‘Federated Service Delivery’ — it’s a bit of a mouthful and sounds rather too much like something a committee of the United Nations might come up with. It’s the working name of one of the Better Public Services, Result 10 actions, Action 5 to be precise, and it’s about taking a truly customer-centric view of delivering government services.
Last year, Result 10 did extensive customer research that asked nearly 2000 New Zealanders what they thought of government services. Customers told us they experienced a lot of pain points when dealing with government services, such as having to approach several different government agencies before finding the one that could actually deal with their enquiry. They also told us that government digital services weren’t meeting their needs and that they were less likely to complete transactions digitally with government than with the private sector.
Life is about events, not agencies
This means enabling customers to use the channels and service providers of their choice, and allowing them to complete all of the government service requirements around their life events without having to navigate the range of government agencies and repeating the same tasks again and again. For web practitioners, it means designing digital channels that support the end-to-end service experience of the customer rather than just individual agency transactions.
Federated Service Delivery is closely related to Result 10, Action 4 — ‘Consolidate and rationalise the government web domain and rewrite service information to make transactions easier to find and use.’
Over the coming months we’ll be sharing more of our case studies and research. We’d love to hear from anyone else working in the federated service delivery area, and welcome your questions about what we’re up to.
