Assessments and Recommendations

Abstract

This section assesses the context and philosophy of services in Chile, and the enablers to support services. It also presents the recommendations on how to improve service design and delivery.

    

In recent years, Chile has been working with the OECD to explore the opportunities and potential of digital government approaches to transform the relationship between the citizen and the state and improve the quality of government services. This has involved work to strengthen the governance arrangements for digital government (OECD, 2016[1]), develop a clear strategic vision for the future (OECD, 2019[2]) and consider the role of digital identity (OECD, 2019[3]).

These areas of work are critical for developing the foundations of the digital transformation of the public sector but count for nothing if they are not considering an ambition for delivering better policies and services that transform the lives of citizens and businesses in their interactions with government. This fourth study considers that ambition for Chile to deliver a government that reduces the burden and cost of interactions between citizen and state whilst increasing satisfaction, effectiveness and trust.

Government services need to work effectively and efficiently wherever and whenever citizens and business have need of them. Interactions that would once have taken place in person have increasingly moved towards a dematerialised, online experience. Nevertheless that transition from one channel to another takes place against an existing context in which there are a patchwork of physical channels, often implemented as part of a sectoral one-stop-shop agenda that runs in parallel and in addition to the web presences of each service providing entity.

This study on the design and delivery of services within Chile focuses on the cross-governmental one-stop-shop ChileAtiende, and explores the practical steps and political and institutional changes that would be necessary to deliver a whole of government, cross-Chilean strategy for unifying the citizen experience of interacting with the Chilean state to deliver better outcomes and more effective government. This study is especially timely given the ongoing implementation of the Digital Transformation of the State Law (Ley de Transformación Digital) (MINSEGPRES, 2019[4]) which promises to digitalise interactions between Chileans and the government, opening up a unique window of opportunity for rethinking service design and delivery in a coherent and cross-governmental way. For such a strategy to become a common agenda that is supported and understood by the whole of government, the following are needed:

1. 1. A strategic and holistic approach that considers the context, behaviours and enablers for service design and delivery in Chile.

2. 2. Understanding services from the point at which someone first attempts to solve their problem, until its resolution (holistically from end to end rather than within organisational siloes of provision).

3. 3. A commitment to securing the same quality of services and transformed citizen experience across all channels so that they work as one, rather than adopting different solutions for different channels (omni-channel as opposed to multi-channel).

4. 4. A recognition that the public, citizen facing experience exists on a continuum with the way in which public servants in a back office respond to those needs (external to internal).

5. 5. For the concepts of ”digital by design”, “Government as a Platform” and a “data-driven public sector” to be embedded for accelerating the transformation of the public sector to achieve internal efficiencies, deliver better value to all citizens, and avoid discrimination based on the personal choice of channel.

The context for services in Chile

Since its inception ChileAtiende has had a value proposition of reducing transaction costs for citizens and business in interacting with the government of Chile through a centralised multi-channel service delivery approach. This approach brings benefits to users as they can access multiple services through a single channel; as well as to the government by increasing the efficiency and coherence of service delivery.

ChileAtiende enables institutions to reach more people through increased coverage of face to face transactions as well as its digital platforms and call centre acting as a signpost to services accessed elsewhere. This means that ChileAtiende has the potential to amplify and catalyse the delivery of smaller organisations who do not have the luxury of funding and capacity found in larger organisations. This allows for thinking about and protecting the ‘long tail’ of government services that would otherwise never receive the focus, or attention, necessary to provide a transformed citizen experience. This may become even more relevant with the entry into force of Chile’s Digital Transformation of the State Law (MINSEGPRES, 2019[4]), which recognises the extent to which public services are experienced at the local level and applies to every tier of government.

Outside government the ChileAtiende network of physical locations, website and call centre is an established and well-recognised brand seen by Chilean citizens as delivering a high quality, and valued, experience, albeit handling only 6% of transactions between citizen and staff (Ministerio de Hacienda, 2018[5]). The commitment of staff to meeting the needs of the public and ensuring their satisfaction across each of its channels is striking. It is clear that the physical ChileAtiende locations are not only a source of pride to staff, but responsive to the needs of the public too. The decision by the ChileAtiende and Social Security Institute (Instituto de Previsión Social, IPS) team to seek specific innovation funding to reduce and remove barriers for those with particular access has resulted in a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere.

