Anthony Lamoureux, CEO of Velocity Smart Technology, discusses how council services can shift to a fully self-service model to cut costs.

The Labour government recently announced a £22bn ‘black hole’ in public finances, meaning a need to balance cost saving with efficiency. Councils across the UK are aiming to speed up and further personalise public services through digitalisation, but much of this is proving unaffordable with the current processes in place.

Shifting to a fully self-service model would go a long way in helping local governments to streamline spending and services. Self-service capabilities are present across many private sector spaces, boosting customisation of product delivery. Councils across the UK can take heed of the year-on-year financial benefits that can be gained, should the Government be willing to collaborate with tech industry partners on how innovation can be sustained long-term.

Overcoming inefficiency challenges

The two main areas of savings that councils can achieve via self-service are boosted IT team efficiency; and the efficiency of employees. On average, it takes 2.9 days to fulfil and end an employee request, causing widespread standstills across the workforce. On top of this, at least 22% of time spent by our customers is on being glorified postal workers, delivering and collecting IT equipment.

Deploying a smart locker solution which can automate equipment delivery can potentially reduce the number of resources that need to be maintained. Financially, a shift from five resources down to four could take annual spending from £60,000 down to £8,000. Meanwhile, council IT staff are free to focus on more important tasks, including cybersecurity patches and upgrades.

IT implementation tends to cost somewhere between two and five of the business's revenue. Most CIOs and IT teams will focus on what can be done to reduce that cost, but what should be considered instead, is how to maximise the value you get from that two to five per cent. This, in turn, will bolster the other 95 to 98% of revenue.

Make IT work for the business, not the business work for IT!

Emphasising automation projects

There's also a challenge to be considered between CapEx and OpEx approaches, in that CapEx takes longer to gain buy-in from, due to needing to fund it with capital. While local councils are unlikely to agree to a 10-year project, a self-service model can typically bring return on investment within two to seven months. This means an outlay can be spent within the same year as savings gained from an OpEx approach.

For years, firms have deployed on-site support, and explored click-and-collect capabilities for resources, as well as tech bars for maintenance. However, these approaches need the presence of staff at all times, which makes peak times including Monday mornings and lunchtimes difficult to manage. Stand-alone lockers have also been used for a long time, but incomplete IT software integration has created more manual tasks (including logging into laptops and creating tickets) to be done by already overworked staff.

To mitigate these pitfalls, local 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, with staff being able to collect equipment within 60 seconds – typically 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.

You never do an IT task front-of-house, that you can’t do back-of-house. With this smart locker system, maintenance for local government services can be completed behind the scenes, further boosting efficiency for staff. One customer has seen 500% improvement in on-site support, through this setup.

Overhauling government services

We hope that once one or two departments take up this kind of automated self-service model, it will spread across the entirety of public services in the UK. Shifting to such a model can mitigate the current need for the presence of staff on the ground and help to personalise capabilities offered – reducing strain overall.

But for long-term success, government stakeholders must make use of the rich expertise that can be provided by the national tech industry, on full implementation and maintenance.

Open innovation can create a culture that prioritises efficiency, now and in the future.