“Each solution is a child of its time and circumstances, with little over-arching view of the Government’s relationship with the citizen. Thus, I have found that departments which provide services focus predominantly not on the citizen, but on an aspect of the citizen called ‘the customer’. This allows the department to focus on the delivery of their service—a transactional relationship...
... the end result is that the citizen who needs multiple services is left to join up the various islands of service to meet his or her needs”
Service Transformation: A Better Service for Citizens and Businesses, a Better Deal for the Taxpayer – Sir David Varney (Dec 2006)
The success or failure of the public sector to deliver partnership working, localism, community budgets, increased efficiencies etc all depend on the degree to which these ‘islands of service’ can be knitted together.
The challenge is that these ‘islands of service’ are deeply rooted in organisational, process and technology structures.
Attempts to resolve these issues tend to either involve huge top down IT programmes (e.g. NHS modernisation) or simply putting in place a ‘quick-fix’ technology plaster. Inevitably, these solutions either end in high profile programme failures or simply make the ‘silo’ problem more ingrained (because the core problems have not been resolved).
We believe that current cross agency case management solutions are a ‘quick-fix’ technology plaster that will reduce efficiencies and ultimately fall into disuse.
In principle these solutions sound sensible; “by providing a system that can be accessed by all partners - data about citizens can be shared more easily and service delivery can be better coordinated”.
There are a number of issues that need to be considered / addressed when implementing these type of solutions:
- Introducing inefficiencies
- When a social worker needs to create a cross agency case will they need to manually enter the data from their social work system into the new cross agency tool?
- Once a colleague in another service team receives and actions this case will they need to update records in both the new cross agency tool and their own systems?
- Failing to identify high risk cases
- Is the identification of complex, high risk cases dependent on the ‘myopic’ view of individual service teams? If so, how does this address the fact that the biggest causal factor in high profile failures, like Askew and Pilkington, was a failure to link existing cross agency data to establish risk?
Unless these issues are effectively addressed, complex cases will continue to slip through the net, efficiencies will be reduced and partnerships will simply create another information silo.
What we offer
Ultimately our approach to cross agency case management is grounded in the following assumptions and principles:
- For complex cases, there is a constantly evolving set of risks that are only manifest if a holistic view of citizen circumstances and needs is considered
- Unless ‘data duplication / rekeying of data’ is minimised these systems will either fall into disuse or become part of the problem
- The majority of cases that require cross agency coordination will be complex and processes are likely to be ad-hoc, consequently partnerships need to avoid the temptation to introduce sophisticated workflow tools as part of these solutions.
By utilising a holistic view of vulnerability, drawn from cross agency data, the Xantura Technology Platform (XTP) is continually re-evaluating citizen risks. Highest risk cases are proactively surfaced and pushed to professionals with a duty of care.
The Orion Alerts system enables these professionals to review these cases and to push these alerts and recommendations to colleagues in partner organisations.
Updates to a citizen’s case occur in each partner’s existing systems and changes flow through to the Xantura Technology Platform as periodic updates.
In summary, our solution is based on matching, analysing and gaining meaningful insight from the data that existing systems already hold. Rather than creating a general cross agency case management capabilities, wouldn’t agencies gain the most from sharing a common platform where they can manage the most vulnerable and risky families and individuals – and only those?