1.2.1: Reorganization
Reorganise the structure of government itself in order to better serve the needs of citizens. Other Information:
First, the Federal government in Canada is seeking to reorganise the structure of government itself in order to better serve
the needs of citizens. In particular, it is looking to break the end-to-end service responsibilities of traditional silo-based
agencies, by in effect creating a wholesale/retail split within government. In this approach, the "retail" function of government
- that is, the responsibility for direct contact with citizens - is being centralised within a single organisation: Service
Canada. Under this model, Service Canada is becoming responsible for the service delivery function across all channels - face-to-face,
contact centre, web - with relevant staff and budgets being transferred from other agencies. This is in many ways desirable
but the obvious difficulty is that making structural changes to government is extremely hard. The sheer scale of the government
business means that any changes need to be implemented carefully, over a long period of time, and take account of the inherent
risks in organisational restructuring. The second approach is to look for mechanisms to join-up services from all parts of
government in a way that makes sense to citizens, without attempting to restructure those parts of government. Conceptually,
this leads to a model where the existing structure of government continues to act as a supplier of services, but intermediated
by a "virtual" business infrastructure based around customer needs. A top-level view of such a virtual, market-based approach
to citizen service transformation is set out at Figure 4 below. This model, which has been developed by CS Transform, is based
initially on our experience as senior civil servants in the UK, creating the operating model for Directgov, the flagship multi-channel
service which sits at the heart of the UK's citizen service transformation programme. Since then, the model has been enhanced
through our experience in helping a wide range of governments implement citizen service transformation.
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