Case Study on Sharing Front Offices
Strengthening Families was recently featured as a case study in an international study on sharing “front office services”. This is a name given to services that take a coordinated, holistic approach to service delivery, and are focused on supporting people’s whole life needs. In a nutshell the report concludes that in moving to a citizen-centric delivery model “…the challenges can be daunting but are far outweighed by the potential benefits of more holistic, coordinated service delivery and the resulting improvement in outcomes”.
Sharing Front Office Services: The Journey to Citizen-Centric Delivery
The study was undertaken by The Accenture Institute for Health & Public Service Value. This global consulting company undertakes research to promote high performance in the health care sector and in public service delivery, policy-making and governance. It has offices and operations in more than 200 cities across the world.
The study uses fourteen case studies to illustrate how front office shared services deal with four implementation challenges:
- governance
- performance management
- workforce change
- information sharing and systems.
The report notes that higher levels of integration are required when working with complex outcomes, such as responding to the needs of people suffering from multi-dimensional disadvantage. Strengthening Families is presented as an exemplar of a ‘networked delivery’ type of front office shared service because it allows agencies to organise integrated delivery around the needs of specific cases, whilst not restricting their autonomy or affecting their core functions.
The Accenture Study identified the following strengths of the Strengthening Families initiative:
- a strong sense of local ownership
- the flexibility for agencies to be involved to different degrees on a case-by-case basis
- governance arrangements that allow for and recognise partner agencies with different service cultures and ways of operating
- a clear mandate for cross-agency working provided by the Strategic Framework
- case-by-case client consent for information sharing, in which clients can specify what information is shared and with whom.
It also noted the following challenges for Strengthening Families:
- supporting agencies on local management groups to fulfil governance roles
- the need for performance management system that supports collaborative working, meaning that staff involved in the initiative are not accountable for its success and may focus on their own agency work when under pressure
- the difficulty of measuring the impact of Strengthening Families on outcomes for clients.
