Anthony Lamoureux, CEO of Velocity Smart Technology, discusses how UK government services can shift to a fully self-service model to save costs and boost employee productivity.
The Labour government is preparing the UK public for more stringent measures as it aims to plug the “£22 billion black hole” in public finances apparently left by its predecessor. In this October’s budget, there will be a need to balance government cost savings with service efficiency.
Along with the need to optimise spending, ever-present cybersecurity, supplier and legacy software, there are concerns to overcome. Shifting to a fully self-service model – a successful reality for other industries – would go a long way in achieving this holy grail.
Self-service capabilities are present across many private sector spaces, helping customers benefit from specific products to meet particular needs and time frames. On average, such a solution can take around three months per department to implement, with savings able to be realised year-on-year.
But for this to work across public sector departments, the government must be all ears to tech industry partners, on how innovation can be sustained long-term.
The value of self-service in government IT
When firms move to self-service, they either need fewer people to perform the same tasks or can make the workforce do more with the time that they’ve got available. The two big areas of savings you get from a self-service model come from boosting the efficiency of the IT team and making the actual employees more productive.
On average, it takes 2.9 days to respond to and complete an employee request to the IT support desk.
That is 2.9 days of that employee being inefficient, which could range from their laptop being dead to the keyboard’s keys not working. On top of multiplying this by the number of staff with technical issues within your organisation at any one time, at least 22% of time spent by IT professionals across the country is spent on being glorified mailmen by delivering and collecting IT equipment.
Suppose you have an overburdened support team of, say, five on-site support staff in your building. Consider deploying a smart locker solution, which can automate the delivery of IT equipment and move the process to a self-service model. You can potentially reduce the number of resources from five to four.
Financially, this shift could save between £8,000 £60,000 a year. Conversely, the overburdened, overworked IT department now has additional time to focus on more important tasks such as technology innovation, cybersecurity patches, and upgrades.
IT tends to cost somewhere between 2%-5% of the business’s revenue. Most CIOs and IT teams will focus on what can be done to reduce that cost. However, that’s the wrong thing to focus on. What should be considered instead is how to maximise the value you get from that 2%-5%. Focus on impacting the other 95%-98% of your revenue. You should make IT work for the business, not the business work for IT.
Emphasising projects
Often, with the way politics and society are, long-term projects are out of favour in exchange for short-termism. People want quick fixes and sound bites like ‘they’re going to fix public services’. Labour currently seems to be prioritising reform of the NHS. However, as the Prime Minister has already intimated and the Chancellor Rachel Reeves will likely confirm, projects like this are not short-term. They will take multiple terms of government to fix. Government work remains a slow-moving beast.
There’s also a challenge to consider between CapEx and OpEx approaches. CapEx takes longer to achieve wider buy-in because it needs to be funded with capital. No one in government will sign up for a ten-year project. However, from our experience, the great thing about implementing a self-service model across public sector services is that the return on investment is typically achieved within two to seven months.
This means an outlay can be spent within the same year as savings gained from an OpEx approach. The year-on-year savings can make this an easy win for the government.
Automated equipment delivery
For years, businesses have deployed on-site support and explored click-and-collect capabilities for resources, as well as tech bars for maintenance. However, the main issues we’ve found with tech bars is they need to be manned for the whole time and can be difficult to manage.
Peak times are typically Monday mornings and lunchtimes and can result in long waiting times due to high capacity. Stand-alone lockers have also been used for a long time. However, incomplete IT software integration has created more manual tasks (including logging into laptops and creating tickets) for already overworked IT staff.
To mitigate these pitfalls, government services can benefit from the automated delivery of IT equipment to smart lockers. Rather than having to manage one-to-one tickets, deliveries can instead be completed in batches. Consequently, staff can collect equipment within 60 seconds – down from 45 minutes with manual processes. This kind of system also works around the clock, meaning that employees can collect and maintain equipment while working across time zones globally.
There is a great approach to customer experience the UK government can take from Disneyland. Never perform a task front-of-house, that you can’t do back-of-house. With a smart locker system, maintenance for government services can be done behind the scenes, improving the employee experience and boosting staff efficiency. We have witnessed a 500% improvement in on-site support, through this setup.
Self-service innovation for blue light services
The self-service approach doesn’t stop at IT equipment in office roles either. A self-service model can also be deployed across emergency services. Smart locker systems can cater for the delivery of resources such as PPE equipment, operation toolkits and even prescribed drugs on the NHS.
A surgical toolkit for each operation can come with a certain number of swabs, scalpels, forceps and other tools to be counted in and out after production. Staff then need to check they have every tool back post-op, to reduce waste. Ensuring that the right kit goes into the right operation theatre can all be managed by a smart locker solution.
Overhauling government services
The rhetoric coming from Labour ahead of the budget announcement is one of fiscal prudence and more difficult times ahead. However, it will only take one or two departments to open themselves up to this automated self-service model, and the savings and employee service benefits will be realised. It might take a bold leader to take a leap of faith, but if they do, the secret will be out, and this model should spread across the entirety of public services in the UK.
For long-term success, government stakeholders must heed advice from the tech industry on full implementation and maintenance. Open innovation can create a culture that prioritises efficiency, now and in the future.
Velocity Smart Technology is designed from the ground up to deliver the most effective Smart Lockers and Smart Vending solution for Enterprise IT that integrates seamlessly to existing services, which is why the technology has been built on the ServiceNow platform.
Velocity Smart Technology is the world’s first ServiceNow fully integrated Smart Locker and Smart Vending solution that finally delivers on the promise to save business time, save businesses money and improve the IT support service.
Smart Collect™, Velocity Smart Locker™, Velocity Smart Vending™, are registered trademarks of Velocity Smart Technology Ltd. in the United Kingdom and/or other countries.
