

Do you think Canadians share similar needs and expectations from the rest of the world?  I’d love to hear your thoughts…

I was asked to participate in the GTEC blog and to provide some thoughts on the topic of Outcomes.  The importance of outcomes for public services and the citizens they serve is a topic I’m passionate about.  As a recipient of government services, a citizen, and a taxpayer with 3 children in school, I experience first hand the dilemma and delicate balancing act that our public sector leaders, policy makers, and managers are expected to deal with. 

On the one hand, as citizens we want better more responsive services which address our individual needs – services that are creative, competitive and that improve our environment.  On the other, as taxpayers we want our governments to act responsibility, spend wisely, and keep our taxes at a fairly constant or reasonable level.  

Ultimately, the challenge is to find ways to efficiently address the expectations of citizens and produce more or improved societal outcomes for the public monies spent. 

At Accenture, we continue to research and study this challenge extensively.  We have published a book, Unlocking Public Value which addresses how citizens measure success, different to shareholders looking after a private company.  We have established an Institute for Public Service Value which focuses on the connections between public management, service delivery and improved social outcomes – or the creation of “public sector value”.  Our research describes how the pressures for public service improvement have grown more forceful than ever because citizens have growing expectations of government. We are generally more vocal about our needs and we are conditioned and influenced by improvement in the goods and services provided by the private sector (at least some of the time!).  We want better targeted, more personalized, responsive and efficient public services.  But that’s not all.  In addition to higher quality services, we demand that government services improve the conditions of our lives and to deal with the issues we care about, such as the environment, poverty, or public safety.

There is little doubt in my mind that our leaders, policy makers, and public service managers are intent on improving the performance of their organizations to improve government services and the manner in which they are delivered.  We have seen legislative initiatives in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States and several other countries set up frameworks for driving continuous performance improvement across key public services. While some are still focusing on budgetary and expenditure controls, others are adopting more innovative approaches that attempt to balance social outcomes, immediate service delivery issues, long-term developments, and short-term “voter sensitive” achievements. This balanced approach is not easy to action and means a change in public service performance management away from crude measurement of organizational outputs towards a more sophisticated targeting of public value and outcomes.

While, we are clearly moving in the right direction, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you think we are doing in balancing the needs and expectations of the individual being served, the collective needs of society, the concerns of taxpayers, and political agenda of government.  In particular:

• What do people think government should be doing to improve the quality of people’s lives?
• What sort of relationship do people want with their government and with the public services it provides?
• What can government do to help ensure that its public services – the primary way it interacts with people day to day – actually deliver value by improving the social and economic conditions of individuals’ lives?