12 August 2002

Islands in the Stream - Challenges in eGovernment

Dr Bob Mann, Director Channel Sales, Lagan

Each and every Local Government organisation in the UK has been challenged to develop e-Government statements - and implement them - by 2005. Increasingly, the same wake-up call is being heard in Government organisations in Europe, the US, and Australasia, driven by cost-constraints and citizens' increasing expectations of good customer service from their public services. In the UK, council organisations are being beaten with two sticks at the same time: firstly, central government is forcing the pace of change with an aggressive timeline for the implementation of eGovernment, driven by the e-envoy's office; secondly, constant budgetary pressure is forcing councils to take a long hard look at inefficiencies in the operation of their existing interfaces to the public.

Whilst many organisations in the private sector opted to develop a company wide channel for customer interaction during the mid-80's - the call centre - most local authority organisations, for reasons of cost and/or scale, tended to leave customer contact within council departments. Often multiple telephone numbers (and more recently email addresses) are published. In other cases a central switchboard is employed to route calls from a main "Town Hall" number to the department concerned. Once a call is received in a department (Housing, for example), the officers will process the request, typically linking to a dedicated back-end system. Commonly, each of these dedicated systems holds citizen information. Thus, inflexible "silos" have developed within most councils, where citizen information, the specialist skills of senior council staff, and the ability to execute specific transactions is buried in individual departments - without hope of being accessed by another department, let alone the customer themselves through self-provisioning.

This is one of the key problems that most CRM systems in local government target.

Multiple Realities

Information about an individual citizen is scattered liberally throughout many (sometimes tens of) different legacy systems. This adds a huge degree of inflexibility to council operations: if calling a council about a specific council tax query, the person who helps you is, today, very unlikely to be able to tell you what time your squash court was booked for at the council leisure complex. Whilst nearly all council customer facing staff are enthusiastically willing to give you the "right number to call" (and the private sector could certainly learn from many councils about engendering a customer-service ethos in their staff), the fact is that another call will be necessary: the data is simply not available to them. This also presents a Data Protection nightmare for many councils: it would be a major exercise, if challenged by a citizen, to prove that all the data held about them on the different systems is accurate, and storage of it is justified.

From this starting point, how can the council appear to be citizen-centric?

CRM vendors can tackle this requirement in a number of ways. Often vendors with a database centric view of the world will approach the problem by providing a CRM data model of their own. This model forms the heart of the system, and must be populated with "live" customer data from the back-end databases. This is often done in batch mode, which can lead to creation of another view of "reality" in the council. The currency of data needs to be traded with the IT overheads of updating it. Whilst some vendors will offer "wild-card" fields for user definition, requirements for data-fields outside of the pre-defined model often need to be addressed through systems integration work. A problem with this approach is that changes in the vendor's data model from release to release will often require retrofit of the customised changes to the model each time.

A different vendor approach is to define a CRM Meta Data model. This can be thought of as providing a configurable data model containing not data, but pointers to the data held on back-end systems. The local CRM data actually held might be as little as a unique name and location identifier for the citizen. The rest of the data is accessed in real time through Intelligent Messaging to the legacy systems. The obvious advantage of this approach is the real-time provision of data; the disadvantage being the need for tighter integration to the back-end systems, (although that is almost certainly required for the provision of flexible and generic case workflow in the council).

Like Lagan most vendors adopt a pragmatic approach: the Meta Data model may hold portions of the data locally where, for example, performance to a particular system is problematic. Similarly, synchronisation processes can be used to try to keep batched CRM data in synch with live data.

Once a single holistic view of the customer is achieved, which all departments can access and use, the CRM system can be set to "time out" customer data, marking it as requiring re-verification the next time the citizen contacts the council.

With the solution in place, the interactions themselves become a valuable source of data. For example, all interactions with the customer - through whichever department, and through whichever channel - can be logged in a Customer History file. This empowers council officers to quickly review past activity and actions, removing the need for the citizen to always deal, by necessity, with the individual handling "their case".

Dr Bob Mann, Director Channel Sales, Lagan, has over 20 years of IT experience, 10 of those in the area of advanced contact centre systems. Dr Mann is a recognised international speaker on issues relating to Customer Relationship Management and Computer Telephony.

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