The future of public service delivery
The article indicates how to deliver public service from government to citizen in the future.
Nowadays, the existing public service delivery is a compound system, interconnecting with various factors from central to local government, charity and private sectors. Depends on the multiple public services and its system, the process of delivery is likely to include all stakeholders and organisation with their specific roles and responsibilities. It is also not simple to identify impacts and beneficiaries clearly. The government is the core to deliver the service with accountability efficiently and effectively, its function is able to affect other external actors and to response the demand from the citizen.
In order to develop service with better quality, the government started to create new opportunities for innovative approach and ecosystems from last decade. Inevitably, the importance of digital transformation and management with technology is increasing to face the challenge of a complex system with seamless and easy way. The Government Digital Service (GDS), a governmental digital transformation, is an outstanding benchmark to search government services and information with easy entry. There is the general result as API driven approach to their services, applying in different public platform, which the technical support is from the collaboration of technology companies. The following paragraphs are going to discuss more this circumstances from several case studies.
Open data for better delivery of public services
Open data is accessible for everyone to access and share. With the public platform like website, data can be available to be used for government, private sector and citizen to benefit societal, economical and environmental approaches. It has applied as initial stage of the process in order to develop more modular and API driven way, which already became the common pathway for private sector or technology companies.
Referring to the “Using open data for public services” from Open Data Institute, the report reveals that the role of open data can be used crucially in public sector. Based on their research, it shows how data can create new possibility for the future development of service delivery.
Releasing open data of government is a new way to understand how the service delivery system works and search for potential problems for different stakeholder, including commissioners, directors, service providers and frontline workers. Increasing the quality of open data from public service can become more successful integrated reference for improving system, it might become the strong and obvious evidence to tackle a particular problem during the service delivery. If there is a direct channel to access government data, it has the potential to raise the possibility of cheaper and better service from organisational channel with the opportunity for a public ecosystem. Open data is a supportive reference to arrange how to deliver public delivery and design service delivery chains with more efficiency.
Case study
Spend Network integrates the procurement and finance data by over 300 different public sector.The resource of data origins from the local authorities, which includes the budget, actual cost and relevant expenses. In general, in spite of having the guidance from central government, publication of data by local authorities still needs the effort to identify and organise as the decent visualised information. The company also has analysis the cost and insights of local authorities and other organisations. It provides consultancy services to potential service providers to public sector (buyer). They created this ecosystem to link the data, quality issues and proposing the further improvements. Moreover, Spend Network supplies the tailored service to re-publishing the open data for government, which meets the regulation under the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).
The publication of open data helps to not only focus on the problem. For citizen, it reveals simply the actual cost of different categories in clear visualisation and integrated information. From the report provided by Spend Network, it includes local authorities’ release of open spending, contract and tender data, supporting more value and further improvement for the spending in public expenditure. This case demonstrates that open data have the ability to perform the appropriate coordination between the government, private and third party sector, involving the service delivery chain and helping the procedure more effectively and efficiently. Earlier timing of releasing open data tends to identify potential improvement quicker and frame impact in service delivery straightforwardly. Also, it opens up the discussion to address the existing problem and brainstorm the solution from data with different beneficiaries. It is curial to connect the benefit and common objectives between these stakeholders with using open data.
New coordination for digital government services delivery
Second benchmark is about the public service is a driven by public-private partnership - Estonia as reference. It would be interesting to check how the collaboration works as an equal relationship between government and private sector with improving public service together, such as the chatbox service via Facebook massager from Singapore government.
Case study
Excluding several specific service like real-estate transactions , Estonian government has pioneered to transform most of public service in digital way as e-service, which is available online to access anytime. The governmental platform is prototyped a similar one which is adopted by well-known company for users. It considered to design the interface in order to help the service delivery easier and more efficiently.
Furthermore, Estonian Government Cloud developed in collaboration highlighted for a private-public partnership. The project involved a consortium consisting of Estonian State Infocommunication Foundation (RIKS) and technology company such as Ericsson, Telia, Cybernetica, DELL EMC and OpenNode.
“ A self-service portal for the technical and administrative personnel of the public sector, including an integrated AppStore for distributing Infrastructure/Platform/Software as a service services, as well as consultancy and architecture review.”
The cloud connects both of management of the public sector and private company as the system administrators. According to combining private and public cloud service, it helps to guarantee the security for other digital service, optimizing the effectiveness and accessibility.
It is clear to understand the possible potential from this public-private partnership model. In the process of digital transformation, the demand of certain technical support is necessary. It means the government seek for the technical support from external resource. The requirement for digital service provides the chance to implement innovative service model for technology company. Eventually, this infrastructure has the beneficial effect for citizen to use the better quality of service.
