Graham Liddell: Local government faces an ‘Uber moment’ if it fails to embrace technology

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Local government is at the threshold of a new era in which it needs to embrace new technology, argues Graham Liddle. The way forward is to welcome change, focus on customer needs and develop an innovation culture.

The taxi industry is facing enormous disruption from the realisation that their (ex) customers aren’t that keen on hanging around taxi ranks or carrying enough cash to pay their fares. And worst of all, they aren’t that bothered whether their driver needs a SatNav to find the way.

Many local government finance teams are in the midst of their own crisis point. Financial risks and have never been higher and the need for financial leadership has never been greater. But we have our own savings to deliver and our staff are becoming more and more stretched. Technology will help, but we need to do more than buy a few iPads and a licence for a fancy cloud application. Nor will providing half a day’s training on pivot tables cut the mustard. It goes far deeper than that.

Think about those taxi companies, I bet that pretty much all of them invested in IT and some were pretty proud of their new booking and location tracking systems, but how many have moved fast enough to meet the raised expectations of their customers and offer a service to rival the competition?

If we are to avoid our own Uber moment, we will need to become more flexible, use technology and information innovatively and deliver continual improvements to the services we provide. So what does this mean for those of us providing professional finance services in local government? Here are three ideas to get your thinking.

Don’t leave it to others: get to grips with the digital world

Our home lives are digital. And even if we haven’t yet downloaded the Uber app, we can all see the transformation that technology has made to our everyday activities: communicating with friends and family, accessing information, making important financial decisions.

If we want digital transformation for finance, this has to start with the finance leadership team. And all finance leaders will need a pretty good understanding of how to use digital to achieve their goals. We don’t need chief finance officers to be coding experts, but we do need them to be able to articulate clearly what it is we are trying to do.

Focus on customer requirements (and not on faster horses)

Understanding our customers has always been important and in the digital world, where the pace of change becomes faster and faster, it becomes critical.

There are, of course, a variety of tools to help us including customer journey mapping, developing customer personas and so on. Fundamentally, though, it’s about culture and attitude.

The whole of the finance team has a role in listening to what our customers are saying and responding to their requirements. And the phrase “customer requirements” is key.

The Spice Girls got it wrong. It’s rarely just about our customers want (not even if they really, really want it). The chances are that our customers aren’t aware of how we can use technology to totally redesign the way they manage their finances. We need to go beyond what they want and get to grips with what they need.

If the answer is simply more of what they already have, we’re probably not doing our job. As Henry Ford is (mis)quoted as saying: “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Furthermore, our customers don’t pay directly for the service they receive and so may not see supporting changes to the way we work as high priority. This is where we need to make full use of our privileged position as both consultants and policemen.

As consultants we secure the buy-in by working with our customers to design new ways of working and cut out activities that don’t add value. As policemen we make sure the new ways of working are followed by enforcing compliance.

Develop an innovation culture supported by firm governance

At first glance developing innovation and firm governance might seem contradictory, but in practice they go hand in hand. Innovation will be killed still stone dead if our teams think:

• They will be blamed if their ideas crash and burn.
• Colleagues will just carry on as before, even if their proposals for change are accepted.

Our staff need to be able to innovate without fear of criticism. In part this comes from the attitude and example of the leadership team. But it also comes from providing staff with a framework in which it is safe to fail.

This is so much more than taking part in a pilot where, more often than not, the objective is to find the best way of implementing someone else’s ideas. It’s about giving staff the opportunity to lead and take part in experiments (even labelling new initiatives as such) and it’s about celebrating the learning from failures as well as sharing successes.

If we are to implement our successful experiments, we need to make sure our governance is up to scratch. Identifying new ideas is hard enough if our teams don’t know what their starting point is. Getting new processes to stick will be nigh on impossible if we don’t set them out clearly and ensure they are followed.

In practice this means that we need to:

• Set out our agreed processes in a form that is useful to (and used by) users.
• Implement effective control mechanisms to ensure that agreed processes are followed.
• Provide a mechanism to enable users to make and document improvements.

None of these ideas are new and they aren’t necessarily easy to implement, but that doesn’t make them any less valid. We are facing our own Uber moment. We need to stop thinking analogue and become digital.

Graham Liddell is Head of Finance (Technology and Process Improvement) for the Orbis Partnership.