Better Public Services Advisory Group Report - November 2011

Better services and more value-for-money
Drive state services to deliver better quality, more responsive and better value-for-money
services to citizens and businesses.
Reducing duplication and consolidation of activity
• Over time, by consolidating and disestablishing some public service and state sector entities,
reduce their overall number to: better support a results focus; reduce fragmentation, duplication,
and transaction costs; and capture economies of scale.
• Consolidate and improve policy capability through a combination of more flexible deployment of
resources, common human resources arrangements and policy hubs.
• Strengthen and extend the use of functional leadership roles to drive best practice, set common
standards, collect data, influence or control budgets and identify opportunities to increase value.
• Require chief executives to implement shared back-office services and real estate wherever this
makes sense, starting in sectors.
• Change legislated reporting requirements to align with the results and sectoral focus and to
reduce compliance costs.
Best-sourcing
• Require agencies to market-test all of their roles, functions and services by looking to see where
it would be more cost-effective to out-source to non-government organisations, private sector or
other third-party providers.
Greater use of technology
• Require the Government Chief Information Officer to drive a programme of standardisation of
information across state services, and to develop a systematic, cross-government strategy for
accelerating the shift to online channels.
Innovation and continuous improvement
• Require agencies to:
- drive continuous business process improvement through the use of ‘lean’ methodologies, and
- drive innovation by benchmarking activity, identifying and implementing best practice from
across the system.
Information
• Require chief executives to proactively make plain English information available to citizens and
businesses and actively seek feedback on services.
• Take advantage of the Christchurch re-build to trial more extensive use of interactive, webbased
information technologies to provide information to and engage with citizens on the design
and improvement of services.
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