tgf — archive

FW: Describing a Public Sector Service

From: Peter Brown <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:05:00 -0000

Jenny, in response to your specific question, ‘ how does "Public Service" different from Enterprise "Business Service"? ’ A business service is offered to “consumers” who, by the nature of most markets, usually have a choice between different market offerings and where any restriction in their choice is tempered by public policy against abuse of monopoly position, cartels, etc. The Consumer’s relationship with businesses is therefore in a permanent state of flux according to market pressures, tastes, trends, etc. Both Consumers and Providers recognize and accept that as part of the “deal” and business offers vary according to “market forces” and, frankly, what they think they can get away with – if a business service can sell the same thing to two people at different prices, they will do. They are driven by a profit motive. A government service is offered to “citizens” who have a legitimate (and often legally-supported) right to be served in an exclusive relationship, without competition, and on an equal basis. “Universal service provision” means that public service agencies are not obliged to compete for the more lucrative part of a service in recognition that they are obliged to provide universal coverage (meaning that their “gains” are used to cross-subsidise their “losses” in providing such universal coverage – something cynically rejected by some private sector and ultra-liberal economic policies who argue that everyone should be able to compete but without obliging the universal provision directive – with result that competition is only on the “profitable” segment, leaving public agencies having to cater alone for the loss-making areas – look at postal services, telecoms, etc. ). The Citizen’s relationship with a government service is a stable one-to-one relationship with no competition or uncertainty, except for the level and cost of the service offered across the board. Again, where this is not the case, has been in situations when universal service provision has been cannibalised to satisfy private-sector involvement. In theory, at least, there would be public concern about the same government service being offered at different prices or conditions to different people. In practice this does happens but is driven more by macro-economic and demographic considerations than by a government seeing how much they could get away with in charging people differently for the same service in order to boost revenue. The attached photo is from a brainstorming and mapping session with a client recently – and nicely sums up the distinction and the difference: in a business-to-consumer relationship, there is an expectation that the business is following its own interests and maximize profit margin and the customer will benefit to the extent needed to keep them as a customer; in a government-to-citizen relationship, there is an expectation that the citizens’ interests are paramount and the government seeks to limit its burden and costs but where there is no motivation of a government service to improve given a protected ‘monopoly’ or ‘clients’… Cheers, Peter From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jenny Huang Sent: Saturday, 08 December, 2012 01:51 To: John Borras Cc: 'TGF TC List' Subject: Re: [tgf] FW: Describing a Public Sector Service John and all, Agree with others the current model seems overly simplified and also hard to comment on, here are my thoughts: · how does "Public Service" different from Enterprise "Business Service"? http://www.knowledgetransfer.net/dictionary/ITIL/en/Business_Service.htm I would much prefer to see the "Public Service" is derived from a common business service definition/model that already has wide acceptance in the industry. (Well, ITIL was created by UK Gov. at the first place) · It is not clear what methodology that the EC group is taking to model the service or planning to create service vocabularies, having some frameworks or reference points at the first place will help the debates, e.g. o conceptual model from what perspectives? Enterprise/Government viewpoints? information viewpoints? Engineering viewpoints? currently the model seems a mix bag of things. o Wondering is there any relation of this EU project with this one? http://wiki.rural-inclusion.eu/index.php/Main_Page , while there is no UML model defined by the RI project, looks like there are much thought processes have gone in for public service modeling in that project. o At least in US and UK, the most well modeled services in Government are in Defense and Military groups i.e. the DoDAF and MoDAF frameworks, while I'm not suggesting something as complicate as those. However, those framework and models have gone thru years of engineering. . at the end of the day models are used to draw relationships and help to automate systems. so I think this EC group should at least do some initial studies to see if something similar can be used as a foundation. nonetheless, agree it is important for TGIF to engage with any one who is attempting to do Public Service modeling work. It is an useful element for TGF analysis/ implementation. Jenny On 12/7/2012 2:29 AM, John Borras wrote: Chris The “What’s it for” question is answered on https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/asset/core_public_service/description but you may well still ask “so what”…. -) The model they have started to produce and the one Nig has just highlighted need to be discussed within the group and decisions made on which way they want to go. It’s early days yet and they don’t have a clear view on that yet. As usual these EC working groups are somewhat vague at the outset and it takes a time to settle down but I believe it’s in our interests to be at the table rather than not, so I’ll preserve for the time being at least. And because they have to get agreement across all Member States they inevitably end up with things at a high-level otherwise they would be there forever and a day! The ESD work has already been drawn to their attention and someone from that area is on the working group. I’ll feed your comments back into the group and we’ll see what they make of them. John From: [email protected] [ mailto:[email protected] ] On Behalf Of Chris Parker Sent: 07 December 2012 10:13 To: Greenaway Nigel; John Borras; 'TGF TC List' Subject: [Norton AntiSpam]RE: [tgf] FW: Describing a Public Sector Service John I'm struggling a little with this. The EC model feels massively over-simplified to me (just look at the reductionist, linear view of the relationship between policy, service and legislation). I could probably list lots which is missing, but it would be helpful first to have a clearer idea of what the purpose of this model is: who are the intended users of it, and what value is intended to deliver to them? Does the EC have some sort of statement of objectives for the work? If we could see that, it would help in giving more focused comments. The UK model Nig has circulated will clearly be helpful to the EC in adding detail, but it feels to me that the two things are trying to do something different: the UK document feels like it is providing a menu of defined concepts which could be brought together to describe any service, whereas the EC work is trying not simply to provide a menu but a generic model of how all the concepts fit together and interrelate for a generic service. Doing so is clearly going to be a challenge. Having said that, my initial reactions about major gaps in the EC model include: · The customers for the service. At present these are packaged into a single box called “community”, which the public service “targets”. Nothing about the need for a service to understand customer needs and circumstances, and how these vary and sub-segment. And nothing which recognises the idea of a two way relationship in service design and service delivery, with eg citizen co-creation of service. Similarly, nothing which recognises that some customers for some services will be anonymous, but in other cases the service will need to identify safely who the customer is (opening up the whole set of identity management issues). · Channels for service delivery. Nothing on this in the current model except the idea that each service has “a site”. Does that mean a website? The implication of the way “public service” is described in the central box (with homepage and url) is that this is focused solely on e-services. But even if that is the intention, we still need to recognise the existence of multiple channels, along with the idea that users want not simply to choose between channels, but to move between them on a single service experience · Relationships with other services. Worth recognising somewhere in this that services do not exist in isolation, particularly when viewed from a customer perspective – where a number of services may need to be integrated in order to meet a single customer need. And of course the wider service universe encompasses not just public but also private and voluntary sectors. · Outcomes of the service. Like you say, benefit realisation is not here, other than the recognition that a process should generate an output. We also need to show how outputs create public value, both directly for the users of a service and indirectly through generation of externalities, and how these benefits impact on the policy outcomes being targeted for the service. Some of these issues have been addressed in another bit of UK work, focused at local government level, which doesn’t yet seem to have been picked up by the project team working on the EC model See the “local government business model” at http://standards.esd.org.uk/LGBMDiagram.aspx . Even this though feels to me like it fails the “so what?” test. Which brings me back to the question of what all this is for! Regards, Chris Parker Managing Partner CS Transform Limited www.cstransform.com T: +44 7951 754060 F: +44 207 681 3908 Citizen Service Transformation