In addition, the pros and cons of this innovative model will exist in the same time. The boundary of managing the data collection of citizen become blurred. Obviously, the government own the database of citizen, these data is inevitably to pass through the cloud which is powered by the private system. The further question is that the private sector have the potential ability to uses our data. Is it possible that they have the permission without any approval of citizen, but own the secret agreement with the government under the table ? Even though, Ericsson declaimed the cloud infrastructure is controlled by Guardtime's Keyless Signature Infrastructure, as a blockchain platform, which is applied on top of existing security product and integrity. From my viewpoint, the uncertainty between public and private sector is still in presence.In the beginning of public-private partnership development, we still need to consider the consequence and be awareness of this importance from this relationship.
Experimentation
The process of creating new model for future government is assigned as the teamwork. Based on the briefing material given by European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the societal issues that addressed by London Borough of Camden as the reference, the team started to associate the scenario and the persona for searching the potential to develop new social roles. In addition, we have done was exploring the existing high-technology application and more cases studies. The main aim of this project is to explore what could be the new relationships between citizens, businesses and governments.
First phase
In chosen circumstances from JRC , isolation is aggravated for citizen as they work and communicate mainly in the virtual space. Moreover, this society tends to become ‘Blaming culture’. People have to involved within “social credit” system, an end-to-end social control where each citizen receives a numeric index of its trustworthiness and virtue. It illustrated the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence has deeply affected how the government works and have close relationship with technology company, which we considered that this is key effect to shape new models of service delivery in a future of total surveillance, contextualising the focus on the social isolation issue. Eventually, we proposed our first provocation about how innovative model can optimise the usage of public service resources
“What if the quality of resources used in the social care service delivery will depend on citizens’ efforts on prevention?”
Our first prototype demonstrate that “AI-driven “public service deliver system”. All citizens rely on AI-driven system, applied for public social care service as model. Based on the analysis of citizen behaviour (data collection), the system provides the various activities that help the users maintain wellbeing as the prevention. Afterwards, the system will generate the ranking score to evaluate people’s participation from prevention stage. Depends on the level of score, the citizen is able to access to different levels of public service in intervention when they need.This model encourages citizens to engage more and put more effort on the prevention process in order to get better quality of public service resources. It aimed to support citizens to take more responsibility for their own health and wellbeing.
In next stage, we had a chance to obtain feedback from relevant stakeholders in co-creation workshop in Central Saint Martin, University of the Arts London on 27 April 2018. The participants included the staff of Camden borough, professionals from NESTA, FutureGov, Cabinet Office - Policy Lab and academics from London universities. According to our persona: Harry, we used the storytelling to present our concept, which helped our audience to envisage our scenario and questioned how to implement in a further way. Some people even had the direct emotional attachment instantly.
In general, the majority of feedback was positive, and it helped us to develop our model in a more practical direction. We reflected on our project again from the cluster of various voices. There has different advices from them, such as AI targeting system, the solution of failure scenario, possible cheating the system, and Economic aspect. However, the discussion of motivation in prevention was truly interesting discussion, it might be possible to become the social expectation for citizen as the ranking competition, to show people you are not a burden on the society, to give a good impression of you, to be matched with people active like you, to make sure you will be supported in case you might need it in the future. What if maintaining the score high is main aspiration for people, it has the adequate motivation to alter people’s behaviours?
Second phase
After assembling the feedback from workshop, we had more discussion and decide prevention stage of our service model for further development. The challenge we faced was about how to assure the people have appropriate motivation among the reward systems in prevention.
After identifying our service model, here are main objective for our core idea:
- To take responsibility on their condition by making them doing something helpful for their condition that they won’t naturally doing in order to reduce the waste of resources.
- To do something helpful for their condition by motivating them in going out of their comfort zone.
- To evaluate people’s performance by quantifying social interaction in a score.
During the process, we tried to map and researched more information about social isolation and defined the journey of persona in details. This step helped us to double check if we were in the right track to solve the issue as our model. Furthermore, the one of given feedback from tutorial supported us to refer the current system from insurance company, which people are already familiar with. Our team decide to apply this concept to integrate with our system. This agreement was important to give the confidence about developing mature service model. Meanwhile, we have a benchmark as similar project: Superflux, a concept about an envisaged world of mandatory health insurance, algorithmically-determined genetic risk profiling and backstreet gene-fixing.
After the iteration of prototyping, finally we have the final prototype and provocation:
What if the Government will act as an insurance company?
