Customer centricity - and the PSSDC, a long acronym that made a difference.

I spent Friday writing up most of my interviews with those I met when I was in Canada. Revisiting the material reminded me what an impressive journey both Service Canada, and Service Ontario, had made.

Both are based on the idea that a single organisation runs a front counter that faces the public. The citizen can go in to the same office, to sort out their pension, their employment insurance (Jobseeker’s allowance), get their social insurance number, renew their passport, their driving licence, and so on. The back office processing part may happen in more than one agency - like the Passport Service, or the Tax Office - but the front office is a ‘one stop shop’ for the government. Compare this to the UK - where you go to the DVLA for your driving licence, the Identity and Passport Service for your passport, HMRC for your national insurance number, the Job Centre for your jobseekers allowance, and the local authority for your housing benefit, and you can start to see why this seems surprisingly rational.

Canada's service integration is still work in progress. For example, from what I could see,

• The ‘Bigs’, like health insurance, and the Revenue, haven’t come on board completely yet, though that’s looking more and more likely in the Canadian Administrative Services Review, which is underway at the moment - which is being run by a former Chief Operating Officer for Service Canada, who has the service integration bug.
• There are still divides between the Federal and the Provincial level that don’t quite make sense from the citizen's point of view
• Each new service integration creates lots of technical issues to iron out, like whether the right legislative authorities are in place, differing “proof of identity” requirements for different services, and different management information and computer systems coming together, all bumping up against each other in the one front office.
• They may, eventually, hit a real cultural reluctance to have government sharing an awful lot of data on citizens, between different Agencies.

One official described what he called a necessary cycle - “Putting it all together, making it make sense, then resuming growth. The second phase, making it make sense, can feel like it’s all cobbled together with duck tape and string at the back. That’s why you need to spend time on that one.”

But there are such rational things going on! For example, they organise services by life event. On the front page of the Service Canada website, it invites you to click on options like ‘finding a job’, ‘raising a family’, having a baby’, ‘retirement planning’ and ‘starting a business’. They then aim to bundle the services together around the life event. One bundle Service Ontario was very proud of, was getting the birth certificate issued at the same time as the social insurance number. They also managed to get the turnaround time for a birth certificate down from 9 months to 8 days. Oh, and did I mention? They saved money at the same time.

What made it work? Lots of things, including being very attentive to customer feedback, strong leadership and soforth, but almost every single interviewee I spoke to (and I met about 6 or 7, from very different parts of the business), mentioned three things.

1. A simple vision: putting the customer at the centre.
2. Attention to creating a citizen-centric culture, from the ‘service agent’ at the front line, right through to the leader at the top. There's loads more to say about this, but just one example is, when they set the 8 day target for the birth certificate, they promised the citizen their fee back if they didn’t make the turnaround time. I wonder whether we could do that in the UK!
3. A body that met twice a year called the ‘Public Sector Service Delivery Council’ (the PSSDC). This was for ‘Deputy Ministers’ (our Chief Executives, or possibly Permanent Secretaries) of delivery agencies.

The first couple of times the PSSDC was mentioned, I noted it down on my handy cognitive map and moved swiftly on. It sounded like a dull old get together of important folk, a talking shop. But as I reviewed the cognitive maps last Friday, I started to question my lack of interest. Five or six people had mentioned the PSSDC as being one of the 'how's', getting central government agencies collaborating more. It actually seemed to be a significant ingredient in the success of service integration. Not the only factor, for sure. But it was referred to as the place where joint projects were initiated, where trust was built between Agency heads, and where the desire for collaboration grew, was nurtured, and was actioned. It didn’t just happen that way by chance: it was set up with the mandate of fostering collaboration.

Where is the UK’s version of this, I wondered? When do the Chief Exec of the DVLA, Job Centre Plus, the Border Agency, and HMRC, come together and pursue joint plans? I think of the work that the Cabinet Office has been trying to do recently, to work with Agencies to integrate their website interfaces, and my impression is that it has been slow going.

Last week, Ian Duncan Smith launched his new ‘universal credit’ , which will incorporate Income Support, income- based Jobseeker’s Allowance, income-related Employment and Support Allowance, Housing Benefit, Child Tax Credit and Working Tax Credit. That list of benefits implicates Job Centre Plus, Local authorities, and HMRC for a start.

I think the Department of Work and Pensions would do well to pay attention to Canada’s experience. Why wouldn't the Universal Credit only be the beginning of an effort at increased service integration? As part of that path, Britain might need its very own clunkily named Council of those that lead organisations doing public sector service delivery.

I’ll be interested to know if my Canadian interviewees agree with my impression of the PSSDC!