TRANSFORMATION -- NEEDS TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO PEOPLE'S LIVES

Our organisations need to transform to improve their service outcomes for society as a whole.

Everyone seems to be talking about the transformation agenda for public and not for profit bodies. Transformation means services being provided to the public in innovative, timely effective and cost efficient ways which do not necessarily reflect the patterns of service delivery that have been provided in the past when resources were more plentiful in these respective sectors, it also in my book means improving service outcomes. The transformation agenda is being driven to a large degree by resource constraints but even if these did not exist then then there would still need to be service transformation to take account of our demographics (Especially an ageing population) and the rapid pace of change in the development of digital technologies and electronic social interaction. We probably would not be able to hide away from the transformation agenda even if we wanted to. So we should not really kid ourselves that it will go away.

 

Transformation for a lot of people is difficult. They have provided services in the past which they feel were well delivered and consumed effectively by their clients -- it is challenging for them to accept that given a whole host of new political,economic, technological and social realities that the way services are configured, marketed and delivered will need to radically alter to address these new realities far more effectively than in the past. There will need to be a much further move down the road to measuring the social impacts of relative public policies and also more work on the outcomes of these policies. Increasing research on payment by results, especially in a proposed new publication by CIPFA, is also gaining ground. Final tranches of monies will only be paid to service providers if certain social outcomes have been delivered, be that problem families, healthy societies or educational attainment. The outcomes will need to be measured against acceptable benchmarks and this will need to  be developed much further as a more generally accepted approach. In future the starting benchmarks will also need to move forward as well in line with society's increasing expectations of what these services can deliver.

 

There is no real objection to the transformation agenda being angled in this way to produce improved social outcomes for our people. There is a need however to ensure that the transformation agenda is not used as a cloak to hide resource constraints per se. It is all very well having shared services which reduce back office costs, reduce service input duplication and increase efficiency but what about the service outcomes themselves. If these radical transformation agendas are followed and service outcomes do not improve then this is only a partial transformation of public sector bodies and not for profit bodies service delivery. In my view it is not true transformation because although excessive costs may be being addressed and efficiencies increased - the outcomes for service users can be worse than before.To my mind such a process would not be a successful exposition of a transformation agenda.

 

It is incumbent on us all to ensure that any transformation project addresses all the key elements of transformation and not just the cost and efficiency bits. If the latter is not the case then we will end up with services which are cheap and nasty which might save money in the short term but in the long term might lead to even greater costs for society as a whole.

 

If we are transforming our services and trying to improve service outcomes then we will often require input and help from experienced third parties who will be able to provide the expertise that we may not possess in technical and financial areas. This may not initially come at zero cost and it is therefore important that any social impact analysis is not short termist and does look at the long term impacts of the transformation agenda in terms of an invest to save approach. Energy saving measures will be fairly expensive now but in the future, the costs of not having undertaken them could prove to be prohibitive.

 

So let's ensure that any transformation agenda we engage with actually improves social outcomes and is not just an excuse to save money. If we can demonstrate this to be the case then the buy in to any future transformation projects will be so much higher and we will all benefit from that.