Spend More, Reduce Costs
It should be a simple system for a large government organisation. Book a customer an appointment in one of many satellite offices at a particular time on a particular day. Why would someone create an Excel spreadsheet on a shared drive to solve this problem? What are the invisible costs of approaching IT systems in this way?
A little background first. I recently fell into the social safety net for various reasons. As a result, I’ve seen some of the effects of the new austerity measures on the provision of welfare in England.
First of all, the IT infrastructure hasn’t been refreshed in a number of years. That’s OK because these machines shouldn’t need to run lots of memory- or processor-hungry applications. The advisers shouldn’t be working on more than accessing the back end databases and writing letters. Any systems that the Jobcentres are using should take account of the fact there are a lot of advisers and a lot of old client hardware out there.
The systems in current usage don’t take that basic cost constraint into account. I was dealing with a woman who apologised repeatedly for having to open and close programs because having too many open applications at the same time caused her desktop to freeze. All you could see in her taskbar were collapsed icons for the many different applications that she had to keep open to do her job. As the interview progressed, she was constantly opening and closing programs to show me new information or to make changes.
One program in particular caught my attention. This was an old style mainframe application being shown through a terminal emulator. Every single task that was being done required the memorisation of a different alphanumeric code to get to the right screen. For a start, there is a time cost incurred. Every 10 second switch between screens, expanded to 30 seconds because every screen switch unexpectedly required a password to be entered, is time that is not spent on helping the customer. Secondly, how much time and money is spent training people to use systems like this? How much money is spent on hiring administrators to maintain such old (and untaught) technology?
What really made me laugh was finding out that one of the major cost-cutting measures was not giving out little plastic wallets to each customer. These wallets are perfectly sized for the paper documentation that they use as part of the review process and make it harder to accidentally lose one of those pieces of paper.
The example from the opening paragraph shows how crazy this whole thing is. During the initial interview, the adviser schedules you into one of the offices in the local catchment area. To do this, she opens an Excel spreadsheet from one of the many spreadsheet links on her desktop, enters your National Insurance number (Social Security number to anybody not familiar with English government), finds the right sheet, filters the data down to open slots, overtypes “BOOKED” into one field next to the slot you choose and then presses a button. Each day, somebody at each office builds a schedule for the day, prints that out, makes sure that each desk is labelled with a box number (printed from a word document, cut to A5 size and stuck to the cubicle wall with sellotape) and distributes it to each of the large number of advisers per office.
At first look, the big cost is the time spent entering the data. But there is plenty of waste elsewhere in the system too, from the over-use of paper to the time spent manually managing the schedules. This system is probably stable by now, but there still needs to be someone available in case of emergency.
What I propose is a module that is part of an over-arching system. This module would already know the national insurance number of the interviewee and their address so it can display the open slots for the appropriate office and the appropriate day for that person. Then, the adviser simply needs to select the time slot chosen by the interviewee and click next. In the offices, schedules can be checked by looking at the data on a screen at the front desk instead of books full of paper for each day.
For those that are more persuaded by the financial numbers than this summary of a systems analysis – consider these approximate statistics. In December 2010 there were 1.456 million claimants of JSA. Every one of these should have visited a job centre office twice in that time. If one person in a thousand makes a change to their appointment time and one in a hundred of those changes results in a mistake that is still 145 mistakes a fortnight across the country. Assume that a mistake costs 20 man-minutes at the minimum wage rate of £5.93 and that means that £22 thousand pounds a year are spent dealing with these avoidable situations.
Of course, that’s just mistakes. Look at the cost of printed schedules. Assume an office prints an average 10 pages each day for their schedules. If a page costs 10 pence, then across the fortnight, each office would spend £20 on printing those schedules. Across all 141,ooo individual offices that means £1.41 million in printing costs! Of course, electricity isn’t free, so you won’t save all £1.41 million by switching to an electronic monitor based system. In comparison, assuming a reasonable kWh cost of 9.7p, one extra monitor for all 141 thousand job centre offices will cost approximately 0.1 million pounds. That is a factor of ten reduction in costs, just from one change!
All this is back of the envelope math. How much do you think you would spend to figure out if it is worth it? How much would you spend if these savings turn out to be possible? How much more do you think could be saved if an end-to-end rebuild was done?
There are many ways to reduce costs but most require investment. This is possible, even in an environment that seems hostile to spending more money. All it takes is people willing to actually understand systems and change them for the better.