Re-inventing the relationship between city and citizen
How Newcastle is re-inventing the relationship between city and citizen.
Think of a chocolate orange. Now bang it on the table and watch those segments separate. That’s how most local authorities interface with the people to whom they provide services. In pieces.
There’s the planning piece. The housing piece The highways piece. The benefits piece, and so on.
When you want to make a payment, ask a question or complain to one of them, you call, phone or write to one department. When you want something else, you deal with another bit that’s probably somewhere else in town. And if your enquiries overlap (like payment of council tax and rent) chances are neither department will know a thing about it unless you tell them.
It’s been this way for years, all over the country. But why? Why can’t there be one point of contact for everything? Staffed by helpful people and supported by a terrific information system so that they know who you are, what you called about last time and when that hole in your pavement is going to be fixed?
In fact, instead of being an orange, why can’t it be an onion?
THE NEWCASTLE REVOLUTION
Great idea? Newcastle City Council thinks so, which is why, in 2002, it set about creating City Service – a revolution in serving customers. Yes, the ‘c’ word. Newcastle is firmly in the customer service business, and that’s not just its opinion – the council has recently been nominated for a national CRM award.
City Service achieves two remarkable things that might sound incompatible – better service at lower cost. In fact they’re on target to increase efficiency by 25%, saving about £27 million in the ten year period, while also climbing into the top 25% of authorities for performance.
TRAUMAS AND TRUST
The City Service transformation reaches deep into the structures and culture of the council. It’s been traumatic at times, as people move from back-offices all over the city to customer facing roles. There are headcount reductions, too fully discussed and agreed with unions of course, and there are new IT systems to improve services for all customers both internal and external. Those improvements cover just about every line of business application, including email, telephony DMS, CRM and payment engine.
For a huge project like this, Newcastle wanted to work with a trusted IT partner and it chose Fujitsu. The relationship is unusually close and involves shared risk as well as reward. For example, one phase of the project involved migrating from Newcastle’s old mainframe to a desktop network. Instead of the usual penalty clauses and contract payments you’d expect in such a situation, Fujitsu underwrote the risk of delay, saving Newcastle about £1 million on this aspect alone (there was a delay!).
WIN/WIN
Newcastle and Fujitsu don’t have a conventional customer/supplier relationship Kath Moore, Newcastle’s Head of Business Development & Transformation shares an office with Fujitsu’s Project Manager. They distribute project information via a shared information portal and the contract is based on open book accounting and what the Fujitsu team refer to as a ‘best friends’ approach. While there are many very tight delivery and performance requirements, conventional SLAs don’t feature in the contract. Instead both parties look beyond the SLA to valuebased objectives, with the shared determination to get more for less.
