Public Sector Roundtable

In our meeting yesterday we spent the morning focusing on the use of data in enabling organisations to improve their performance. David Anker of Lightfoot Solutions started the morning by talking about behaviours that prevent organisations from effectively using data to improve their performance. He then went on to describe what happened to Canterbury Health Care in New Zealand after the earthquake when they didn’t have the resources to build new hospitals but still had the need to look after the health of the population. David gave real life examples from the public sector of what joined-up thinking needs to look like and how, if you focus on improving just one part of the problem, you find unintended and unwanted consequences occurring elsewhere.

This presentation was followed by Chris Hemingway from HMRC who discussed how tax debt was reduced during the recession by creating a learning system by which different techniques for recovering debt were experimented with and decision rules were used to extend the use of effective interventions. Chris finished by presenting what a “customer focused HMRC” would look like and some of the implications for its implementation.

Mike Bourne