Barriers to the delivery of high-quality government services

Figure 7 provides an overview of APS leaders’ perceptions of the key barriers to the delivery of high-quality government services. These have been organised around cognitive, institutional, and environmental barriers. Cognitive barriers refer to obstacles to the capacity of the APS to understand the service needs of Australians and deliver on the service promise.

“To build trust we need to actually engage with people and businesses that consume services from government in the way that they think about services rather the way we're organised in government.” [KS2]

“At the end of the day, it can’t get much worse, it can only get better. And until they put some normal people in that actually know what it’s about that I suppose, for argument’s sake, a normal person, not one that sits behind a big oak desk and whatever else and has actually had experiences, that have had drought experiences and aged care experiences and [Financial Support Service] experiences, whatever, those people, they are the ones that can actually try and change it for the better because they’ve actually been there, done that, not sit behind a desk and let some other puppet do all their work for them.” [FG5]

Institutional barriers refer to internal organisational issues which impact on the capacity of public organisations to create and deliver quality public services. The key institutional barriers to delivery identified by APS leaders include: siloed systems that are not conducive to service delivery; complexity in service design and access; difficulty in finding the right information, at the right time, in the right context; reactive service management; poor communication with users about entitlements and obligations; users being required to provide information multiple times; and, the complexity of tools provided by government.

“I think without exception the user journey approach is being accepted within agencies. A really strong desire to understand how to do collaborative delivery is also strongly supported. We have a community of practice, we have guilds, we have training and development programs that are proving to be very popular across the APS. I think the thing that is most challenging though, is as we think about user experience it invariably spans agencies, and layers of government.” [KS2]

An infographic showing barriers and enablers split into 3 categories: institutional, cognitive and environmental. Institutional barriers and enablers include siloed systems, complexity in service design and access, opaque information systems, poor service culture and reactive service management, absence of touch points for “seamless” services, inflexible working practices, little incentive to take the time to think about how to work differently, limited capability in user design and strategic communications with citizens, complexity of tolls provided by government and process centred rather than outcome focussed services. Cognitive barriers and enablers include unpredictable group behaviour due to citizen bias against the policy intervention or previous service experience, absence of delivery expertise in the APS SES and understanding of the rudiments of service culture, “top down” approach to policy and service design and negative perceptions of the “Canberra bubble”. Environmental barriers and enablers include low levels of political trust, high citizen expectation of the quality of service, low levels of trust between jurisdictions and fragmented policy service systems. All of these then have impacts on service system and culture such as service outputs, problematic compliance with outputs by target groups, actual impact of policy outputs, perceived impacts of policy outputs and identification of implementation gaps.
Figure 7. Barriers and enablers to service delivery identified by APS leaders

Environmental barriers refer to exogenous factors which can undermine the capacity of public organisations to create and deliver quality public services. Most environmental factors are beyond the control of public organisations but need to be factored into strategic thinking particularly in areas of risk-management and strategic communication to staff. In this instance they include:

  1. low levels of political trust;
  2. high citizen expectation of the quality of service;
  3. low levels of trust between jurisdictions; and,
  4. fragmented policy and service systems.

Most of these barriers can also be identified as conditions for high quality service provision. For example, if we consider the cognitive barriers in Figure 7 these involve:

  1. unpredictable target group behaviour due to citizen bias against the policy intervention or frustration with previous service experience;
  2. the absence of delivery expertise in APS SES and limited understanding of the imperatives of a service culture;
  3. a ‘top-down’ approach to policy and service design; and,
  4. negative perceptions of the “Canberra bubble” (the ‘tyranny of distance’).

Each of these barriers can be turned into a positive value if a transformational strategy is implemented to reverse prevailing conditions. For example;

  1. potentially can be addressed through improvements to the service culture;
  2. potentially can be addressed through recruitment of appropriate capability;
  3. potentially can be addressed through integrated policy systems and inclusive policy design; and,
  4. potentially can be addressed through better strategic communication and authentic community engagement and co-design.

These sets of barriers do not exist in a vacuum but interact with one another in complex and often unexpected ways. They provide a basis for strategic thinking about both the necessary conditions for high quality service provision and effective strategies for achieving them (refer Figure 2).