Going above and beyond: how can the private sector meet more than just a contract?

In Britain, you can nev­er pre­dict the weath­er, but that is exact­ly your job if you are
respon­si­ble for grit­ting icy roads to make them safe in freez­ing tem­per­a­tures. But each time Nor­folk Coun­ty Coun­cil grit­ted the most treach­er­ous parts of its 6,200 miles of net­works and bus routes, it would cost over £25,000 of pub­lic mon­ey and some­times, tem­per­a­tures wouldn’t plum­met, leav­ing unused grit on the asphalt. How­ev­er, not grit­ting the roads could result in seri­ous injury or even death.

The coun­cil need­ed a fix for this prob­lem; a sys­tem which let the road itself say when it need­ed grit­ting. Capi­ta pro­vid­ed the coun­cil with IoT sen­sors, that were then installed in key parts of each road that would inform the coun­cil of road­side tem­per­a­tures.

“I haven’t seen a part­ner­ship work­ing this effec­tive­ly ever,” says Kurt Frary, assis­tant direc­tor of ICT & chief tech­ni­cal offi­cer at Nor­folk Coun­ty Coun­cil. “We spend £3.4m on grit­ting runs every year to keep the roads safe. These are low-cost IoT sen­sors, but they help us grit when we need to grit and not grit when we don’t need to grit, which saves £8,000 per grit run.”

The pub­lic sec­tor can achieve so much more than over­com­ing the British weath­er, says Andy Start, CEO of Capi­ta Pub­lic Ser­vice. “We need to recal­i­brate pub­lic expec­ta­tions of sup­pli­ers pro­vid­ing their ser­vices, not just meet­ing a brief, but solv­ing the need for it in the first place,” says Start. “Capi­ta is help­ing the pub­lic sec­tor move from old­er mod­els of sim­ple con­tract deliv­ery and pro­vide holis­tic solu­tions to real world prob­lems. Post-pan­dem­ic, the mod­els of the past are often not fit for the future. These mod­els need to help accel­er­ate lev­el­ling up, over­com­ing Covid and achiev­ing net zero.”

In many cas­es, the pub­lic need is served by infra­struc­ture that wasn’t enabled for large-scale home work­ing. Capi­ta part­nered with the think tank Demos to study what cit­i­zens want­ed from their post-pan­dem­ic pub­lic sec­tor. ‘The Social State’ report found an over­whelm­ing major­i­ty want­ed to get to know the peo­ple who pro­vide their local ser­vices (71%) as well as know­ing oth­er ser­vices users bet­ter too (64%).

Open­ing up and lever­ag­ing data and tech­nol­o­gy can help organ­i­sa­tions see broad solu­tions, says Start: “The pub­lic sec­tor can see imme­di­ate­ly when some­one miss­es a coun­cil tax pay­ment. But what else can that tell us? We know, with human behav­iour, that if you can­not afford to pay your bills, the first one missed is coun­cil tax. We can see this per­son may be strug­gling with oth­er bills or issues too, allow­ing us to get ahead of the curve and help peo­ple and com­pa­nies at the same time.”

Helping customers in a flood of calls

When improv­ing a pub­lic ser­vice call cen­tre, the focus can often fall entire­ly on hir­ing more staff, installing more phone lines or increased online automa­tion. At the Finan­cial Ser­vices Com­pen­sa­tion Scheme (FSCS), Capi­ta was employed to ensure the smooth run­ning of an organ­i­sa­tion tasked with solv­ing a dizzy­ing array of calls.

Capita’s response was a pro­gramme called Accel­er­ate, a prod­uct which uses nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing to analyse the dia­logue of cus­tomers’ emails, calls and texts as well as in print­ed doc­u­men­ta­tion to solve issues more quick­ly. By accel­er­at­ing the process and improv­ing accu­ra­cy, Capita’s solu­tion short­ens wait­ing peri­ods mean­ing deci­sions can be made more quick­ly.

This analy­sis of lan­guage also empow­ered the fight against crime. Pre­vi­ous­ly, some call details could be lost in the rush to deliv­er ser­vice to cus­tomers. But now, with the help of AI, cor­re­spon­dence could be analysed to help piece togeth­er instances of fraud by large com­pa­nies. This enabled the FSCS to spot instances of ‘phoenix­ing’ – when indi­vid­u­als from finan­cial ser­vices firms go out of busi­ness, but lat­er reap­pear in con­nec­tion with oth­er
claims – and there­fore help secure con­vic­tions and pre­vent future frauds from occur­ring.