Nevertheless, ChileAtiende does not reflect an omni-channel approach: where the design and architecture of services supports access through any channel, from any device, at any point in a new or existing service journey. Instead, the different channels do not work as one to deliver the same service or quality of service. The piecemeal simplification and digitisation of pockets of government in response to sectoral needs or the priority of a given one-stop-shop has produced bespoke solutions operated on a channel by channel basis. This means services available through the website are the not the same as the call centre and those are not the same as the solutions available to agents in the physical locations or installed on the self-service kiosks. It also means that users cannot reliably predict what services will be available whilst there is an overhead for the ChileAtiende team in maintaining different levels of access through different solutions. Only the team from the Directorate of Labour (Dirección del Trabajo, DT) demonstrated a more sophisticated ambition to develop an omni-channel approach.

The focus on physical interactions should be understood through the demand for face to face access in Chile. Providing access to services for those who cannot, or choose not to, use digital and telephone based channels is an important element in any strategy for delivering access to services. Age demographics and cultural expectations are understood as the reasons for limited success in achieving channel shift thus far. Alongside these challenges the service provision landscape in Chile appears to be a factor with the constraints of existing digital identity provision in particular a barrier to the transformation of services.

The most striking feature of that landscape are the myriad organisations providing their own service channels. Indeed, only 6% of transactions between citizen and state take place under the auspices of ChileAtiende (Ministerio de Hacienda, 2018[5]) . Although ChileAtiende exists as a central citizen service delivery channel the coexistence with websites, call centres and physical locations offered by other organisations in the Chilean public sector create additional complexity for citizens, project a fragmented image of government and undermine the success of ChileAtiende.

With each institution wanting to keep their own identity and host their own services this creates multiple locations, telephone numbers and websites, all with their own brand recognition. To the external observer this looks like a confused picture. For citizens however, there is familiarity in accessing the relevant provider and their physical location, call centre or website to meet their specific needs. The current ease with which citizens can visit physical locations to access services provided by the Service of Civil Registration and Identity (Servicio de Registro Civil e Identificación, SRCeI), the Internal Revenue Service (Servicio de Impuestos Internos, SII), the National Health Fund (Fondo Nacional de Salud, FONASA) or other agencies is supported by a confidence that those interactions will meet their needs. With no strategic approach to the holistic provision of services across Chile, whether in person or online these channels proliferate and partnerships between different organisations rely on internal relationships rather than following from a clear mandate to deliver a unified experience for citizens.

One of the most important short-term opportunities in the Chilean public sector comes from taking the high service standards of the face to face experience of ChileAtiende and ensuring that it is reflected in the approach taken to any other channel and in the underlying culture of other government service providers. In this way, a set of standards and expectations for the ‘front door’ to interactions with government can provide a consistently excellent experience. There has been some success in identifying ChileAtiende as the single brand through using the website and call centre as a single entry point to services across government. However, that brand recognition is diminished if it is simply an index signposting to websites or physical locations owned and branded by others, rather than being a genuinely unifying user experience that consolidates government to simplify and streamline life for users.

Longer-term, any strategic vision and commitment to an omni-channel approach of consolidating access to services under a single brand across all channels needs to be complemented by the necessary ‘Government as a Platform’ resources and enablers. These will support the teams holding responsibility for particular users and their needs to deliver consistently designed services more quickly and effectively. However, the lack of a clear vision for whether ChileAtiende is to become the service delivery brand for government or in establishing a consistent user experience makes it inevitable that other government institutions see ChileAtiende as an extension of IPS rather than a government wide programme.

