Transformational Government in the UK

Transformational Government - Enabled by Technology November 2005, lays out three key objectives:

  1. Services enabled by IT must be designed around the citizen or business, not the provider, and provided through modern, co-ordinated delivery channels. This will improve the customer experience, achieve better policy outcomes, reduce paperwork burdens and improve efficiency by reducing duplication and routine processing, leveraging delivery capacity and streamlining processes.
  2. Government must move to a shared services culture in the front-office, back-office, in information and in infrastructure, and release efficiencies by standardisation, simplification and sharing.
  3. There must be broadening and deepening of government's professionalism in terms of the planning, delivery, management, skills and governance of IT enabled change. This will result in more successful outcomes; fewer costly delivery failures; and increased confidence by citizens and politicians in the delivery of change by the public services.

Within the UK the Governments 2004 Spending Review tasks Local Authorities with improving productivity by 2.5% per annum from their 2004/5 base line by 2007/8 - that represents efficiency gains of 6.45 billion.

  • Half of these gains must release resource's for front line service delivery.
  • To achieve this, Local Authorities are directed to restructure their working methods; to combine, eliminate or automate their processes.
  • Consequently, Local Authorities are embarking on a major business process redesign, looking to become client facing and investing heavily in software and training to enable wide reaching organisational change.
  • Local Authorities must realise savings and demonstrate how the productivity gains have been achieved.

Successful transformation of organisations is not easy and takes time and according to the Harvard Business Review:

"Many fail miserably. Why? Too many of us don't realize that transformation is a process not an event. It advances through a series of stages that build on each other. And it takes years. Under pressure to accelerate the process, we give into the temptation to skip stages. But shortcuts never work."

People, at all levels of the organisation, are the key to effective and lasting change. Sounds obvious, yet there are many examples of technology projects that have failed to deliver the expected benefits because work has not been reorganised to take advantage of the technology or the technology did not support the work being performed.

Enabling transformation in UK Local Authorities

Instream Services is working in conjunction with knowledgeable organisations and partners within the Local Authority community to create a solution that will enable transformational government based on a solution for implementing sustainable organisational excellence.

The Instream Services solution will enable Local Authorities to:

  • Embed changemanagement capability into their organisation and not rely on outside consultants
  • Use role-centric tools - including Role Activity Diagrams (RADs) - as the base for defining all aspects of work
  • Adopt the best practice organisation and processes approved by the DCLG as their target To-Be
  • Monitor service delivery performance to ensure that improvements are realised to meet specified targets
  • Reduce the burden of collecting KPI data as it will be a by-product of performing the work
  • Participate in shared service or outsourcing arrangements with no loss of visibility over data or performance in marked contrast to current PPP and private sector outsourcing experiences
  • Rapidly develop new software applications to support the future-state processes, much more cost effectively than traditional software development techniques



The key to the Instream Services approach is the clear separation of information about work from the actual work using business events to track live operations and provide an on-line and up-to-date view of the status and content of the work.

Views of work information are tailored for each role within the organisational structure to ensure that the right information is available at the right time to the right person. This picture can be used to understand not only the current status of work but also the history of any work activity. The current status and historic information is used to measure productivity, quality and customer service.

Because the Instream Services solution will be user driven it is exactly in accord with the recommendation of the Government IT Strategy document (November 2005) in which Government has noted that Local Authorities are not receiving the expected benefits from externally imposed Business Process Reorganisation exercises typically delivered by the large consulting firms. The Government is directing Local Authorities towards undertaking their own process design and analysis which is exactly the area that Instream Services excels.

Instream Services is working actively with SPRINT, which places RADs at the heart of its business process re-engineering methodology to help deliver solutions where the citizen, or business, becomes the focus of service delivery which is a core requirement of the Transformational Government strategy.