Technology for the People
At the u.K. Department for Work and Pensions, IT Director General and CIO Joe
Harley is building a single view of citizen information to deliver social services
grow
CHARLIE FELD: Your department
is bringing a 21st century, cus-tomer-focused model to serve
the citizens. What was the
impetus for this change?
That seems like common sense
but extremely difficult to jus-
tify and execute. How have you
approached the business case?
We had to streamline the organization and take out real costs.
That is still a work in progress. Over
the last three years, we have taken
30,000 jobs out of the system and
saved £ 1 billion (about $1.6 billion)
including a 30 percent cost reduction from IT. Much of our cost reduction is driven by our citizens’ desire
to use the Web for more and more
self-service.
Internet. The citizen can access all
those vacancies and learn how to
apply for them.
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JOE HARLEY: We tend to deal
with some of the less fortunate
in society: people who have lost
their jobs and are looking for work,
disabled people who need support,
older people and children. These
customers deserve good govern-
How is the department responding to the economic downturn?
The daily pressures on the department are quite intense these days.
Had we not invested in all of these
systems, we would have found it
very difficult to deal with the recession in the way that we are doing at
the moment.
f JoirestHLaArSle Ty
ment service. We adopted a position
that there is no wrong door for the
citizen. They won’t be told, ‘That’s
not our department’s business, go
somewhere else.’
It is a big challenge to do that
because we have to have a single
view of the customer’s information,
regardless of the channel in which
the customer interacts with us. It
could be an online channel, a telephone call, it could be face-to-face
at one of our offices.
What have the changes meant
so far to U.K. citizens?
Before our modernization, if someone wanted to apply for a state
pension, they would need to fill in
a 20 to 30 page form and it would
take 60 days to process. With the
online systems we have, we can do a
pension claim in 20 minutes. A pensioner can call our contact center,
speak to one of our agents trained in
the pension reform and get it done.
We now exploit information already
held in other databases and have
redesigned our CRM systems for our
agents and customers.
Another example is a national
service for people who are looking
for work. As part of our Jobcentre
Plus offering, employers let us know
about job vacancies so that we can
put them into our massive database.
These jobs are uploaded to the
Now that you have built the
base infrastructure and began
to get the data organized,
where do you go next?
My aspiration is to deliver new
products, applications, systems, in
months rather than years. That is the
big challenge here, to respond to our
government’s needs. We have a pilot
program running right now called
“Tell us Once.” For example, if some-
body dies in your family, you have to
contact the government. The num-
ber of contacts that could involve you
is up to 40—and practically the same
data. We want to turn that around so
we will handle the complexities of
government for our customers.
A member of the CIO Hall of Fame, Charlie
Feld retired from eDS in 2008. Read the
full article, including a discussion of the
u.K. Department of Work and Pension’s
infrastructure modernization at www
. cio.com/article/493811.
