The overall goal for the State Services is: A System of world class professional State Services serving the government of the day and meeting the needs of New Zealanders.

A one day conference held at the Westpac Stadium on 19 September focussed on designing and delivering customer-centric services and improving user experiences of government services. The focus was how agencies can collaborate to as part of the E-government Strategy, the Digital Strategy and the Development Goals.

The programme featured a range of people at the forefront of their field from New Zealand and overseas. They offered examples of best practice, the latest research and technology trends and some tools from their wealth of information for agencies to take back and use in their journey towards improved service delivery.

All presentations can be viewed online by clicking on State Services Commission - Driving Government Performance 2007

There keynote addresses were:

Professor Charles Owen, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology (USA), expert in customer centric design.

Towards Customer-centric Government Services, Structured Planning; Generating and Optimizing Insights and Information to Develop Customer-centric Service Systems

Delivering customer-centric government services raises some significant challenges and complexities. If government is to take the "outside-in" view and focus on delivering services from the perspective of the customer experience, agencies need to be prepared to collaborate in ways that stretch current organisational structures and work practices.

Professor Owen discussed how Structured Planning addresses these and other challenges. Structured Planning is a methodology that generates and optimises the insights and information necessary for planning customer-centric service systems, and has the added advantage of enabling traceability of decision-making, a feature that is particularly relevant in an accountability-focused government environment.

Achieving a future of customer-centric services is a complex challenge. Professor Owen reviewed how this challenge can be managed, and how this future can be achieved by systematically removing the unnecessary, simplifying the necessary, and rethinking services from the standpoints of those who must use them.

Len Cook, former UK and NZ Government Statistician focussed on why government agencies should enhance customer centric delivery and the business outcomes to help drive government performance.

The effective application of contemporary information and communications technologies is a critical determinant of organisational achievement and source of process and product innovation as well as productivity improvements.  The major benefits of IT-based change in government often come from extensions to the scope of activity undertaken, and its greater integration with that of critical partners, although the initial focus is on cost savings.  The path of IT developments is more evolutionary than we plan for, as the context within which we work is continually changing.

This change can undermine the fit between costs and benefits of projects.  To manage well it is essential to have an embedded understanding of what makes up success, and strong metrics about the performance of the organisation.  The presentation discussed this through a mix of practical cases from official statistics in NZ and the UK.

Steve Hodgkinson, director of Ovum's government practice in Australia and New Zealand presented 'Looking in the mirror: Reflections and observations on the public sector and its need for a makeover.'

Steve explored the challenges raised by the mismatch between the way public sector organisations operate and our aspirations for how they should or could operate.

He used the eGovernment Chimera concept to articulate the systemic tensions inherent in the public sector and discuss our experiences over the past 5 years or so in harnessing IT as an enabler and catalyst for transforming the way policy and services are developed and provided. Some things have changed for the better, others have remained constant.

The core message is our need to develop ways to live the vision of government as an integrated enterprise, rather than as a collection of independent agencies. Collaboration, sharing, reuse, standardisation and consolidation are the necessary realities from an economic and citizen-centric perspective, but there are many ways to pursue this journey, many cultural barriers and no universal solution. He will discuss the need to think of solutions that are adaptive and organizationally robust to changing economic and political circumstances.

Hugh McPhail, Acting Deputy Commissioner ICT, State Services Commission set the scene for this conference and Mark Prebble, State Services Commissioner, discussed what New Zealanders are looking for from government services and link customer centric services to the development goals. Hon. Annette King closed the conference.

Contact ict.business@ssc.govt.nz for further information.