As a consequence, inclusion in the ChileAtiende digital platforms or call centre is seen as a low cost (or even no cost) way of growing an organisation’s own coverage rather than as an endorsement of the ChileAtiende network. Instead of being the prelude to migrate towards consolidated platforms for service delivery, several organisations had the expectation of ChileAtiende adopting their back office systems. Not only does this create challenges for the staff within the ChileAtiende networks in managing a multiplicity of software, it codifies the siloed approach to government delivery and undermines efforts to create an integrated, interoperable approach to services.

Despite the efforts of the Digital Government Division (DGD) within the Ministry General Secretariat of the Presidency (Ministerio Secretaría General de la Presidencia, MINSEGPRES), there is still a strong tendency to take an organisation specific approach to designing and delivering public services. This means their development is not built around an understanding of the whole problem facing a user and so there were only limited examples of organisations working together to meet an end to end need. This situation is exacerbated by evidence of drawn out processes to allow bilateral agreements for sharing data internally while the organisation specific approach to training budgets and performance reporting reinforces those siloes.

These challenges mean that the structure and organisation of government is too often taking primacy at the expense of the needs of the public. Nevertheless, where ChileAtiende has built partnerships, particularly with smaller organisations (such as the National Consumer Service (Servicio Nacional del Consumidor, SERNAC)), it demonstrates the potential of the network to deliver value for citizens in increasing the breadth of access. Indeed, several of the other service delivery networks had successfully developed partnerships with local and regional government. In these cases, the conversation is moving beyond any question of branding or platform ownership to a focus of teams working across governmental boundaries to more efficiently deliver the foundational ambition of better access to higher quality services.

The philosophy of services in Chile

The ambition of better access to higher quality services was at the heart of the ChileAtiende project on its inception. Over the subsequent decade, the prominence of ChileAtiende has ebbed and flowed whilst the service delivery and administrative simplification agendas, coupled to the evolution of technology, have inspired and motivated organisations throughout the Chilean public sector to explore the digitisation of its citizen facing and internal processes and procedures. However, the lack of a service delivery model based on a strategic user-driven approach, with institutional roles, governance mechanisms and a specialised staff to support it means that there remains an e-government era view of deploying front-end or back-office technology as the solution to providing online channels. Chile has yet to fully adopt digital government approaches that consider the entire citizen experience in light of the opportunities provided by data and digital tools to rethink how the public sector works in order to deliver end to end transformation.

Chilean organisations are conscious of the inefficiency and failure demand caused by existing analogue processes and use an analysis of triggers for high demand as the basis for digitising a given service. However, this means that in the case of several potentially high profile transactions, such as that involving criminal records or claiming medical leave, the process was being digitised without a recognition of the potential for revisiting the steps and procedures underlying the delivery of the service and rethinking its design in light of new data or technology opportunities.

In general, organisations were content with the status quo and happy with the incremental digitisation of the next step in the process rather than considering the broader opportunities to improve outcomes for their users. This was not true of every organisation with the team at DT particularly impressive in framing the challenges they faced within a narrative of service design to proactively avoid the effort of either citizen or public servant that reflected the vision being provided by the organisation’s senior digital leadership. Overall, it appears that transformation efforts owe more to individual activities within an organisation rather than being coordinated. With the passage of the Digital Transformation of the State Law (MINSEGPRES, 2019[4]), there is a critical window of opportunity for public agencies to reorient service design and delivery towards the needs of their users beyond user experience practices, having ChileAtiende as a suitable platform to channel those services under a common user experience and branding.

One of the barriers to planning the future shape of the service delivery landscape in Chile is the still inconsistent cataloguing of services across government and the lack of a map detailing the flow of data access and re-use between organisations. Although recently a catalogue of services has been officially put in place, further efforts are required to standardise the concepts and data being used in the service delivery domain. Without this it will remain complex for the government to develop a detailed understanding of how different channels, organisations and the services themselves hang together or design the necessary incentives to effect any migration away from the existing situation of multiple brands with their own channels.

