Managing Government Business Processes

Krems.
We’re entering the second and final day of the CeDEM 2011 conference here in Krems. The first speaker of this session is Bojan Cestnik, whose interest is in business process outsourcing and its connections to citizen participation. Bojan starts by noting that the availability and sophistication of user services provided by governments are steadily improving; there is also a strong EU policy stating that no citizen should be left behind by these services in 2010. At the same time, participation figures remain limited: only 28% of citizens participate (but 68% of companies). So, there’s a need to understand and engage citizens more effectively.

There may be problems of apathy or intentional exclusion here. Certain obstacles and barriers actively discourage engagement, but this has also given rise to a common but incorrect belief that people just don’t care about politics (that they see it as a spectator sport). It is necessary here also to embrace voluntary and incomplete participation, rather than aim for ‘perfect’ outcomes.

Availability of services across the EU is generally good, and user experience assessments are also largely positive. But how may we assess the effectiveness of such e-government services – administrative perspectives (cost to value rations, quality of service, urgency, flexibility) are not enough; citizens’ perspectives also need to be incorporated.

Bojan examined this in relation to the Housing Fund of the Republic of Slovenia, which was founded in 1991; it encourages savings in housing and offers housing subsidies for young families. There has been considerable media attention on it (given its importance), and it handles a substantial amount of funding.

One key goal of the scheme was to promote long-term savings in housing (enabling citizens to buy housing rather than rely on big mortgages). There are two incentive mechanisms for savers: state premium accruals, and favourable housing loans. Key actors in the data flow within the fund are citizens, the housing fund itself, banks, and the relevant state ministry, therefore. Of course, legal frameworks are constantly shifting, so change management also needs to be considered; in 2006, major changes were made to the fund, for example.

A second key area were subsidies for young families, provided in annual schemes; such subsidies apply to buying, building, and renting homes. Target populations are young families, first-time buyers, and specific income groups. There has been a very steady, significant growth in applications to the scheme over the past five years – from only 300 applications in 2006 to over 8000 in 2010. Some 20% of applications were unsuccessful – and they usually turn out to be the most work-intensive ones. To engage citizens more effectively in this process, the project processed the data from past years, showing what parameters in applications tended to lead more frequently to rejections.

Business process outsourcing proceeds from a close analysis of business processes, identifying inputs, outputs, stakeholders, and the information exchanged. Key to this is also a need for application integration, mainly oriented towards business processes, which in turn relies especially on application interoperability.

The success of such processes is dependent on managing project complexity, which may refer simply to structural complexity, which can be addressed reasonably well, or to overall uncertainty, which poses a more difficult problem. The project pursued a Rational Unified Process approach (with agile elements and ‘eXtreme programming practices’, which sounds exciting), also including risk assessment and management and intuitive user interface design.

Lessons learnt from this are that the economic efficiency of services can be increased in the first place by in-house optimisation, but that further gains can be made by shared services, and finally through outsourcing. Additionally, the project observed that staff worked better and generated better outputs when there was average or just above average schedule pressure; beyond – and below – that point, staff motivation and outputs drop off significantly.

Interoperability included data exchange between the fund and the central population register as well as the tax administration (i.e. g2g exchanges); risk management was conducted through risk assessments, especially around the introduction of the Euro in 2007; and change management addressed problems of personnel rigidity and backwards compatibility. Active change management must address flexibility, robustness, agility, and fluidity. User interface design, risk management, and simplicity of services are paramount.

Improving citizen participation can happen through user interface design, and can be tested through user behaviour modelling. Even simple modifications can contribute to better results; perfection isn’t needed here. What’s crucial is to ask the right questions – setting right targets, and monitoring the results of the process.