SAS Institute – Written evidence (FFF0046)

 

  1.               SAS is the leading global partner to governments and private enterprises who want to make better decisions faster. SAS uses artificial intelligence and analytical software to enable fully informed, consistent decisions to be taken throughout organisations based on the sum of institutional knowledge. SAS works with more than 1,300 healthcare organisations at 3,500+ customer sites across 49 countries.

 

  1.               SAS operates at the frontiers of technology in areas such as computer vision, deep neural learning, natural language processing, entity resolution and computer vision and, as the world-leader in both Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Platforms, invests over $1Billion per annum in research and development on behalf of its customers at nearly 90,000 sites worldwide. SAS is committed to ethical use of data and is recognised for its socially responsible, ethical, and moral business practices.

 

SAS Response to Inquiry

Q1. IT IS DIFFICULT TO PREDICT ACCURATELY HOW THE PUBLIC SERVICES WORKFORCE WILL NEED TO CHANGE IN THE LONG TERM, AND YET IT IS NECESSARY TO PREPARE NOW FOR THE FUTURE. WHAT IS AN APPROPRIATE APPROACH TO LONG-TERM PLANNING FOR WORKFORCE NEEDS AND DEMAND IN PUBLIC SERVICES, AND HOW SHOULD CURRENT TRAINING ADAPT, NOT JUST AT THE POINT OF EMPLOYEES’ ENTRY INTO THE WORKFORCE BUT THROUGHOUT THEIR CAREERS?

 

  1.               Forecasting skills requirements across government in alignment with each department’s strategic objectives as they change over time is not trivial but such an approach is required. Traditional means of backfilling positions are not necessarily going to be fit for purpose in an ever faster paced and digitised world, thus workforce talent acquisition teams must be empowered to work in collaboration with leaders across strategy and operations to plan for the skills needed for the future.

 

  1.               Longer term strategic planning has to centre around a better use of data, to analyse the talents and experience of the vast array of existing employees and upskilling those with the greatest potential for growth and the most relevant experience. Analysis will also inform forward recruitment in terms of workforce population and make-up from a skills perspective. Government departments need to create an aerial view of their operations using core HR data alongside data from finance and the wider organisation to drive more accurate and timely decisions.

 

  1.               Central to this is the ability to be able to use as much data as possible to understand future demand for public services, based on the forward nature of those services and the degree to which they will be called upon by citizens. This can help public sector bodies both understand what skills are needed – where and when, and to source in a way that lowers cost to serve and improves service for citizens. As an example of this, a key US health provider managed to reduce costs by a magnitude of millions per annum and improve service through better use of data to understand certain elements of patient care.

 

  1.               Government in the widest context may wish to conduct analysis across the entire public service ecosystem considering third party contractors in the supply mix and assessing future skills requirements for major government infrastructure programmes and other volume demands that can be identified. Clearly this should be done in concert with the Department for Education to align skills training, the Home Office to adjust immigration policies to reflect scarcity of future skills as well as volume employers such as MoD and NHS.

 

  1.               As the workforce demographic changes, government must maintain a balanced workforce to ensure the optimal blend of employees with a rich, deep experience of ‘the business of running government’ and those with tangible skills in digital development who can take government forward. Use of data to optimise training budgets and recruitment is a good way to do this.

 

  1.               Leaders must therefore find ways to foster the skills and experience of employees at both ends of the experience spectrum, while ensuring that vital operational skills and strategic expertise is not lost as employees retire. Successfully navigating this change will require succession planning and knowledge retention or transfer programmes that can evolve dynamically with the workforce population and the needs of every government organisation.

 

  1.               International examples where defence organisations and pharmaceutical companies have been able to use data to understand when staff may leave an organisation, how best to recruit new staff that can be successful in post and how to incentivise staff with key skills to stay within an organisation are available on request.

 

  1.          To achieve this kind of recalibration, not once but continually, will demand insights from a far greater set of data than currently used. This will entail moving beyond internal HR data and using broader government and external open data on salaries, job tenure durations, skills demand info, industry skills distribution, retraining effectiveness to name a few.

 

  1.          Providing leaders with the capability to develop confident and sensitive succession strategies and skills transfer programmes will also lead to personalised career development and capability goals (at scale) for the workforce across government.

 

Q4. How might the public sector become more attractive as an employer, particularly in comparison with the private sector? How might it become attractive enough to retain workers throughout their careers while maintaining a level of turnover THAT BRINGS FRESH IDEAS TO ORGanisations?

