Cabinet Office Chief Information Officer

The 2005 Transformational Government Strategy set out a journey for transforming public services up to 2011 – services that focused on the citizen, joining up the needs of customers and professionally delivering to all.

Personalised services
The Comprehensive Spending Review [External website], published 9th October 2007, sets the Government's spending and delivery priorities for 2008–2011. It has the principles of Transformational Government right at its heart via the Service Transformation Agreement. Departments across government have agreed to reduce their avoidable customer contact by 50%.

Citizens will benefit from:
• reduced hassle;
• a more personalised service; and
• greater dignity when using public services.

We want to ensure that the public services we deliver are right for the people who use them. By really understanding our customers, we can work together to ensure that services are delivered in a personal way, at the point of need and across organisational boundaries. What if:
...we really understood our customers;
...we designed all public services around them rather than around our organisations;
...we were there for everyone, but really came through for those who needed us most;
...we were always just a click or a call away;
...this was usual?

We know we can do it. Designing and bundling services around the customer shows that you really can deliver a better customer experience, efficiency for the taxpayer and better job satisfaction for frontline workers at the same time.

Alexis Cleveland
Director General
Transformational Government
and Cabinet Office Management

Alexis Cleveland

Tools that underpin service transformation

In order to achieve what has been set out in both the Transformational Government Strategy and more recently the Service Transformation Agreement, government is using a range of tools that help move the citizen to the centre of service design, including:

• customer insight;
• service design; and
• information sharing.

Customer insight
To get the Service Transformation Agreement to work we need to understand the customer and build services based on their needs. To achieve this we have set up the Customer Insight Forum. Customer Insight experts across government will underpin progress made against the Public Service Agreements (PSAs) set with a robust understanding of citizens' and business' experiences and needs. Since 2006–2007, these experts have come together in the Customer Insight Forum. This group provides oversight across the public sector on all matters relating to customer insight, with a primary focus on the development of customer insight capabilities across government. The Customer Insight Forum is an enabler of Transformational Government by being an advocate across departments for the role and value of customer insight, by promoting best practice and knowledge and championing examples of customer insight in action, making a difference to both service design processes and outcomes.

The Business Customer Insight Forum has been established as a special interest group linked to the Customer Insight Forum, to develop a better cross-departmental understanding of business experience when interacting with government, sharing best practice and business customer insight. In December 2007, the Customer Insight Forum published guidance [External website] and a toolkit [External website] enabling effective measurement of customer satisfaction.

Services should be designed with the needs of those on the outside first, rather than the needs and structures of departments at the core. To assist in this process, the Customer Insight Forum has published guidance for practitioners and managers in the public sector on customer journey mapping, one of the key tools for building customer insight. Customer journey mapping is a powerful way to capture the experience of a customer through their own eyes. It identifies how services may overlap and where the high or the low points are in the customer's experience. These are not always what the public service provider assumes them to be.

Mapping out a customer journey is a very effective way of communicating back to the service delivery organisation, the problems that customers face including frontline staff and policy makers. It also shows clearly what drives satisfaction or otherwise within the service. This can create a powerful lever to drive change.

A Customer journey map

Customer Service Excellence
In March 2008, the Government launched Customer Service Excellence. This is its new standard for customer service. It is a practical, user-friendly tool that challenges organisations to scrutinise services from the perspective of their customers and communities. It is aligned with the service transformation work on reshaping public services to meet the rising expectations of citizens and complements ongoing programmes of customer–focused change.

At the heart of Customer Service Excellence is an emphasis on the importance of customer insight in meeting the individual and collective needs of citizens. It works on three levels:

• a driver of continuous improvement;
• a skills development tool; and
• an independent validation of achievement;

The standard itself and material to support the concepts which it tests are available from www.cse.cabinetoffice.gov.uk [External website].

Service design
Delivering against the Service Transformation Agreement will equire a change in the way services are designed. Some services work really well, such as claiming pensions, and others less so, including claiming free school meals which can suffer unnecessary processing delays.

