Crown Reps For Customers

One of the interesting moves this coalition government has made is to appoint "crown representatives" for key suppliers to government.  So far this looks only good - government has a way to join up how it deals with suppliers (and find out what is going on across government - often suppliers know more than government does, see "nobody knows anything") and suppliers have a place to escalate issues or propose new ideas.

Perhaps the next move is to appoint crown representatives for customer groups - to speed the joining up og pieces of government that, together, can do something important for, say, retired people / soon to be retired people / children  etc.

Arguably we tried to do that some years ago with direct.gov (and alpha will face the same problem as it tries to join up government content and then - even more so - transactions), but we didn't ever crack a way of joining up the policy and implementation (of future changes), only the description of the way it is now.

Such a move, at both official and ministerial level, and provided it was accompanied by levers to control budget and delivery, could result in some amazingly good changes to the way things work today.

Crown Reps For Customers