Thinking about digital services

An open letter, originally circulated early 2015

As a long-term sustainable business we need to ensure that our digital services, infrastructure, and user experience meet the needs of an increasing and ever-evolving customer base. This will enable us to meet our business priorities for 2015–2017 of greater efficiency and quality service, and the 2020 target of 75% of our customer transactions occurring online.

An important point to note is that this call for action is not to say that there currently isn’t the necessary provision in place. We have a strong overarching digital strategy to steer and guide our efforts, but there will be a need for greater oversight from the perspective of digital service design and management, rather than purely project orientated, IT systems, or strategic viewpoints.

We’re at a point in time that presents a great opportunity to be able to build, design and deliver these services from end-to-end, to form a robust and delightful platform for interaction without the constraints of legacy architecture. Though this will require specialist skills and a more open, holistic and iterative working culture to overcome the restrictions and rigid operating nature of existing systems, we have already begun to make progress towards realising this opportunity.

What has been done so far?

To date, some real tangible progress has been made that offers an indicator of our underlying commitment to technology and digital as a whole, providing a deliberate sense of direction that we can continue to build on to reap the benefits of digital transformation:

Where are we now?

At the moment our efforts are heavily fragmented and slightly weighted in favour of provision for prospective customers, with projects such as the e-sign up/tenancy initiative leading the way. However, with digital services, the real benefit often comes from the efficiencies and service satisfaction improvements seen when applied properly in the context of existing customers that form the bulk of our legacy audience.

There are two fundamental aspects to the way we approach digital currently that are outlined below; infrastructure and platform, and organisational management.

Infrastructure

Historically, we’ve taken a ‘product’ mindset when developing new services online, by which each individual service is regarded almost in isolation to the whole offer. Each product is developed and integrated with existing systems and external services in unique and often bespoke ways, using varying standards of design, authentication and web technologies.

This approach leaves us with a plethora of different services that all utilise similar components and principles, though fail to come together as a unified extension of a platform, making it extremely difficult to access and analyse vital data and metrics of usage and success:

Management

The same could be said for the organisational management approach. We treat digital projects as isolated, discrete pieces of activity and at times fail to utilise some collective joined up thinking where obvious overlaps occur:

What could the solution look like?

If we were to alter our approach to building services to increase efficiency and satisfaction, we might do well to consider placing the platform at the centre and building an ecosystem of services that are extensions of this — that can be analysed and iterated upon — with an intrinsic link through which data, credentials and users can flow. On a macro scale, this is more commonly recognised as a systems-orientated architecture (SOA) approach, within which (as it’s most basic function), all services offer specific functions (singularly or in combination with each other) and must communicate with each other even though they may exist as discrete services.

In practice this would mean placing the Group website at the heart of the system, and utilise the open source framework as a base for an extensible platform. Each service would be required to be developed as an extension of this platform, using a shared single sign on (SSO) approach to authentication and authorisation, and integrate with third party systems through web services that are robust and scalable.

This approach will require a dramatic cultural shift, moving from thinking driven through traditional hierarchical structures, to behaviour that is both digital and agile in form and adaptive to shifting customer needs in nature.

As noted by one prominent and respected digital lead within the sector, JayneHilditch, “Websites get commissioned by Communications & Marketing teams. IT systems tend to be commissioned by IT & Housing teams. Online services get lost in the gaps in between”. This scenario should sound familiar, as it’s not too distant from our current situation and way of operating. It is not to say that we are unable to deliver new services, but perhaps integral decisions are made in isolated silos, as service ownership is unclear, with guiding principles that are too far removed from operational aspects to serve as an overarching strategy.

In Orbit, Project Managers do their utmost to deliver projects efficiently, aided by Project Boards and Sponsors. Within the latter two groups — it is clear that the appetite and intention to approach ‘digital’ in the right way is there, but the critical understanding from a digital service perspective may be missing.

I would argue that there is a need to apply both a level of technical understanding for robust systems infrastructure, and commercial awareness for the importance of customer centric service and experience within digital services to our process for managing projects of this nature.

How do we take this forward?

Recommendations

As our Digital Inclusion Manager @TimD_Orbit previously outlined, this platform idea would essentially form the core of our ‘Digital by default’ customer service and systems strategies.

There are several components to this approach; the following apply to the organisational management of digital initiatives that should be backed by the infrastructure/technical platform ideas outlined above:

1. We would need to ensure that an agreed standard and service design minimum is adhered to for any existing/new project, consisting of a flexible and extensible systems and data architecture approach with the goal of enabling seamless transfer between channels for customer, for authentication and for data
2. This could be maintained by a Digital Service Manager(s) (either as a new role, or additional responsibility), assigned as each project arises, whom would continue to monitor the service and iterate in conjunction with the project team/owner throughout the lifecycle of the service
3. Inextricably linked to the success of this approach will be the need for operational planning and performance measures to explicitly favour digital approaches. As an example, a metric of customer service success could shift from targeted call volume increases, to restrictions in volume in favour of efficiencies via digital channels. The method by which we achieve this would need to be agreed by all invested parties, with the ideal method being that digital channel’s service standards exceed those of others.

What does this look like in practice?

As there are a number of projects already in motion, with each at varying stages of completion, it wouldn’t be feasible in our business or reasonable to expect for there to be a large scale change within a short timeframe.

What we can do, is begin to put in place the measures outlined above; use the standards to assess the status of current projects and determine how well they fare vs the ideal, explore the idea of shifting the responsibility for maintaining and applying these standards, and finally make sure that all business areas that play an important part in meeting our digital ambitions have targets that promote this and foster progress.

As far as aligning our existing and currently proposed technologies across projects to form a platform based ecosystem of services, we should look to form a phased plan of alignment that culminates in all of our digital service offerings meeting the above standards — conforming with every aspect of design, system architecture and user experience considered — within an agreed timeframe.