Ethos Issue 3, Oct 2007

Integrated Service Delivery: The Australian Department of Human Services
Jeff Popple

Jeff Popple, from Australia’s Department of Human Services, discusses their experience in integrating service operations across different agencies, in order to achieve large-scale synergies.

What is the Australian Public Service’s approach to innovation and excellence in service delivery? What are the factors behind your drive towards service innovation and service integration?
Like most Public Services around the world, the Australian Public Service constantly seeks to improve the quality of services it provides to the Australian people. One of the factors behind the establishment of the Department of Human Services was the desire to reinvigorate public administration and improve the delivery of services to the many Australians who have contact with the agencies that comprise the Human Services portfolio. This has led to a culture within Human Services, and its agencies, of always trying to improve the quality of services that are provided. The individual agencies undertake a range of activities to support this approach to excellence, including benchmarking, customer surveys and monitoring against performance standards. Agencies also explore more innovative ways of dealing with customers, such as the use of short message service (SMS) or text messaging, provided these innovations do not conflict with the policy intent of the programmes they are administrating and do not jeopardise the integrity of the payments they administer. If done well, innovative service delivery can result in higher satisfaction amongst customers and can also be more efficient and more cost effective.

The search for improvement in service delivery can sometimes logically lead to service integration, but this is not necessarily always the case. If done in an effective manner, integration can lead to more convenient service delivery. In Australia, we have the complication of three different levels of government: local, state and commonwealth. Often, each of these levels of government can have involvement in the same areas, such as childcare.

The Australian people, however, often do not differentiate between the different levels and just see it as being “government”. Achieving greater synergy between the three levels of government is one of the biggest challenges that we face.

In your experience, what are the challenges of pursuing an integrated approach to service delivery, and what are the key opportunities and advantages?
An integrated approach to service delivery can lead to more convenience for customers, especially if they only have to visit one location to do their business. We have had some success in Australia with the Flexible Service Delivery Trials, involving Medicare Australia, which primarily administers health rebates, and Centrelink,¹ which delivers welfare and family payments to Australians. The trials involved Centrelink delivering some of their services for older Australians and carers through four Medicare sites and, in turn, Medicare trial-tested the delivery of some of their services in four Centrelink sites. The trials were reasonably successful and the benefits included:

• more convenience with people able to conduct a range of government business in one place at the same time;
• better customer service designed to suit people’s specific needs; and
• more choices of sites in which to conduct government related business.

The Australian Government is currently considering the outcomes of the trials.

There are advantages to integration, but it has to be managed in such a way that you do not compromise the expertise that individual delivery agencies have built up and do not weaken their current accessibility, i.e., by forcing them into less suitable locations.

Has technology, or new models of management and organisation supported your pursuit of service excellence? What achievements would you highlight and what are the factors underlying their success?
Technological advances have certainly provided new opportunities to improve service excellence. The most obvious examples involve the use of the Internet, mobile phone communication and the electronic sharing of data.

Australia is still developing new ways of improving electronic service delivery, although nearly 60% of people now report having contacted the Government using the Internet at least once in the previous 12 months. This is nearly a doubling of Internet contact since 2004.