It all starts with Journey Mapping
SAIDS is working with a wide range of partners in the public and third sectors. The starting point for all our work with partners is Journey Mapping. But why is this?
At the root, the SAIDS project demonstrates an answer to the question:
“How can the cost, risk, effort and friction that citizens and practitioners experience when moving between and through services be reduced in a cost effective manner?”
We see a combination of unnecessary cost, risk, effort and friction in all public and charitable services. For example:
Citizens incur costs when they have to attend a service in person, to bring documents to show that they are who they say they are or that they are entitled to something. Practitioners, those on the front line of a service, incur costs for their organisations when they have to travel to meet a citizen to view such documents. There are also significant admin costs inherent in operating many customer relationship management systems.
There are risks of transferring data by email, over the phone or on paper. These risks include data being copied incorrectly and being exposed to people who should not have access to it.
Effort is required every time a citizen is asked to complete a new service registration, fill out another form, and explain what it is they need again. Sometimes practitioners, such as link workers, are even employed to take on some of the effort inherent in the public and charitable service ecosystem on behalf of citizens.
Friction occurs when completing a task is harder than it needs to be and ultimately risks that citizens will disengage and practitioners will find work-arounds.
Think about the overall experience of services that have high levels of cost, risk, effort and friction. People using a service always appreciate when a practitioner has been able to help them. However, it can feel like you are being passed around and nobody is actually able to provide help that makes a difference. The more disadvantages you face the more it can feel like this.
However, if you run a service, have you ever thought of the cost, risk, effort and friction that the citizens that use it experience? When you use services yourself do you ever think that there must be a better way?
What we find is that very often this cost, risk, effort and friction has never been properly identified before. That’s why we start with journey mapping. Journey mapping is a common technique in service design, marketing and other disciplines. Journey mapping the current service enables service providers to identify where data needs to be captured and shared. Given current paper-based and IT systems, these points of data sharing usually map to the key points of cost, risk, effort and friction in the service as currently provided.
From there we can start to look at how digitally enabling the service, by creating web apps to capture and share relevant information from a citizen’s Personal Data Store (PDS), will make a difference.
The SAIDS project is producing a set of videos, a legacy from the project, so that public and third sector organisations can continue to use the Web App Generator to digitally enable their service. The first of these videos is about how we suggest doing journey mapping as a foundation for digitally enabling services and removing cost, risk, effort and friction. You can watch it here
