The public sector is under pressure to save money. If you follow this kind of thing you keep hearing pretty meaningless estimates of the savings that could be made - $15 billion here, $20 billion there. Most of the savings, it's suggested, will come from greater efficiency in back-room operations - with better IT systems and the use of call centres. In other words, as this article suggests, service industrialisation. This kind of thing genuinely worries me.
We're at the start of a decade of pretty savage public spending cuts - and I think this approach misses the point, and will only make things worse. John Seddon, who writes a lot on this topic, says, in this article:
"Service industrialisation represents the pursuit of lower costs through economies of scale. Yet higher costs ensue. The most evident cause is "failure demand" - demand caused by a failure to do something.... for the customer, who then has to call again - which causes extra work."
His argument is, broadly, that you should concentrate on designing your system so that gives people what they want first time. If you get rid of a lot of the "failure demand", then there'll be more capacity - and money will be saved.
I remember the odd time that we'd have an unhappy customer when I worked at Trade for Change. It's a good retail technique to ask the customer what they would like you to do to sort things out. There's a risk in that approach, but it tends to get things sorted pretty quickly as you quickly focus on putting things right.
Of course the social care system is just a bit more complicated than a fair trade shop, but some of the same principles could work well. So often at the moment people get lost in the system - and that creates pain for those people, and costs the rest of us a fortune in waste. We can't afford that now, and we certainly won't be able to in the lean years ahead.
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