In conversation with Shivangi Narayan, Brian Moran, global managing director of Accenture’s Public Service Operations & Management Industry, talks about moving services to the digital domain thus improving the productivity and reducing cost of services.

Could you elaborate more on your research which says that if we increase the efficiency of delivery of public service by 1.1 percent every year, we will be able to match the gap between available and required funds for public services delivery in 2025?
If you look at the history of the governments around the world, they have all had a very difficult time creating a financially sustainable model and that they have to radically change their public service delivery models to make it viable.

In a country like India, the people are in an era of prosperity where the expectation or the demand for public services is going to go up. The demand rate in India is going to climb quite dramatically simply because the population is growing.

Also, India is in a very different point in their evolution in their public service, for example the incorporation of plans like the UID. The country has to drive the benefit out of these programmes and increase the productivity, simplify the overall government structure and reduce the cost of government spending. 

If you look at Brazil, they have got something like that but then there is a lot of demand, so the cost has gone up. There is a real need to increase productivity to simply run the operation better. The process of interacting with the citizens has to be made far more efficient than it is today.

What do you mean by “fundamental changes in public delivery”?
I would categorise it as a single citizen interaction. We can see it happening around the world. In reality, government needs to get to a point where the vast majority of interactions need to go digital. By digital I mean if I want to apply for a loan then I should be able to do that on a mobile phone. Today, for the vast majority of the country, you have to do this in person, you have to show up which takes a lot of time and that is where the productivity gets lost.

For different services you go to a different person, none of whom is connected with the other. So where the world is going in the digital age is when all these operations are connected to one another.

Apart from increasing productivity, the cost of interaction in such a system also goes down dramatically. A good example is in the private sector interactions. If you look at how the private sector deals with their customers, they try to do only two things: they try to get new customers and try to retain the ones that they already have. The first part involves personal interaction. The second part, i.e. the service part, is almost entirely digital – insurance companies and banks, for example. People are happier, which means it is a better service model and cheaper still. When we talked to people around the world (as part of our research), we realised that the digital interaction for service is consistent everywhere.

Do you think it is possible for the digital model of public delivery to work in a country like India where people have different levels of accessibility and knowledge of the digital domain?
India presents a very unique demography and the citizens may want a particular model where they can talk to someone and have people-to-people interactions. But actually, it costs much. Secondly, the citizens are going to want that service. The question is: how can they deliver the right kind of service at the right price? One way of doing this is through mobile phones. The mobile penetration is going up and it certainly is a low-cost model of delivering public services.

When I was in Italy, we did a lot of work with the post. Postal services in Italy have a very significant role in delivering the public services: they also provide mobile phones – very low cost phones. On that phone are a bunch of services that you can access. You can link your prepaid card with your bank account and many immigrants in Italy use these prepaid cards to send remittances to their home countries. Money transfers here cost an SMS each. A Western Union transfer earlier would cost three to five percent of the money transferred.

Tell me more about the digital survey in India?
We did this digital survey to see which countries want services on the digital domain. It was found that 56 percent of Indians, the highest in the world, want their services on the digital domain. The survey indicates that as a country, India is actually quite comfortable working digitally and providing information online and getting their services on the medium. More young people want services on the digital domain. This is something that the government of India should take up. However, if you are uncomfortable of sharing data online and then there should be an option of getting your service in a different way.  

So how is Accenture planning to provide this kind of service delivery in India? Is it going to be a public-private partnership model? How is it going to be done?
In India, we are working with the e-district project and we have enrolled with the department of electronics and IT (DeitY) in combining the portals and all the ministries and services and connecting it with the data centres — so that at a common service centre (CSC) a person can do that transaction easily. We are working to put all the pieces together such as training, awareness, portal work and also coordinating with all the ministries. We have to adopt the mobile phones for the next level of public service delivery.

What kind of challenges you had to face during your work in India?
The biggest challenge in India is the range of wealth and demography and the physical scale of things here. Therefore, the governments need to utilise different models of governance for different people. It is one of the traps that many governments have fallen into: the idea that it is all going to be digital. That idea will not work right now. You want the highest percentage of the population to utilise that, but the reality is that it is not going to.

Another thing is that in India, the scale makes speed very difficult. While people want the changes to happen quickly, the infrastructure required is quite large and because of that the use of technology also needs to be updated every now and then. So if you look at the national e-governance programme then you will see that the technology there needs a certain amount of refreshing to fit in the present context. The acceptance of change also requires time for the citizens. We can only move as fast as the citizens want; but India, just because of scale, has to push it that fast.

In India, there is a problem that people are able to work around any kind of system and make it work for their benefit. So, when we give them Aadhaar, they will find a way to work through it. What do you have to say on that?
Right, there is always this possibility that someone will come up with fake accounts and get some extra benefits. That will happen in every system. But the positive side is that we increase the possibility of reaching out with the benefits to a large number of people by so many times that these small aberrations should not deter us to go ahead.

The only issue is the privacy issue, but we can see that the generation that is coming along is much more comfortable with sharing information online, as can be seen on the many social networking sites. The government needs to ensure that it puts laws and policies in place for better data sharing and better working. There can be an independent watchdog which can ensure that the governments are using the data for only the stipulated work. For example, Singapore has more information about its citizens than most other countries but there is a clear expectation in the people that the information is only used for their benefit and nothing else. There is a trust factor which is reinforced by the government’s behaviour.