Cabinet Office Chief Information Officer

Key achievements over the year

The Department delivers 13 million payments to customers reliably each week, worth £115 billion in a year, and provides the UK’s number one recruitment website, with six million job searches each week. Every working day the Department:

• helps over 6,000 customers into jobs;
• conducts 45,000 adviser interviews;
• accepts over 19,000 job vacancies from employers;
• takes over 64,500 calls to Jobcentre Plus contact centres; and
• deals with over 15,000 calls to the Disability and Carers Service helpline.

Building on achievements
The Department’s £6bn investment programme, over five years from 2003, has delivered major improvements in customer service:

• Employer Direct online continues to be the UK’s largest jobsite; 400,000 jobs are available online [External Website].
• the Customer Management System in Jobcentre Plus [External Website] enables information from customers to be used on-screen to decide benefit entitlement more quickly.
• 19 million pension forecasts issued by The Pension Service since 2005 help people plan for retirement.
• National rollout of wave one of the Pensions Transformation Programme enables State Pension, Pension Credit, Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit to now be claimed in one free phone call to 0800 991 234.
• the Disability and Carers ServiceHelpline deals with about 4.7 million calls a year, with 95% of callers rating it ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’. (Source: The Pension, Disability and Carers Service was created on 1 April 2008, incorporating what were formerly the Pension Service, and the Disability and Carers Service)

The Department is developing its business strategy, designing the Department’s services around the needs of its customers. One of the features will be in Directgov, showing customers' entitlement to benefits and giving access to further information: a self’help tool for the citizen.

Transforming the Department’s IT capability
The Department is transforming its IT infrastructure to serve new demands and higher expectations. Realigned contracts with the Department’s major IT suppliers are on track to deliver better service and technology at marketcompetitive prices. Over the last 18 months this programme, one of the largest in Europe, has:

• Upgraded the Department’s IT infrastructure benefiting staff and customers by providing a more resilient and reliable service at a lower cost to the taxpayer, including new, greener desktop computers.
• Installed the Government’s first truly business–service based network joining up voice, data and video and new contact centre technology – to manage customer interactions virtually across our business in the UK.
• Equipped the Department with the increased capacity to join up services for customers while reducing service times and costs.

The Department has developed a new IT Strategy to enable its Change Programme. It uses proven IT solutions that are less complex, more flexible and more reliable. It has also created a single Application Delivery Centre to develop and deliver the strategy coherently, by bringing together IT expertise and resource from across the Department.

Taking forward the Service Transformation Agenda

The Department continues to contribute to the successful delivery of the Government-wide Service Transformation Delivery Plan by:

• Leading Directgov from April 2008 to become the number one digital service for the citizen.
• Leading the Tell Us Once project to reduce the number of contacts people have to make when telling Government about changes affecting them.
• Leading the development of the Customer Information System to join up services around the customer across Government.
• Leading the Government’s Supplier Management Initiative, by building on the Department’s experience in managing supplier.
• Extending the pilots with HMRC and Local Authorities to provide a better service for customers moving into and out of work.
• Taking on development and operation of the Government Gateway allowing it to be exploited on behalf of Government with other DWP IT assets.
• establishing a Customer Insight Function to generate a deeper knowledge and understanding of our customers – to inform the design, development and delivery of policies and services.