Service delivery and digitalisation

About

The state has a vital role in the delivery of a wide array of public services from justice and security to services for individual citizens and private enterprises. Besides traditional public services, such as health care or education, there are administrative services, such as delivery of licences and permissions, which are subject to regulation of administrative proceedings. Service delivery can be defined as any contact with the public administration during which customers – citizens, residents or enterprises – seek or provide data, handle their affairs or fulfil their duties. These services should be delivered in an effective, predictable, reliable and customer-friendly manner. Due to rapid expansion of the use of information and communication technologies, electronic service delivery is an effective means to reduce costs, both in time and money, for the customer as well as the government.

Key elements

Good service delivery requires that:

Users are at the centre of the design and delivery of administrative services.
The public administration delivers streamlined and high-quality services.
Administrative services are easily accessible online and offline, taking into account different needs, choices and constraints.
Digitalisation enables data-driven decisions and effective, efficient and responsive policies, services and processes in the whole of government.

What SIGMA does

SIGMA assists countries in enhancing their service delivery practices by:

Supporting the development, revision and implementation of regulations to help to ensure consistent and coherent administrative procedures and public liability.
Offering expertise in the use of quality assurance tools.
Providing tools to help monitor, assess and re-design the service delivery processes.
Offering guidance to put in place the policy and institutional set-up to achieve user-centric service design and delivery.
Facilitating the use of user engagement and participation, service standards and mechanisms to reduce administrative burden.
Supporting the simplification and modernisation of processes, suggested in a “life event” format.
Helping governments to define and implement accessibility of the public administration for all users (examining different online and offline channels).
Assisting governments in adopting the fundamentals (eg. policy and governance arrangements, interoperability of registries) as well as advanced enablers (digital signature, data governance) for effective digital transformation of the public sector.