This limited cross-government coordination, or agreement over the philosophy underpinning service design and delivery, coupled to an underestimation of the value of unified branding and a single entry point into government information and services (supported by full integration of back end processes, systems and data) means there is confusion about the current and future purpose of ChileAtiende. Government wants more services to come under the umbrella of ChileAtiende and for this service delivery brand to have prominence, but at the same time there is a desire to preserve the channels offered by different organisations and their branding as long as they reflect ChileAtiende’s customer service model. This reflects the lack of strategic thinking between service delivery and broader government goals around competitiveness and productivity which are high priorities for the country.

Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that the ambition should not be for a single, consolidated team responsible for delivering all services across government but methods for scaling good service design practice and embedding it as part of the DNA of government. The ChileAtiende network has already proven itself a valuable laboratory for exploring approaches to customer service but to transform the service design and delivery context in Chile will require a mandate to work with the Service Council and the Modernisation Council and Committee to inspire a different model of delivery throughout government (including partnering with DGD, the Government Laboratory (Laboratorio de Gobierno, LabGob) and the Modernisation Secretariat). There is a consequent need to increase the frequency, quality, effectiveness and direction of communications between public institutions and the government to develop the opportunities for achieving the necessary shift in behaviour.

Ultimately, Chile does not have a clearly stated, and commonly accepted, vision for delivering consistently excellent services across all channels that prioritises the needs of the user and which can be accessed through a unified entry point. 2020 provides an opportunity to restate the original ambition and refresh its vision for the next decade of ChileAtiende to inspire a whole of government adoption of that mandate. Through the Digital Transformation of the State Law (MINSEGPRES, 2019[6]), the government is attempting to change its way of doing business in order to increase its efficiency and improve its relationship with citizens. It is, indeed, a significant opportunity to put common standards for service design and delivery at the core of the digital transformation of the State.

Ensuring a shift in the approach of government as a whole involves leadership and governance arrangements at every level: cross-government, in institutions and amongst ‘ordinary’ staff. At the centre of government, multi-disciplinary thinking is important for developing the strategic future for ChileAtiende. That leadership team needs to be able to cast a vision for an inspiring future for service design and delivery whilst navigating and influencing thinking in this area amongst senior public servants and political appointees. In each organisation, the impact of Director level appointees who understand the opportunity is significant, but it is in the collaboration between organisations where individuals can work together as a network to develop a culture of digital leadership that will propagate different ways of thinking and working. Equally, at an individual level, there need to be ways for talent that already exists in government, regardless of their level of influence or job title, to meet and support like-minded individuals (in a similar way to Chile’s Public Sector Innovators Network).

The enablers to support services in Chile

In ChileAtiende, Chile has a ready-made, highly regarded network for providing services to the public. However, to enable it to fulfil its promise it is crucial for Chile to identify, and prioritise, work to support the enablers for digital government and service delivery.

Although the absence of common components addressing payments and notifications constrain the development of new services, the most important building block for Chile to develop is Digital Identity and the accompanying interoperability of underlying data. Its current absence is a barrier to basic channel shift and more effective integration because without a robust solution, digital and telephone based service channels can only provide information and generate new transactional siloes. The new vision for ClaveÚnica offers an approach that it is not simply about identity and therefore unlocks the potential for transforming services by rethinking the nature of interaction between citizen and state rather than just digitising an existing process.

It is encouraging to see a high priority placed on Digital Identity and to see progress on the development of other enabling tools and resources provided by DGD for re-use by teams across the public sector. Making these tools the de facto choice of delivery teams across government will depend on the extent to which further investment is made available. While mandating the use of particular resources is one route to ensuring this takes place, perhaps as part of the spend controls process, DGD would benefit from developing a more mature ‘service wrapper’ to encourage the adoption of these resources and continue to improve the value they offer. All in all, there several missing steps in terms of security, transparency and governance for ClaveÚnica which need to be considered at the time of rethinking service design and delivery in the country (OECD, 2019[3]).

