Uber for potholes: Driving the consumerisation of public services
Services we take for granted are getting a face lift. From black cabs to Uber, takeaways to Deliveroo and from hotels to AirBnB — the speed, efficiency, relevance and price of services we thought were ‘good enough’ have become great, thanks to business innovation and disruptive tech.
In the business world, the rise of predictive analytics, crowd-sourcing, wearable computing and other [potentially disruptive technology trends provide huge opportunities. But they don’t only impact the private sector — they’re also big opportunities for government to bring innovation to old ways of working, and join up disconnected processes.
It seems to me the biggest potential for innovation in the public sector is in how services are delivered to citizens who are increasingly mobile and connected. Governments could become more responsive, efficient and functional if they adopt disruptive technologies to reinvent the way they operate, and interact with customers.
There are benefits for everyone in driving digital transformation in public services: local authorities, government departments, regulators, police forces, health, and education. Some councils are already deriving benefits from digital disruption, and they started by transforming their content, communication or collaboration systems — all of which are great places to begin, as I mentioned in my most recent article.
A few years ago Peterborough council has moved all of it’s content to Box from shared and personal drives, and in the process made a change from Office 365 to Google Apps ( a good reason why your content should be platform independent).
But public sector organisations aren’t just seeing returns from transforming their internal operations. Giving citizens the option to interact with public services via an app, rather than the switchboard, is also a huge area ripe for innovation.
Take the London Borough of Lewisham for example. Its LoveLewisham web and mobile apps have been insanely successful. They let people report and manage a range of environmental issues, such as graffiti and fly-tipping, snapping a photo and submitting it electronically.
LoveLewisham has been around for a dozen years, but has been updated over time and integrated into back-office systems. Since 2006, through members of the public using the apps, the Borough has seen a 73% reduction in graffiti and 53% drop in fly tipping. They’ve also managed to shorten graffiti removal times — from 2.78 days to less than half a day. In financial terms, call centre activity has dropped by a third, saving £500,000 over the past five years.
I find initiatives like this really exciting, but it’s really just the beginning. Some public sector organisations are using self-service kiosks (McDonalds has an excellent in-store Kiosk to learn from), and applying analytics to customer data to understand service usage and trends, and predict future demand, linking it to precise locations through geo-mapping like Surrey Heath who’ve integrated back scanned PDF’s into a public GIS system to enable citizen self-service for planning.
In healthcare, organisations are starting to use wearables to monitor patients, for example Parkinson’s sufferers, in order to analyse the results clinically. One Information of Things (IoT) invention embeds a sensor into a medicine dispenser, to track when and whether the medicine has been taken, and alert or remind the patient or doctor accordingly: which is ideal for elderly patient care.
Then there’s smart buildings that can track, manage or automate everything from car parking to lights and dispensable hand towels.
The technology to do these sorts of things is emerging fast, so we need to be ready, dreaming big dreams. There are just so many opportunities to make services more efficient, speed up delivery times, give citizens more detailed, more relevant information, and, most importantly, to save money in a sector where budgets are tight. The idea of apps to give citizens faster access to public services, whether it’s reporting graffiti, missed recycling collections or getting potholes attended to, is just the beginning. So, what’s on your drawing board?
If you are looking for assistance with driving change through digital transformation, have a look at this customer video story, on how AstraZeneca standardised on Box’s content sharing and collaboration platform across thousands of employees in more than 100 countries.