From our revised model, it is mandatory for every citizen to participant this system after the citizen starts to earn the income with valid National Insurance numbers. According users’ behaviour and the environment they stayed, the system will generate the certain risk score. This system has the four level of treatment and tax to pay from 0-25, 26-50, 51-75, 76-100 points. If your ranking is higher, you will receive the more expensive risk tax bill from government per month.
This service focus on the encouragement to reduce their risk score by different approaches, such as working out, attending the outdoor activities , connecting with your network with face to face interaction. The reduce moderator standard will be regularised in all products and purchase, which will assist citizen to decrease their score in any approach. As the private sector, the technology companies will focus on highlighting the product and service to reduce the service as well. When the citizen has an incident which endangered metal or physical health, their risk score rises over 95 as the threshold of eligible to use public social care service.
Overall, we built up the entire new system for possible future of government. For sure, there is no end, it becomes so interesting that the process will not determined in this stage and still have potential assumption to discuss. Personally, I am looking forward to have more further conversation with professionals and relevant stakeholders. The feedback from different perceptive will support this model to be comprehensive step by step.
5 trends of future service delivery
The significance of risk score system
Based on our provocation, the risk score will becomes the mainstream influence in the future. Risk moderator-driven system will work for entire society. Decreasing their risk score and risk tax payment will become the major impact for people to change their behaviour. The private companies will only focus on how to help consumers to reduce their risk for primary beneficial target. By the public sector side, the central and local government will deliver different service for encouraging citizen, which can help them to reduce the risk from participating different activities. Even though, the average risk score will become crucial KPI between the councils as the competition. The result of reducing the risk score will be supportive to not waste the assets of social care service, the government can manage the public service resource under the control.
People realise the cost will be too high to afford if you did not in good condition, so they will make an effort to maintain their wellbeing. Generally, this system support the citizen to forwards the wellbeing life actively.
No data, No service access
Data will be crucial role in future society. Both private and public sector required your previous digital pathway and data history since you are born before acceptance your demand of purchase or using public service. Because the system rely on the results of algorithms extremely, data become the essential element for this achievement. So, if you lost all history record, it is equivalent to become digital statelessness and lose any access for governmental service. It might happen to deprive your digital record as the penalty for certain criminal in the future.
It also means the data might be similar position as cryptocurrency. The only difference is everyone can generate the data in complimentary way, it is inevitable to produce the data every moment in future daily life. The data recording continues without pausing until the end of life. However, cryptocurrency needs through data trading and consumption from tangible currency.
Low priority privacy
Above the last trend, generating the data all the time and owning them becomes indispensable affairs. In order to get the privilege of service, people will prioritise to share their data to public and private sector, instead of protecting the data privacy. To open my data is direct shortcut to take advantage of everything in daily life. It is not big deal under surveillance, because the company or government can receive my data and deliver them in quickest way. People will not concern anymore if the company of wearable devices will infringe on their own privacy or the government is watching them via CCTV. The personal privacy is the worthless without any practical effect.
The citizen only care if their data can transform to the beneficial result in various way as soon as possible. “The hundred record of facial recognition in Starbucks will turn into one cup of free latte as digital coupon equally.” “GP only offer the prescription in order to get the medicine when you already provide sufficient real-time heartbeat rate and pulse data to NHS.”
No boundaries between communication
In the future, there will not have any obstacle to communicate with each others, even both side converse with different language, the wearable devices will detect the audio or text as data and transform to the original language of each side. From another technical detection, Braille and sign Language also can be transferred as general language, which the disables can communicate simply. The data and all information after algorithm will display in most appropriate way for people. For example, if the user is a senior group, the system will adjust the clearer layout and enlarge the font size in order to suit the current condition of user. This trend can demonstrate that the technology can support the government to deliver the content of service with reducing communication barriers and assure the different group can receive and deliver the message between council and government comfortably.
The whole digital society
I assume that people will have to face the numerous data in entire “digital-oriented” surrounding in the future. Certainly, it will produce massive convenience for providing service seamlessly. I was wondering how human react in this assumption. Is it possible that future people already have the balance with whole digital life? or another group are totally depressed and have an allergic reaction to digital approaches?
The public service system will be advanced and complex digitally. However, the efficiency for conducting service will be higher to face the quicker pace in society. Meanwhile, the action from organisation and prediction of tendency in the society must be more intense. The government will still play the same role, but require higher technical supporting and more effectiveness for more complicated challenge.
Delivering public service to the citizen will progress with high-tech, with the initial aim of supporting the citizen. Overall, The technology of deliver service is in constant changing, but the essence of government is constant.