  1.          The Public Sector does attract extremely dedicated and talented individuals with strong service values, high personal standards of integrity and an enthusiasm for innovation and a passion to improve their organisation and the wider civil service. It is this author’s experience that where frustration exists at a senior level it is very often the cultural barriers to risk taking and the lack of empowerment that this undeveloped risk management ethos has created that are the underlying cause. This may also be a factor when public services struggle to attract the best talent.

 

  1.          This culture may lead to an aversion to change and a relatively conservative uptake of new technologies which then impacts retention in lower grades and leads to repetitive unfulfilling work in routine operational delivery roles.  However, this is not universally true and we find increasingly that the UK civil service are pioneering technology enabled transformation that is well ahead of many private sector customers.

 

  1.          Technology, and analytics in particular has a broad role in improving employee satisfaction starting with the measurement of satisfaction such as conducting employee sentiment analysis on internal systems or staff surveys. Deeper analysis can then reveal underlying causes and can also assist managers to identify issues earlier to make system wide changes or identify individuals who may be at risk to enable retention strategies to be designed and implemented. In a recent pilot using administrative data in the UK public sector such a system correctly identified 94% of the employees who tended their resignation in the subsequent 6 month period.

 

  1.          Technology can also improve the quality of working life as part of delivering improved service performance. A utility firm spun out of a nationalised industry found it had difficulty meeting demand in peak times leading to staff dissatisfaction with mandatory overtime and customer satisfaction levels plummeting. Implementing an analytical system, they identified the key factors leading to equipment failure including the weather, equipment model and age and customer profile.

 

  1.          By using this modelling, they could conduct pre-emptive repairs in quiet periods reducing the peak demand and enabling engineers to control their overtime individually. This led to much improved customer satisfaction, happier employees, reduced costs, improved equipment longevity and an environment where innovation and employee ideas could flourish.

 

Q6. How can providers of public services recruit a more diverse workforce? How should they improve their recruitment of BAME people, people with disabilities, older people and people who use public services and live in the communities THAT PROVIDERS SERVE?

 

  1.          Wherever possible, public services should strive to deliver peer-based services which have high approval ratings and accurately tailored services to the community, culture or lifestyle of the service recipients they serve.

 

  1.          This is another area where analytics can be used to help understand how to improve/accelerate diversity and inclusion. Whilst targets themselves are a matter of policy, the careful analysis of available data will support the setting of such targets and drive insight into changing community attitudes and sentiment. For instance, most service providers should have demographically adjusted targets so the proportions of staff drawn from the target population should align with the proportion in the local community. Use of national or regional figures are unlikely to capture significant local variations in numbers within a catchment area and, wherever possible, staff recruitment demographics should be targeted at the active service user-base. This is especially important when specific services are provided predominately to these communities.

 

Q9. Preventative and early intervention services can improve the ability of the public services workforce to respond to users’ needs. How might such services be embedded within any public services WORKFORCE STRATEGY

 

  1.          Strategic use of clean, reliable and contextual data aids in identifying prevention and proactive interventions. It can also help maximise workforce productivity by transferring staff to prevention during low activity spells. Prevention may require alternative skill sets which must be held by appropriate numbers of staff and may not be as hard to acquire in some circumstances, potentially enabling service costs to be further reduced whilst pleasing the recipients. Understanding how prevention opportunities can be identified means training appropriate staff in other service delivery units to identify and create data flags for triggering the required action.

 

  1.          Decisioning systems which focus on near real-time decisions can look at all available service options for citizens and create a work allocation schedule for both single point and multiple agency delivery. Critically, this can constantly risk assess a citizen’s circumstances from a number of perspectives to ensure that interventions can be initiated through the correct services at the earliest available opportunity, supporting the citizen whilst ensuring optimal use of resources. Resources can also be better allocated to preventative pre-emptive work at quiet periods. These systems will also improve staff retention by reducing unexpected overtime and allocated planned overtime to civil servants or private contractors according to their stated preference.

 

  1.          Key to all of this is a better understanding of how to use data in a public sector context. Data literacy in general is a hot topic, and it is important that the public sector understand and embrace the opportunity that better use of data represents both from an organisational and associated process improvement perspective.

 

Q11. Integrating public services can mean that they are delivered more effectively to users. What would be the outcomes of better integration between public services WORKFORCES?

