Interview with Cynthia Griffin, Executive Director of Customer Access and Culture Services at Havering LBC. (Courtesy of Public Servant Magazine)
Standard practice can make e-Government perfect.
Whatever the doubters believe, internet use will continue to grow and, with it, the demand for high-quality online services from government, so says Cynthia Griffin of Havering Council, part of an ODPM-backed partnership devising national standards for e-service delivery that will still allow for local adaptations. Alison Thomas reports
The problem with standards is that if they are based on too narrow an experience, they are not widely enough applicable – but if they are set nationally, they can feel too prescriptive and may fail to fit local needs, but for e-Government, with its key deadline this December, the development of workable standards is essential – not least to persuade those who remain unconvinced about the transformative properties of online services.
"the aim is simple: to help council departments be more efficient and provide their customers with consistently high standards of service"
The London Borough of Havering is the lead authority in a partnership of councils developing national e-service delivery standards (NeSDS) in a range of service areas including customer service, highways, housing and property.
Havering executive director for customer services and culture Cynthia Griffin says the aim is simple: to help council departments be more efficient and provide their customers with consistently high standards of service – whether they log on, phone up or walk into a council office with their query.” On one level, you want using online services to be as straightforward as booking a flight on a budget airline or looking something up in Google,” she says. “But equally, managerially and operationally, you must have the proper processes in place and if you don’t get that right you can end up delivering a poor service.” The key, therefore, is to marry customer service on the frontline with efficient processes in the back office, she says. “The prime focus must be on the customer because the customer is why we are all here. The other side of that is achieving an operational understanding about how difficult or easy you can make it to give somebody a seamless service. “You need to come up with a consistent service so that whatever people contact the council about there is a very simple way of navigating around and finding that out, whether it’s a housing query or getting their bins emptied, they will get the same quality of answer.”
The NeSDS project seeks to build on the success of last year’s PARSOL
(Planning And Regulatory Services Online) project, start to spread the same
delivery standards throughout local government and develop a template that
individual councils can adapt to their specific needs. While the initial impetus
for NeSDS came from the centre, in the shape of the Office of the Deputy Prime
Minister, the councils involved in the partnership – a diverse group
including Brent, Hertfordshire, Leeds, Rochdale, Wandsworth, Hartlepool and
Northamptonshire – are keen to learn from each other’s best practice
and set their own priorities, and for hard-pressed authorities with plenty
on their plates, it makes sense to pool expertise and draw up a common set
of standards for achieving the high-quality responses Griffin talks about.”
It’s a lot of work and it is much easier if we collectively develop
a set of standards we can all use,” she says. “We have a wide
variety of councils involved because we need to make sure these standards
are going to work everywhere for everybody.”
While the government’s target-setting culture has been criticised for
its rigidity, NeSDS aims to offer more flexible guidelines. “The nice
thing about them is that people can take them and adapt them locally,”
says Griffin. “They give each service or department something to work
towards but it is not prescriptive and people will come from very different
places on some of these services. For instance, Northamptonshire is leading
on the highways standards and they are quite a different challenge in a big
county than in inner London because there are different patterns of usage.”
The project also offers an opportunity for a more fundamental re examination of departmental structures and ways of working.” The most interesting thing about putting services online is that you do actually have to hold them up to the light and look at the process you are running,” Griffin says. “You can’t just go on doing it in the same old way.” One example is authentication for access to online services and striking a balance between verification of identity and entitlement and ease of use.” It does make you think – do you really need those twenty-four steps that you have in an authentication process or could you do it with ten? Is somebody else already doing it with ten and can you learn from them?” That’s where these service standards tie in to the Gershon efficiency agenda because we are all looking for cashable and non-cashable savings. One of the great things about e-standards is that it helps deliver non-cashable saving. Your processes have to be simpler, more efficient and very clear. The same process that you use online is backing up your call centre and your front desk, so it does help you improve overall.”
Implementing NeSDS not only means joint working between councils but a more cooperative approach inside each council, Griffin says. “The big trick about service standards is really positive working between front and back office. There’s no point getting through to the call centre quickly and having someone deal competently and professionally with your call if nothing happens as a result.”
“The internet is not the be-all and end-all but it’s part of the mix – an important part.”
But what about the non-believers, who say e-government is proving an irrelevance to the average citizen, and that all the frenetic activity to put services online within the next six months is a waste of time and energy? Griffin is adamant. She believes internet use will continue to spread and become more socially inclusive, thanks in part to public access to computers in libraries, and IT skills courses run by councils such as her own. “Our courses have been fully booked almost since we started and a very wide range of people are using them,” Griffin says. “I think other local authorities have also had that experience, while PC ownership is spreading at a pace that most of us didn’t expect. “The internet is not the be-all and end-all but it’s part of the mix – an important part.”
