BPM In Government: A key enabler for Citizen friendly service delivery
Business Process Management as a management discipline and key area of IT adoption is now well accepted in corporate world. As world economy faces the prospects of prolonged recession, the management focus towards process efficiency and productivity is bound to increase and BPM offers great opportunities in those areas.
However, recession or no recession, public sector and governments all over the world have always faced the challenges of delivering better services to citizens within the constraints of limited budgets. Over the last decade, with the improved availability of information and improved access to services, the percentage of population falling within the target group of various citizen services has increased. At the same time, the expectations of citizen have also increased when it comes to speed and efficiency of providing services.
Across the globe, public sector has responded to these challenges by adoption of more and more technology enablers for conducting its business. This adoption of technology for government, popularly referred to as ‘e-government’, has focused on improving the information availability, enabling two way communication between citizens and governments (grievances, suggestions mechanisms) and new interaction mediums for providing government services (service provisioning, user charges and tax payment, utility payments etc.)
However, in my opinion, for e-governments to be truly effective in terms of meeting ‘citizen expectations’ and delivering ‘more with less’, following key strategic imperatives need to be considered.
• Focus on developing a ‘consistent’ and ‘transparent’ service delivery framework, going beyond current approach of creating a ‘web based façade’ over existing processes. At the implementation level, such ‘Citizen service delivery framework’ (as I call it) will have the capabilities of handing end to end provisioning of citizen services with key technical features around ‘consolidated view for a citizen’, ‘Identity awareness’ and flexible integration with core back end provisioning systems.
• Removing any elements of ‘discretion’ and ‘ambiguity’ for applying rules and regulations for majority of high volume services required by common citizens
• Provide internal users (process executioners) with more efficient ‘tools of work’
• Creating a ‘Service delivery framework’ at global level of government and aligning specific departments initiatives to that.
Business Process Management as a discipline and toolset lends itself very well to these objectives. Watch out for next blog for some specific areas where BPM can play the key role at ground level in governments and some key considerations for BPM adoption approach.
