NZ gets proactive: 'integrated services' focused on life events

New Zealand’s public servants are working towards a joined-up government that can proactively provide government services in response to changes in people’s lives, positive or otherwise.

According to Darryl Carpenter, who is leading the charge towards Integrated Services at the Department of Internal Affairs, such a thing is much easier to imagine in New Zealand, where the two-tier government “essentially” operates as a single entity.

Speaking at the GovInnovate conference in Canberra this month, Carpenter said Australian bureaucrats told him it was “barking mad” to try and upturn and re-arrange service delivery in this way. But it is beginning to work, he contends, helped along by the small-town culture of New Zealand where “everyone knows each other” — or at least it seems that way.

“So, rather than having a program that is the be-all and end-all and kind of centre-led and all of those things, we’ve retained that kind of New Zealand way of doing things, where it’s very much an agency-led and a decentralised model,” he said.

“It relies heavily on relationships; we’re only two steps removed in New Zealand compared to most other countries [where] it would be six or seven steps.”

To explain how integrated services is beginning to work, it helps to remember what happens in government when there’s a big natural disaster, says Carpenter. People snap into action and do their best to help out, co-operation seems to suddenly become easier and quibbles about formal processes are kept to a minimum.

Government agencies focus on “what the citizens need at that particular moment” and work from makeshift offices like tents and camper vans if need be. Carpenter recalled what happened when the big quakes hit Christchurch: “We had cross-agency teams like the New Zealand government had never experienced before.”

“So the Christchurch [earthquake] showed us what joined-up government could be,” he said, noting it is “amazing how much change can occur” to legislation, policy settings and public service processes in such an environment.

Can’t we do that all the time?

After the crisis, it wasn’t long before “policy and the rules caught up” and public servants went back into their agency silos. This was like a backwards step, in Carpenter’s view, considering everyone had proven they could collaborate far more.

Now he is working towards a way government can behave more like it does after a flood or an earthquake all the time, having taken on the job of designing and implementing the first examples of Integrated Services at the start of the year.

Services, he explained, would respond to “what citizens need at a particular moment in time — it may be a time of tragedy, but it also may be in a time of significant growth or advancement or an opportunity”.

Proactive delivery is about recognising when people’s circumstances change, perhaps “from well to unwell [or] from non-vulnerable to vulnerable” in government parlance, and making any new entitlements available to them.

“We already know all about them,” said Carpenter. “We know sufficient [information] within the government agencies, or those entities who are working with us — NGOs or private sector or whoever it happens to be.

“[We have] all the information we need, but we make people stand in another line, call another call centre, then fill in another form.

“So what would happen if we actually just tipped that on its head? What if we made the entitlements completely available at the time and place when people are perfectly entitled to those?”

One thing that would probably happen is the emergence of privacy concerns with phrases like “we already know all about them” being bandied around. Government, therefore, needs to be open with the public about the exact nature of the data sharing required to provide integrated services.

The digital means to a service delivery revolution

Carpenter sees himself as a public service outsider, having joined the Department of Internal Affairs in 2014 to work on its role in the Better Public Services program.

Making it easier for citizens to interact with government digitally is one of the goals of BPS, and uptake of digital channels is the key metric by which success is judged: the target is to have 70% of the “most common transactions” with citizens performed digitally by December, 2017.

Now in charge of integrated services, Carpenter is concerned not just with meeting the Better Public Services digital transformation targets, but with how they are met. He has his eyes on a bigger goal: to “transform government services as we know them” so they are truly citizen-centric and proactively delivered in response to the changing affairs of citizens. He now sees the end point of digital transformation as a situation where everything people need from government is ready to go when required.

One particularly useful element of the BPS program, Carpenter says, is the appointment of three “functional leaders” as whole-of-government change-makers. His boss, DIA chief executive Colin MacDonald, is functional leader for ICT strategy and action, as he is also the government’s CIO.

Unfortunately, according to Carpenter, the “technology-led transformation of government” did not progress within the BPS framework as quickly as was hoped when it began in 2012.

“As programs came into being, we were all kind of poised waiting for something to happen, and absolutely nothing happened,” he said, explaining that events like the global financial crisis intervened and competed for the attention of ministers and public servants alike.

As one way to rebuild the momentum, MacDonald, as the ICT functional leader, set up a new Partnership Framework in 2015 “to support the goal of a single, coherent ICT ecosystem supporting radically transformed public services” according to the DIA website.

Carpenter described this as “essentially the coalition of the willing” — a group of 15-20 public service chief executives and deputy chief executives who came together to build new “focus and momentum” behind digital transformation, in line with MacDonald’s core principle for all his work as government CIO: “centrally led, collaboratively delivered”.  Progress towards the BPS targets and success in individual digital projects — such as the world’s first fully online passport applications in another part of Internal Affairs — helped too.

Carpenter notes that Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Bill English had begun to take particular interest in the moves towards joined-up government too.

Just do it, the New Zealand way

The birth of a child was the first life event chosen as a focal point for integrated services, which are developed based on customer journey mapping like other service redesign processes. According to Carpenter, this proceeded in a “classic New Zealand way” — public servants just went ahead and gave it a try.

“The system settings weren’t conducive to joined-up government,” he explained. “The system levers and opportunities and even the technology platforms weren’t in place. But a whole lot of good folk doing the best they can with what they had — limited funding, limited focus — managed to achieve a whole bunch of things.

“Progress was made. As soon as you make progress you get leeway or leverage with ministers or those who need to take notice of such things.”

MacDonald’s cross-cutting partnership framework marshalled leadership support and integrated services are now “well underway” for birth of a child, enrolling in tertiary study, and turning 65. New Zealand’s digital transformation drive is being taken to a new level, says Carpenter. The focus has shifted to building “the digital components” needed for integrated services to work.

“And amazingly, with a group of people, fully committed, and encouraged to succeed with enough oversight from their partnership framework, with the interested ministers kind of keeping an eye on things, fantastic progress has been made.”

Carpenter’s presentation repeatedly came back to this image of public servants just getting on with it, working together across boundaries where needed and relying more on interpersonal relationships and a willingness to work together than more rigid collaborative governance arrangements.

But he also conceded that cross-agency work can be very challenging and is a “learnt skill” for all involved — one he sees demonstrated more often in nonprofit organisations.

“[NGOs] have been doing this for years and been doing it for next to no money. And they’ve been doing it based on relationships.”

While Australia’s federated system of government is a whole different kettle of fish, there is still much value in Carpenter’s advice: come out of the silos more often, build cross-government interpersonal relationships, and don’t overthink joined-up government. Just give it a try, the New Zealand way.

“If you want to shake up the system, and you want to do things differently, then just start.”