There is a nascent data-driven culture within the Chilean government. However, in general, public agencies do not want to share data and there are no incentives or mandates to make this happen whilst an interoperability platform for electronic services has been developed in the past it is not widely used with citizens having to provide the same information multiple times. Addressing the issues with the country’s data infrastructure is essential but this must come as part of a broader strategic approach to data governance and sharing. It was encouraging to learn that a national data strategy is under development and will draw on the OECD’s framework for a data-driven public sector (OECD, 2019[7]) but there is a still a gap for the function of a Chief Data Officer to provide clarity across government about data governance, the application of data and the role of data in building public trust, and its necessary linkage with the service delivery agenda. There has been a good start in using data to understand performance but the challenge remains in applying it throughout the Government Data Value Cycle. It is relevant to ensure this data strategy is developed under a collaborative and participatory approach in order to increase its appropriateness and ownership.

The ongoing evolution of procurement in Chile offers some optimism that this important factor in enabling service transformation will improve over time. However, procurement was identified as being a blocker to some of the ambitions either in terms of its efficiency, dynamism or in the outcomes that it had produced. Long-term contracts with expensive change control processes remain a constraint in terms of designing and developing services that can iterate in response to the needs of users (such as the identity management contract from SRCeI).

One of the most encouraging characteristics of the ChileAtiende model is the strength of its customer service culture. Although that culture results in high levels of satisfaction and important efforts to transform the experience of interacting with ChileAtiende it is not the same as a user-driven approach centred on placing the needs of users at the core of the design of underlying services. In some parts of government there was a lack of involvement from stakeholders (whether citizens or public agencies) and a view that users needed to be educated in order to use a service rather than investing in its design. However, in other organisations there were clear efforts to move towards such a user-driven approach and a desire for the centre of government to be more explicit and take a stronger stance in terms of governing and assuring the quality of services. Although DGD is providing certain cross-cutting enablers and LabGob is encouraging the adoption of design and innovation practices, the model by which MINSEGPRES and the Modernization Committee would enforce quality controls or provide common standards to underpin the way services are designed and delivered is less developed.

It was clear that there was a shortfall of the necessary capabilities in order to incorporate more services into ChileAtiende or to take a different approach to their design in the first place. Whilst procurement can provide a vehicle to bringing the necessary talent into government, the most sustainable way to transform the design and delivery of services is embedding an innovation and user-driven design culture across government through the recruitment and training of public servants, an area in which Chile’s LabGob is already playing a valuable role. A particularly important group of staff to consider are those who are currently employed throughout the Chilean service delivery networks. As the current landscape involves multiple networks meeting organisation specific needs there are concerns amongst Chilean Trade Unions that a consolidated approach under the ChileAtiende brand would lead to job losses but there are opportunities for retraining this group of people in the skills needed for digital service design and delivery as well as for strengthening existing physical channels to improve quality and efficiency of service.

Recommendations

1. Define a clear cross-government strategy and coherent plan of actions to create and nurture a design culture that places users at its heart and is driven by their needs

• Develop training and reference materials in service design and delivery practices drawing on the experiences of other OECD countries as discussed throughout Chapter 2.

• Develop training and reference materials in customer service drawing on the experience of ChileAtiende and mandate its usage by all other service delivery networks

• Establish a Head of Design role for the government and encourage similar appointments at an institutional level

• Identify existing networks in Chile, such as the coordinators of Digital Transformation, ChileAtiende counterparts, the Protected Middle Class network (Clase Media Protegida, CMP) or the network of public innovators, and work with them to manage change and establish a culture of service delivery based on citizen needs.

• Alongside those formal networks encourage policy teams, delivery teams and operational teams to work together by creating communities of practitioners from similar disciplines and fostering service communities of those responding to similar needs. Design appropriate incentive mechanisms and performance objectives that are focused on embracing a service design culture and promote collaboration in design, sharing of data and building common understanding of the needs of shared users and their journeys.

• Use governance tools, such as planning for new public programmes and evaluation of projects to incorporate an expectation for service design based on user needs. This could include making it an explicit requirement in existing evaluation approaches or management improvement policies carried out by the Ministry of Finance Budget Office or the Ministry of Social Development.

• Partner with the Civil Service to define and develop dedicated training on integrated service design within Chilean public agencies.

