Professional Public Sector Intermediaries

The demands the public sector makes on citizens and businesses can be a complex undertaking. In many cases several locations must be dealt with, documents must be provided and forms need to be filled out. The public sector’s customers tend to carry out these activities themselves in most cases. In special cases such as building a house, tax returns, or a death there are already experts who specialize in giving advice and processing formalities in these circumstances.

It is worth expanding on these basic ideas for the general processing of administrative procedures in order to develop these approaches even further In future “public sector consultants” could take on the entire communication process with public institutions in a professional manner. Public sector consultants would take care of their customers’ needs and inform them of all relevant issues. Being able to give comprehensive advice in a customer’s native language is considered to be of great importance. In addition, as contracted procedural managers they could check applications and documents for completeness and give them directly to the relevant administrative department.

Public sector consultants need their own portals for their work and to win over customers. They can also provide their customers with further information in a secure and protected part of the portal. In addition, public sector consultants can also have access to the open, shared contributions made by points of single contact, responsible authorities and shared service providers. To support the creation of formal and correct documents the consultants can draw up collaborative systems to collect the necessary data, acquire the necessary documents and examine these to check that they are complete. They can also deal with applications including queries, status information, sent out notices and bill payments.

Public sector consultants complement the portfolio of the institutions within the public sector. As the public sector’s professional partners, they establish communication with the right contacts exclusively and they speak the government departments’ language. They also deliver complete and correctly filled out application documents. Public sector consultants provide customers with a simplified way of dealing with their administrative affairs. In more complicated cases citizens and businesses will receive more comprehensive advice as the consultants will advise them of the best approach. Public sector consultants provide a customer friendly point of single contact service based on a modern IT infrastructure which includes systems for knowledge and case management, responsibility finding, saving documents and online collaboration.

This concept would be highly attractive to savings banks, cooperative banks and private credit institutions, and for lawyers, tax advisors, and consulting firms as a certain number of their clients are already being looked after by the public sector and these institutions would like to gain new clients.

Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS’ research group “High Performance Portals for the Public Sector” developed a concept for a public sector consultant’s work profile in Fall 2008.