Tackle the big challenges by understanding the problem better
Civica’s Derek Wise and Microsoft’s Robin Denton recently joined the ‘Truth about Local Government’ podcast hosted by Matt Masters; this is an abridged version of their conversation.
If you were to ask the CEO of a local authority to define the problem they’re trying to solve, they’d most likely answer, “which one?”.
In county, city and town halls every day across the UK, local leaders are trying to solve a plethora of problems, from tackling homelessness to rejuvenating high streets. They’re doing so against a bleak backdrop of ever-tighter budgets, a tough economy and local communities in need of support. As if these weren’t enough, our care system is creaking under enormous strain and councils are struggling to attract the highly-skilled workers they need.
Is technology the panacea to all these problems? As tech sector leaders, you’d probably expect us to answer with an emphatic “yes!”. However, the truth is that technology will only make a real difference if you genuinely understand the problem you’re trying to solve.
Beware tech blindness
Curiosity is the source of all great innovations. Albert Einstein famously remarked, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
Einstein may not have been referring to local authorities and the wider public sector, but he could just as well have been. He understood the crucial importance of drilling down to the fundamental problem to be solved.
In the digital age, technology is often seen as the ‘magic pill’ or ‘silver bullet’ to solve practically every problem, and it’s easy to see why. Today, cloud-based technologies are eliminating forests of paperwork, saving money and helping automate ever-more complex tasks. So, why are we still facing mounting pressures – shouldn’t technology have solved those already?
Local authorities, like so many other organisations (public and private), tend to work in silos. Different departments use an array of digital technologies to solve a myriad of problems, from guaranteeing the safety of elderly residents to ensuring bins are collected on time. We’re seeing real success stories here, with technology playing an increasingly crucial role in improving and, in some cases, saving lives. However, these successes tend to stay within their silos. To get beyond this, leaders need to take a step back and start with the most important question of all – why?
Start with ‘why?’
It is vital to spend time really understanding the fundamental problem that needs to be solved. Otherwise, you end up endlessly procuring new technologies but never achieving that much-desired step change. That’s where many organisations find themselves today; they have the technology but it’s not achieving its true problem-solving potential because, ultimately, they don’t know what that problem is.
The secret to unlocking the true potential of digital technology is really no secret at all. It involves taking a step back and trying to understand the ‘big’ problem that you’re trying to solve. Most organisations have very clear mission statements, rooted above all else in serving their customers. Begin with your mission statement and start asking the big questions. These questions will trigger the right conversations and the right processes across your organisation.
Savour every byte
All public-sector organisations sit on goldmines of data. That golden data, however, is rarely ever together in one seam. Joining together data sets from across different functions can offer a completely new perspective on the problems you’re trying to solve. Crucially, it can also reveal the interplay between those problems, offering a ‘big picture view’ of the challenges facing customers and communities. For example, if a resident is behind on their council tax payments, is it because they’re struggling to pay or might they have wider problems the local authority might be able to help with?
We’re seeing great examples all over the UK of councils looking at how they can pull together data to inform their understanding of not just the citizen, but also the place. For example, being able to identify every incidence of damp and mould in your social housing stock can help to prevent health problems further down the line, improving residents’ quality of life as well as reducing the pressure on the NHS.
We often speak of solutions needing to come from the ground up, but when it comes to data, the approach must come from the top. Leaders (CxOs) need to think holistically at what is needed to tackle the big challenges such as unemployment, care and vulnerability; the data will follow.
Open the digital front-door
The most recent UK census revealed there are 67 million people living in the UK. Around 84 per cent of UK adults (aged 16+) used a smartphone for private use; we’re more digitally connected than ever before. With such a huge proportion of our communities using digital devices, we should be using those same digital devices to engage with them.
That number drops, of course, for over 70s and it’s vital that in embracing digitisation, we don’t leave anyone behind. As well as building a ‘digital front-door’, we must ensure there’s also a ‘verbal front-door’ for customers who still prefer non-digital channels. The challenge is ensuring that we provide exactly the same information and quality of service through digital and non-digital channels.
If it works, copy it
Naturally, there are ‘silos of excellence’. The challenge is how do you create an engine within your organisation to understand where best practice is taking place and then how you can share that across every function? How do you escalate the really excellent use-cases to your executive leaders so that others can copy those ideas?
For great ideas, you must also look more closely at what’s going on ‘down the road’; think about how you can take great ideas from beyond your organisation and replicate them for your customers.
The secret to social value – unlock your data
When we speak to local leaders, social value is top of the agenda. This is hardly surprising; those who chose a career in local government do so for a reason. Day in and day out, they are thinking about how they can help their communities, and this is their way of doing it, by working at those local authorities.
More and more leaders are asking their technology partners about how we can deliver more social value. The answer is we can, but once again it comes down to data.
Data is the secret ingredient which will turn social value from an aspiration into a reality. Without a clear command of data, you can’t generate the insights to inform decisions to make a real difference in people’s lives.
Derek Wise is the chief product and technology officer at Civica. Robin Denton is the director of local government at Microsoft.