• Strengthen the collaborative relationship between DGD and LabGob to encourage an innovation culture throughout the Chilean public sector that supports adoption and change management in implementing digital services.

2. Enable public sector organisations to develop an understanding of the needs of the public in order to be proactive in finding solutions to the problems that cause the most pain and the highest costs

• Establish a Head of User Research role for the government and encourage similar appointments at an institutional level

• Strengthen the Registro Nacional de Trámites and its integration with other sources of information such as ChileAtiende, the CMP network, and PymesGob among others. Identify all those involved in delivering these services by including detail on the flow of data between institutions and encouraging user research to understand:

  • the end to end experience of accessing them for users

  • the effort and challenges involved in delivering and operating them for teams

  • the associated costs and how to reduce them (in terms of the time it takes, and the efforts involved, for the public and government to completely resolve an issue)

• Establish a unit or role with responsibility for strategically analysing the register of services in order to understand opportunities for rationalising services and defining digitalisation, transformation and adoption strategies as part of the existing governance for service delivery.

• Recognise the methodology for measuring user satisfaction developed by the Modernisation Secretariat as the standard for the Chilean public sector and take active steps to encourage its adoption by those public agencies with significant service delivery responsibilities in order to allow comparative analysis across government.

• Design a user research process to benchmark all existing service delivery channels (digital, telephone, physical) against this performance baseline. Determine what short-term training is needed to bring all citizen experiences into line.

3. Ensure a joined-up and simple-to-navigate experience, with coherent branding, for all interactions between government and businesses, citizens and visitors

• Assign to the inter-institutional coordination committee the task to provide distinct professional leadership for those working in the disciplines of policy and service design, user research, delivery, software engineering, web operations, operational and customer service professionals across government. Ensure resources are available to convene and coordinate cross-government communities of practice, identify best practices and success cases.

• In the mid-term develop Chile’s Government as a Platform ecosystem (see Recommendation 6) to equip teams and government suppliers with the necessary resources to meet the needs of users with an omni-channel, self-service experience with a consistent look and feel. This should include:

  • Best practices and guidance materials

  • Business case support for accessing funding, ongoing procurement reform, and the assurance and enforcement of standards

  • Resources to support digital literacy, connectivity and accessibility

  • Common components delivering discrete functionality (such as identity, notifications and payments) as well as more generic design resources forming the basis of a common design system

  • The relevant aspects of the OECD’s data-driven public sector model

  • A strategic approach to public sector talent and capabilities.

• As a longer-term ambition set the vision and strategy for ChileAtiende to become the single government service delivery brand for accessing services across multiple channels and with the ultimate intention to consolidate, and rationalise, the Chilean public sector’s web and physical presence. Activity associated with designing and delivering those services should remain with those organisations with single, or shared, responsibility for a particular set of needs supported by the ongoing efforts of LabGob to encourage a more Agile, experimental and iterative approach.

4. Commit to an inclusive, omni-channel, end to end experience of government building on Chile’s expertise in offline service provision

• Develop a service standard reflecting the omni-channel ambitions of the Chilean public sector. The priority given by Chile to the offline experience of citizens and the importance of face-to-face interactions provides an opportunity to develop a digital by design, rather than digital by default, assurance process that takes into account existing offline processes and the value they provide.

• Establish an assurance process for monitoring the implementation of this standard and include its provisions in business case and performance evaluation processes

• Ensure that the internal experience of working with ChileAtiende to include new services or adopting any ‘Government as a Platform’ enablers is as easy as possible to facilitate those organisations responsible for the ‘long tail’ of government services that would otherwise be left as analogue interactions

• Identify services that touch on multiple organisations including across tiers of government. Select at least one to form the basis for a cross-government service community to develop exemplar services. The funding model for this exercise needs to incentivise collaboration and ensure that different parts of government do not end up feeling that they are competing with one another rather than working together. Exemplars should:

  • be citizen-driven: involving the public throughout the design and delivery process to ensure their needs are understood