In 2006-2007 a Service Design Group was formed, which includes representatives from across government, local government, the third sector and the service design industry. A pocket guide to service design [External website] is available on the website. Two collaborative projects by local government (Kent County Council and Haringey) will test the value, impact and compatibility of a service design approach to public services.

Power of Information Review
In the past year, the United Kingdom has seen growth in activities that exploit the fact that tens of millions of people are online. People’s expectations are changing, and public services need to change with them. Some completely new forms of behaviour have arisen online that are modern versions of the 19th Century cooperative movements. The Power of Information Review [External website] looked at new types of mutual support online and the changes being brought about in the market for public information by new technologies. The Government accepted most of the reviewers’ recommendations [External website] immediately.

In order to accelerate the rate of change, the Government has set up a task force chaired by Richard Allan, Director of Government Affairs, CISCO Systems. Its focus will be to advise on the use of social networks to convey government information and to work with departments to free up data.

Secure Information sharing

Public and private sector services could not function without secure sharing of information. The need to share data securely is an important element of Transformational Government. During 2005-2006, work on data sharing continued in the direction set out in the September 2006 Information Sharing Vision Statement [External website]. The Prime Minister, in his speech [Source: Speech to University of Westminster 25 October 2007] on Liberty [External website], examined the best way to achieve a balance between the benefits of the information age and respecting people's legitimate concerns for their own privacy and security.

Data sharing in public service delivery offers three main benefits:

• Better social outcomes: understanding a person's needs in the round to ensure the right help and interventions.
• Better service to customers: personalisation, faster, saving bureaucracy and repeated form-filling. If one bit of government knows something about you, should you have to carry a piece of paper to another to prove what government already knows?
• Better efficiency: collecting and verifying the information once rather than many times, avoiding errors and discrepancies.

The Prime Minister, with the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, announced an independent review [External website] to seek that balance. Richard Thomas and Dr Mark Walport were appointed as reviewers. They will examine the scope of sharing of personal information and the protections that apply when personal information is shared in the public and private sectors.

The review's terms of reference include:

• Consideration of changes to the way the Data Protection Act 1998 operates in the UK and the options for implementing any such changes.
• Recommendations on the powers and sanctions available to the regulator and courts in the legislation governing data sharing and data protection.
• Recommendations on how data sharing policy should be developed in a way that ensures proper transparency, scrutiny and accountability.

To inform its recommendations, the review panel will consult with:

• the devolved administrations;
• the European Commission;
• the academic and legal community;
• media;
• representatives of the IT community and the private sector;
• a representative sample of government departments and agencies with an interest in data sharing and privacy and
• other parties identified by the review team.

The recommendations will seek to take account of technological advances and strike a balance that ensures appropriate privacy and other safeguards for individuals and society, while enabling sharing information to protect the public, increasing transparency, enhancing public service delivery as well as the need to minimise the burden on business.

The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice will publish a report in the first half of 2008. The review subsumes the work on the data sharing strategy planned for summer 2008.

Keeping information safe

Joining up information can only proceed if the customers of the service trust how it is done.

Government often handles personal and sensitive information on behalf of citizens. If we are to maintain trust and confidence in how we deliver services to people whether online or otherwise, we must ensure that we adequately protect that information. The revised National Information Assurance Strategy (NIAS) meets these challenges and covers the whole of the UK using a broader approach to IA. It has the following vision for 2011:

The major data incidents reported in 2007 have demonstrated that more work is needed to improve the situation in some areas. The work required will be set out early in 2008 by the Cabinet Secretary in his report to the Prime Minister. Already organisations such as HMRC have put in place a complete ban on the transfer of bulk data without adequate security protection such as encryption, as well as measures to prevent the downloading of data without adequate security safeguards.

The Crown Prosecution Service has reviewed and significantly changed write access to portable media. It is now only permissible to download data from the CPS system to portable media with the explicit permission of the IT Security Officer. An encryption programme for the hard drives of laptops containing personal data has been completed. A review of back up tape procedures has taken place and written assurances that they are secure in transit and when stored has been provided by local managers. A Data and Information Integrity Audit has been completed with no significant issues being identified. Further work is ongoing to assess and reduce risk and strengthen information risk governance covering personal data and other sensitive information. This will be completed during the financial year utilising the ISO 27001 compliance programme.

