I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking recently about what the “real” purpose of my employer is. In common with many other public sector bodies, we’ve outsourced bits of our support and front line services (and others were already in private hands by default). When we do this, however, we both lose and gain something: it’s not always a good idea (it seems, or maybe we just don’t do it very well each time) as we seem to be sort of “hollowed out” and we lose influence. If people have a problem with the way the roads are surfaced, do they talk to the council responsible or do they talk directly to the company that resurfaces the roads?
In this sort of climate it is tempting (and I have succumbed) to envisaging this kind of process taken to its logical conclusion. If a council commissions all of its services, what is it for? This thought experiment has led me to start considering local (and maybe central) government as a platform business that exists to
- understand the needs of people and places under its care
- search for funding opportunities that might help with those needs
- curate a set of service providers and help to ensure the markets for each are broadly functional
- provide a set of levers for those with a political mandate to push in order to deliver on political priorities
- provide intelligence to all so that commissioning decisions can be undertaken intelligently.
So what we might refer to as “the council” becomes quite small really and is a hub – centred around a platform containing
- expertise in the funding landscape, performance management, public engagement, (big P) Politics and data
- a business intelligence toolset and competencies to crunch all the available data
- a web channel that ties services together (in a service-oriented architecture style of thing)
- document/records management that provides an archive of policy, actions and decisions
- Master data management (ensures we don’t double-count people or places in our calculations, and ensures joined up case management)
- Data warehousing (performance management, demographic, needs data on the full range of services)
- middleware to join processes up.
There’s perhaps some political (big P again, sorry) dynamite here in that it might be seen to imply privatisation or outsourcing on a massive scale (on the scale recently attempted – and abandoned – by some other councils such as Suffolk) but I need to stress that it doesn’t necessarily mean that. It does, however, necessitate a *logical* split between those bodies/teams/people/partners that commission services and those that provide those services. The split occurs because the service provider has a different business model to the commissioner.
In fact, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the vast majority of commissioning is done by actors outside of the council: we have personal budgets for healthcare, politicians have local budgets, other authorities or public/third sector bodies may fund developments, even the private sector might utilise this platform to commission work.
[Although my focus is on local government I wonder if this approach also extends to central government. Both exist to do broadly the same thing, just on a different scale, both currently depend on partners and service providers to do the majority of the work, and both are relatively poor at commissioning as opposed to service delivery. Maybe, maybe not.]
If we are a platform business, then that model dictates that we build for scale and reuse, in a service-oriented style. And why should each council build its own platform if we are all doing the same thing?
Martin Howitt's blog 
Interesting post Martin,
A couple of observations and you may have eluded to them but I didn’t pick it up explicitly.
1) When you refer to the “council” and you state politics, does this actually mean accountability of local services or do you mean the prioritisation of services?
2) If localgov were to become a platform then it would need to provide a resolution centre of some kind (basically complaints) is this what you mean by performance management?
3) The web channel wouldn’t need to tie things together from a technology perspective at all, but it would need to ensure that it promoted where the accountability was…in that we already (like most councils) have a diverse web landscape – the challenge and question is do we want this to be cleaner and clearer in terms of accountability or are we happy to accept a very small centre and a directory of “approved services”. In my view this is the difference between localgov choosing an Amazon model or a Yell.com model.
4) You state that the council would need to be a hub, but are you actually saying that the council should provide these technologies at the centre or could it simply commission these capabilities in, much like the rest of it…What you have done it outline a set of requirements that need to be met, it doesn’t mean that we as a council should actually build it ourselves? Of should we?
I agree that localgov shouldn’t build this alone, the problem here is there is no formal mechanism to actually force localgov to work together on resolving this…
thanks for the comment Carl. I’ll try and answer your questions:
1) I mean both. If the platform doesn’t support both things, it isn’t “government” in my view. There’s some detail in there that I’m still thinking about.
2) “complaints” to me means 2 different things: firstly, non-specific grumbles about how much things cost and how the “council” does its business (these should be addressed by providing clear, high quality, in-depth information – ie business intelligence and records mgmt); second, individual casework relating either to a political process or the operations of a service provider. There’s a monitoring and arbitration role for the council as well as performance management but service providers for local gov must also accept external “advanced caseworker” access to their systems.
3) I strongly believe it’s an Amazon model rather than a Yell.com one. The service provider should be as strongly identified with the Council as possible and the council must own the service. Commissioning something out doesn’t mean we wash our hands of the problems of service delivery.
4) It *could* be commissioned, but I suspect that as far as possible the IP for this will want to be kept in house. Although sharing a platform with other councils would work (and sharing expertise is vital especially in the early days).
There’s also something about customer development – if we build a platform it doesn’t necessarily mean that councils will want to use it. So I would vote to pilot this somewhere forward-thinking and annexe other areas as and when we can.
A very quick reply, thank you.
On your last point:
“4) It *could* be commissioned, but I suspect that as far as possible the IP for this will want to be kept in house”
I didn’t mean commission the work itself, more that we merely commission the platform to support this…
There are some reasons why i can see you would say that we wouldn’t want to, but i’m not sure about the assumptions here if i’m honest…
firstly, my view would be that we understand what is required first, then test the market, confirm what is achievable then commission (either from ourselves or someone else) otherwise how can we be confident of best value, if the market isn’t capable, we should have a role in stimulating it and helping it grow!
…also if our in-house provision is sufficient and worked, we could exploit this and “resell” it across other authorities as a shared service. This is a different business model and would need to be seen differently (it would likely become a joint venture) but would in fact end up being commissioned by the council to deliver it anyway…hope that makes sense
Second that some people perhaps fear the complete commissioning of all services, but that doesn’t mean and you eluded to this that it all goes into the private sector…you could have a situation where all aspects of delivery are turned into social enterprises and be commissioned by the council. My main point here is that commissioning a service could result in the status quo, but with a different relationship between service delivery and commissioning.
Much needs to be thought through and this is the tip of the iceberg and actually depends on the local appetite of any council as to how far along the commissioning spectrum they can go.
In general, agree with your analysis there – in a sense, it’s actually quite close to the film-industry model. The one part that isn’t much in that film-industry model, and, worryingly, seems absent here, is governance.
Outsourcing is fine in theory: but not if there’s no governance. (Look at what happened when the US largely outsourced its wars to various ‘contractors’ Who-Shall-Be-Nameless-For-Legal-Reasons, without adequate governance or controls or accountability or, well, anything, really…)
That said, I think you’re onto something really important here: hence the critique, because I definitely want it to work! Might be worthwhile, though, to rework that list above to include the feedback-loops, perhaps as per Viable System Model system-3* and the like? Happy to help in that, if that would be any use to you?