  • solve an end to end problem: considering the user’s journey from the moment they identified a need through to its resolution, regardless of how many organisations and interactions are involved

  • proactively meet needs: rather than being initiated by a user, exemplars should look to anticipate requests and, through integrated access to data, reduce the interactions that are needed

  • take innovative approaches: explore how a policy or service might be reimagined to achieve the desired outcomes through the use of new ideas, technologies or applications of data where appropriate

• Promote digital inclusion efforts to remove and reduce barriers to the adoption of digital services. This should include developing new or strengthening existing strategies for:

  • connectivity throughout the country

  • developing clear standards for accessibility of all services and all channels for those with disabilities

  • working with community groups, voluntary organisations, civil society organisations and municipal governments on initiatives to increase digital literacy

• All face-to-face locations, including ChileAtiende, should become the focus for partnerships to move beyond delivery of services to become hubs for activity around civic participation and digital inclusion and consequently encourage adoption amongst the public.

• Identify opportunities for transparently communicating progress in terms of service design and delivery efforts through blogposts and videos as well as physical workshops and demonstrations within ministries and local communities to stimulate ongoing engagement and participation of all stakeholders

5. Secure cross-government political support for a holistic service design and delivery agenda

• Through the Modernisation Committee secure political capital in support of the service design and delivery agenda and secure a commitment for integration between the big service providers and ChileAtiende.

• Design a governance model for services that includes all the key stakeholders and ensures their ongoing coordination. This should build on the existing role of the Service Council in coordinating ChileAtiende (IPS), CMP network (Ministry of Social Development and Family (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social y Familia, MDS)), Ministry General Secretariat of Government (Ministerio Secretaría General de Gobierno, SEGEGOB), Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism (Ministerio de Economía, Fomento y Turismo de Chile), DGD and the Civil Service.

• Clarify the institutional responsibility for service design and delivery in Chile and ensure there are sufficient mandate and resources for the lead organisation(s) to execute the ambitions contained in this report, in collaboration with the main public service providers. They need to be able to involve the appropriate actors and identify, publicise and enforce assurance criteria that achieve a focus on proactive service delivery, driven by citizens and tailored to their needs.

• Strengthen the strategic coordination between DGD and LabGob for a coherent and integrated approach towards service design and delivery standards and practices considering both the expansion of the ChileAtiende network and need to implement the Digital Transformation of the State Law (MINSEGPRES, 2019[4]).

• Bring together all those involved in digital leadership networks at least twice a year to be inspired by the service design challenges and opportunities being explored across Chile. Use these as opportunities to invite public sector leaders, especially those with ‘non-digital’ roles.

6. Secure the availability of enabling ‘Government as a Platform’ resources

• Take advantage of the Digital Transformation of the State Law (MINSEGPRES, 2019[4]) as an exceptional and strategic opportunity to transform the way services are designed, integrated and delivered to citizens. This means going beyond the digitalisation of public services and UX practices, giving larger attention to embedding cross-sectoral service design and delivery standards and the coherent coordination and integration within the government to satisfy final users’ needs.

• Establish the function of a Chief Data Officer for the government and encourage similar appointments at an institutional level.

• As stated in the Digital Transformation Strategy, develop a National Data Strategy in line with the OECD’s data-driven government framework to fulfil the ambition of citizens to provide information once only and provide the necessary legal and technological frameworks to ensure digital security.

• Continue the efforts led by DGD to establish interoperability arrangements across the Chilean public sector.

• Prioritise the development and strengthening of ClaveÚnica as the sole mechanism for identity validation, authentication and advance electronic signature within the Chilean public sector, in line with the recommendations provided by the OECD (2019[3]).

• Prioritise the development, ongoing implementation and support for take-up of common components, such as payments and notifications, which can speed up the delivery of digital services informed by user research into the common needs of service teams.

• Invest in the capacity and coordination of DGD and LabGob to lead on the uptake and development of ‘Government as a Platform’ enabling tools and resources as a service to address concerns and questions of public servants. This needs to involve the following areas of activity:

  • Develop an engagement and ‘marketing’ function to handle account management for common components and tools with those teams that are using them and that can identify the reasons other teams are choosing not to.