 

  1.          Considering the huge size of the public sector and the diversity of roles and organisations within it, workforce management technology can be deployed to better support the training, skills and career development of officials. In turn, this provides more attractive and rewarding careers, thus benefitting the retention of public sector employees. Both better use of data and sharing of data across public sector is key here.

 

  1.          Some public services can be delivered in a linear fashion and by a ‘stand-alone’ provider. However, most are provided by a complex mixture of national and local government resources augmented by private sector contractors and third sector organisations. In some cases, a regulatory framework will exist to ensure standards are met and provision is fair and equal.

 

  1.          In many cases, elements of possible interventions with the citizen may be fulfilled by a number of cross-government channels and this has historically led to ad-hoc co-operation at a local level. However, this approach is not systematic and often leads to fragmented delivery, duplication of effort or elements falling between departmental silos to the frustration of all parties. Moreover, this model does not allow the needs of the service user to be identified holistically and addressed by the most appropriate blend of services. It will rarely deliver the insight necessary to adopt a more predictive and preventative approach offering better outcomes for citizens, often at a reduced cost to the taxpayer.

 

  1.          This is a service optimisation problem that can be tackled using an analytical approach. This answer will focus on the operational orchestration of service delivery but clearly data and analytics will also be instrumental in policy development to identify citizen needs and consider the various delivery options and providers involved in addressing them.

 

  1.          The complexity of determining the most appropriate blend of services, their delivery time window and the service providers to be employed is significant and when we take into consideration availability of resources, costs, urgency, geographic limitations and other constraints and then attempt it in the context of thousands of other competing cases, it soon becomes impossible for humans alone to achieve in any reasonable timeframe. However, analytics, data and artificial intelligence are particularly adept at solving such problems.

 

Q12. How might voluntary and private sector workforces be involved in the delivery of integrated public SERVICES?

 

  1.          Decisioning systems such as that described in Q9 will achieve the best results when deployed at scale with the facility at a local level to influence the resulting work schedules by adding constraints to the problem which the AI will then factor into its work allocation process. As noted above data sharing is key to this.

 

  1.          A national scheme may be desirable in the longer term, but a regional hub approach would allow a faster initial capability to be built at lower cost/risk with subsequent hubs learning from the experience developed by the existing deployments.

 

  1.          These systems provide a collaboration environment that could be used by public and private sector organisations to work more closely and allocate work according to best overall outcomes yet will understand resource availability from both sectors as well as the cost parameters involved.

 

  1.          This type of solution effectively allows the creation of bespoke working structures tailored around the needs of the citizen without the need for complex machinery of government changes or complex contractual mechanisms. It does this by moving the data, not the people or the infrastructure.

 

  1.          Call-off contracts could potentially be managed via blockchain[1] to reduce the overhead of procurement processes and such a system would be influenced by local delivery capabilities and hence identify best practices through localised service variation, whilst developing national oversight to identify trends.

 

Q13. What are the barriers to achieving better workforce integration (including integration with the voluntary and private sectors), and how can any such barriers be overcome? How can leaders of public services drive and incentivise any cultural change necessary to achieve integration between organisations? Are there any examples OF BEST PRACTICE?

 

  1.          It is perhaps useful here to consider the future hybrid workforce. Shared data and a common understanding will greatly improve integration between private and public elements of the workforce but let us not forget that across the public sector, AI is being deployed to drive efficiency and to cut costs.

 

  1.          HMRC and DWP both use AI, specifically AI-driven bots, which are being used to improve the speed of service provision and to automate routine tasks, and further improve decision-making. These may help to act as a continuity between humans but business leaders must also take account of the issues involved in deploying AI into the general workforce, analysing where they will be best deployed, the impacts on human recruitment and retention and ways to support this cultural change.

 

  1.          Another aspect that needs attention now is the quality of data.  It is hard to predict a future workforce from a data perspective if historic data is inaccurate, and/or not suitable for generating insights for certain key strategic questions. Now is the time to experiment with potential data and test their value in generating the insights required. This may include learning from other sectors who use data to understand risk and needs at an individual (citizen) level such as financial services companies.

 

  1.          Of course, using these new data and the new capabilities in operational planning that they enable will itself require new skills to be developed and practiced with early learning fed back into the analytics to improve accuracy and increase granularity. The people and the process elements are always critical and the technology merely an enabler, albeit a vital one. Integration across all these dimensions is a necessary priority but this will tend to accelerate user effectiveness/acceptance and this in turn will allow early identification of risks and paths to their mitigation.

 

[1] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmtreasy/910/91004.htm