Traditionally, local government organisations have been designed from a departmental perspective, creating silos and inefficient manual efforts. Organisations have attempted to resolve this through their focus on the front end, digitalising customer transactions and customer requests – but without innovating back-office systems that deliver the true benefits of front-office changes.
This approach simply creates more pressure and demand on the middle and back office to respond to increased ‘electronic’ communication via manual processes.
Forrester research on behalf of KPMG shows that on the topic of ‘seamless interactions,’ just over half (56 percent) of organisations believe their services are integrated within and across departments and the wider ecosystem. Forrester notes that organisations that are better able to execute on objectives spanning the front, middle and back offices are 1.5 times more likely to successfully harness data, advanced analytics and actionable insights with a real-time understanding of the customer and the business to shape integrated business decisions.1
A well-designed back office can help drive true customer centricity, reduce costs and employee manual effort, improve the ability to perform more value-adding activities and analysis, and improve the employee value proposition by enabling them to do more meaningful work. It can also increase the capacity of councils to invest in more meaningful initiatives and reinvest back into the community.
The design of the back office in today’s digital environment should be service-oriented for customer centricity, and its processes and systems should enable rapid, reliable, secure delivery on those objectives. Adopting best practices that are common in other organisations, such as for payroll or accounts payable, and tailoring specific processes that can help make a key difference for efficiency, should be encouraged. Improvement in the back office may, however, be limited without simultaneously investing in the right technology tools and systems, such as chatbots, automated processing and data integration.