  • Showcase the tools and resources available for use by teams in the public sector and ensure regular communication throughout government to raise awareness of new capabilities

  • Support the product teams to meet user needs well through addressing barriers to adoption and, in particular, making initial onboarding for experimentation very easy and being responsive to support needs.

  • Proving the value of using common resources by having clear value statement about what they offer to a user. Work with service teams using the ‘Government as a Platform’ ecosystem to analyse the benefit of enabling tools and services. Offer ongoing support to measure impact, produce case studies detailing the cost benefit analysis of adoption, and provide template business cases for teams making the funding requests to support implementation.

7. Governance, roles and the organisational responsibilities required to support and encourage service design in Chile

It is essential that clear responsibilities are established and the relevant roles identified in order to provide coherent governance and effective leadership across government. Where appropriate this should iterate the legal and regulatory framework to provide a formal basis for the following:

• Secure through the Executive Committee for the Modernisation of the State the long-term vision and governance mechanisms for the coherent implementation of service design, delivery and data strategies.

• Establish a permanent strategic coordination body for service design and delivery in Chile, involving relevant stakeholders in the provision of public services in the country, such as DGD, Ministry of Finance (Ministerio de Hacienda), IPS, Ministry of Social Development and Family (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social y Familia), LabGob and Civil Service. At an operational level, coordination to be carried out by the Service Council with participation from the aforementioned newly established roles of Head of Design, Head of User Research and Chief Data Officer

• MINSEGPRES, Ministry of Finance (Ministerio de Hacienda) and IPS should assume responsibility for normalising the service design and delivery agenda by:

  • setting out a clear omni-channel strategy

  • mapping the existing service landscape and identifying the prioritisation criteria by which services are identified for transformation

  • providing the necessary incentives to stimulate coordination

  • disseminating good service design practices

  • funding the delivery of any enablers for collaboration

  • establishing performance indicators to track and audit progress

• DGD to have the mandate for providing practical elements of the service toolkit for design and delivery teams including standards, guidance and design resources for achieving omni-channel services as well as those activities associated with interoperability, identity management and the citizen wallet, payment systems, and data infrastructure and architecture.

• IPS to be responsible for setting clear customer service guidelines and develop appropriate training for interacting with the public through any channel including forums, social media, web chat as well as physical and telephone. In collaboration with DGD and LabGob, coordinate cross-government user research and analysis of the priority needs to meet as well as developing an effective mechanism for evaluating performance across channels.

• LabGob to work closely in partnership with DGD to develop the standards, guidance and design resources and with IPS to support the analysis and understanding of needs through qualitative and quantitative methods including proactive user engagement to gather. Moreover, work with individual institutions to provide assistance in embedding a user-centred and user-driven culture towards designing services.

• Individual institutions are responsible for adopting these design and delivery standards in their services and channels and work towards their inclusion, and perhaps eventual migration, to ChileAtiende. Training in line with the service design and delivery strategy should be prioritised by individual organisations.

References

[5] Ministerio de Hacienda (2018), Presentación Nueva Institucionalidad ChileAtiende.

[6] MINSEGPRES (2019), Estrategia de Transformación Digital del Estado, Ministerio Secretaría General de la Presidencia.

[4] MINSEGPRES (2019), Ley 21.180 de Transformación Digital del Estado, https://www.leychile.cl/Navegar?idNorma=1138479 (accessed on 12 December 2019).

[2] OECD (2019), Digital Government in Chile – A Strategy to Enable Digital Transformation, OECD Digital Government Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/f77157e4-en.

[3] OECD (2019), Digital Government in Chile – Digital Identity, OECD Digital Government Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9ecba35e-en.

[7] OECD (2019), The Path to Becoming a Data-Driven Public Sector, OECD Digital Government Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/059814a7-en.

[1] OECD (2016), Digital Government in Chile: Strengthening the Institutional and Governance Framework, OECD Digital Government Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258013-en.