Revenue and Customs has also disabled all the personal and laptop computers it uses to prevent the downloading of data onto removable media, and they will only be reactivated at the approval of a senior manager for a specific business critical purpose. Keyran Poynter's independent review into the HMRC incident has published the final report [External website] and the Cabinet Secretary has also published the Data Handling Procedures in Government: Final Report [External website].

The goal is to achieve three strategic outcomes:

• government is better able to deliver public services through the appropriate use of ICT.
• the UK's national security is strengthened by protecting information and information systems at risk of compromise.
• the UK's economic and social well-being is enhanced as government, businesses and citizens realise the full benefits of ICT.

The strategic outcomes will be achieved by focusing on three objectives. These will have important implications for the way that organisations, particularly within government, do business.

Objective 1: Clear and effective information risk management by organisations.
This comprises: clear board-level ownership and accountability for information risks will be required; where information is shared, a single point of risk ownership will be identified.

Objective 2: Agreement upon and compliance with approved and appropriate IA standards.
This will be achieved by organisations, particularly those within, or linking to government, operating within a national framework of IA common standards, and through trust and confidence in the use of information maintained through an effective model of compliance with these standards.

Objective 3: The development and availability of appropriate IA Capabilities.
The aim will be for Government to work more closely with wider sectors in the development of ‘Capabilities’ to enable organisations to manage information risks. These capabilities include: availability of the right products and services; coordinated and appropriate efforts on innovation and research; improved professionalism; and awareness and outreach.

Since the publication of the National Information Assurance Strategy (NIAS) work has been commissioned by the Cabinet Office to review data handling across government departments and agencies. The outcome of the interim review has shown the NIAS to be both robust and consistent in its approach.

Below are examples of where the sharing of information between government departments will have a positive impact on the people we serve:

• The security services, the Courts and the police have several lists of people who should be prevented from leaving the country. In 2005 these lists were shared electronically and matched against air passenger lists provided by civil airlines. This has led to over 1,100 arrests following over 14,000 alerts to border agencies generated by the new electronic border control system.
• It currently takes up to six weeks to process a free school meal application. Many parents are put off by the complexity of the process. Through transformational government we are demonstrating that this could be reduced to four hours by sharing data securely between DWP, DCSF and the local council.

Identity

If a person is entitled to help from the government from more than one source it can save them time, hassle and preserve their dignity by joining those services up. To do this accurately and efficiently, it is vital to be able to identify the person in a number of different delivery systems; for example, the retirement pension, pension credit, meals on wheels, council tax benefit and housing benefit. Such personalised services can only be delivered efficiently and securely if government systems know who people are.

Outside government, in an increasingly complex world, people need to be able to assert and prove their identity more often. People also seek reassurance that others are not using false identities to commit serious crime.

During 2006 and 2007 the government has continued to test and evaluate the single, secure ID proposed in the National Identity Scheme. Progress has included:

• Exploratory work between Identity and Passport Service, and DWP on developing a shared identity service from the Customer Information System.
• More secure issuing of passports to first time applicants through the introduction of face-to-face interviews, rather than purely paper-based applications.
• Driving licences being made more secure against counterfeiting.
• An identity and “right to work” pilot service, run by the Identity and Passport Service and the Border and Immigration Agency, with UKvisas.
• Innovative research on using technology to protect privacy in the operation of the National Identity Scheme, initiated through joint work between government, industry and privacy experts.
• Development work on standards which could apply across government on business processes, data and assurance of identity.

The Public Private Forum on Identity [External website] set up by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and chaired by Sir James Crosby, engaging a wide variety of organisations and individuals in examining the scope for partnership between the public and private sectors on identity management to deliver benefits for individuals as citizens or consumers. This was published on 6 March 2008.