“By har­ness­ing a unique com­bi­na­tion of soft­ware, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion skills and tal­ent­ed peo­ple we can help gov­ern­ment deliv­er bet­ter peo­ple-cen­tric ser­vices,” says Start.

Opening up better outcomes

The key to suc­cess­ful social ser­vices is to remove the gaps through which vital infor­ma­tion can be missed. The Scot­tish Wide Area Net­work (Swan) is one of the most sig­nif­i­cant sin­gle pub­lic sec­tor ICT ini­tia­tives under­tak­en in Scot­land, cre­at­ing a sin­gle shared net­work and com­mon ICT infra­struc­ture across Scotland’s entire pub­lic sec­tor.

By link­ing 6,000 sites across Scot­land, includ­ing over half of all local author­i­ties, 100% of hos­pi­tals, GP surg­eries, phar­ma­cists, and 90% of schools, Swan pro­vides seam­less but respon­si­ble data-shar­ing across mul­ti­ple ser­vices. Since its launch in 2014, Swan is bring­ing reduced costs, improved ser­vice and the abil­i­ty to share data across organ­i­sa­tions, fos­ter­ing co-oper­a­tive work­ing.

“Swan has the unri­valled abil­i­ty to deliv­er a vital ele­ment of Scotland’s crit­i­cal nation­al infra­struc­ture for secure, every­day data shar­ing as well as the use of wider tech­nolo­gies such as 5G and IoT enabling the deliv­ery of cit­i­zen and patient ser­vices that save time and mon­ey across the coun­try” says Start. “The grow­ing deploy­ment of IoT sen­sors can also pro­vide bet­ter and more accu­rate data on fac­tors includ­ing water lev­els, air qual­i­ty, foot­fall analy­sis and addi­tion­al ana­lyt­ics for future health and social care ser­vices.”

The ser­vice con­tin­ues to have a pos­i­tive impact on those who pro­vide our pub­lic ser­vices; when last asked, 98% of user respons­es said Swan was “ben­e­fi­cial to their organ­i­sa­tion.”

Helping the public sector maximise the value of the public purse

If Covid-19 has shown us any­thing, it’s the impor­tance of being able to stand up new grant schemes quick­ly and to ramp up the deliv­ery of exist­ing schemes to dis­burse funds. In the ear­ly stages of the pan­dem­ic alone, Capi­ta admin­is­tered £750m of busi­ness grants for over 13 pub­lic sec­tor clients as a direct result of Covid. It is now draw­ing on this expe­ri­ence to deliv­er dig­i­tal grant man­age­ment – through its soft­ware plat­form, Grantis – to digi­tise and ful­ly auto­mate the grant admin­is­tra­tion process.

It is far more intu­itive for appli­cants who can check their eli­gi­bil­i­ty and see exact­ly where their appli­ca­tion is in the process. Not only will this sup­port more suc­cess­ful eli­gi­ble appli­ca­tions – get­ting enti­tle­ments to peo­ple quick­er – it reduced instances of fraud, ulti­mate­ly max­imis­ing the val­ue of the pub­lic purse.

Con­tracts around the world are fre­quent­ly mea­sured on out­puts and – while this serves its func­tion – it means that long-term solu­tions are not con­sid­ered, says Start. “When we think in terms of out­comes, rather than reac­tive­ly man­ag­ing symp­toms, it is bet­ter for all par­ties. By shift­ing our per­spec­tive to see­ing out­puts as step­ping-stones on our jour­ney to deliv­er­ing bet­ter out­comes, we are able to work more holis­ti­cal­ly, allow­ing our­selves to take a step back and view the results of our efforts as a whole.”

By con­tin­u­al­ly embrac­ing new ways to unlock data, tech­nolo­gies and ways of work­ing, the pub­lic sec­tor can uncov­er new ways to tack­le his­tor­i­cal­ly dif­fi­cult chal­lenges.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it capita.com

Pro­mot­ed by Capi­ta