This chapter analyses and assesses the approach to user-driven and proactive service design and delivery in Türkiye using pillars 1 and 2 of the OECD’s Framework for Service Design and Delivery. The first section of the chapter considers the context of representative and organisational politics, the legacy of channels, technology and infrastructure, and societal and geographic factors. The second section considers the philosophy for service design and delivery through leadership and establishing multi-disciplinary teams that work across organisational boundaries as well as the behaviours associated with understanding whole problems, designing end-to-end experiences, involving the public and delivering in an agile way. Finally, the chapter concludes by considering how service design and delivery practices supported the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Digital Government Review of Türkiye
5. Creating user-driven value in proactive public service design and delivery
Abstract
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic removed any lingering doubt that digital technology and data are foundational to life in the twenty first century. Pre-pandemic, citizens and businesses had high expectations about moving seamlessly between analogue and digital environments but lockdowns and fully remote working turned digital into the default overnight and cemented the need for digital-era public services as a priority for governments. Well-designed services can improve the efficiency of public agencies, the well-being of citizens and their satisfaction with government, as well as the success of policy. For the government of the Republic of Türkiye, the ambition is to be increasingly user-driven, seamless, inclusive and proactive with a focus on meeting people's needs in the context where they are.
Digital government helps to translate these ambitions into practice. By re-engineering and re-designing services to reflect digital-era working practices, the smarter use of data and the appropriate deployment of technology, governments can be paperless, go mobile, and experiment with artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. A crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the benefits of having the right service design culture and enablers in place: in responding to new and emerging needs under pressure, they could do so with clearly understood and simple to use services that meet user needs without increasing their burden, or that of the responsible public sector organisation.
In order for digital government efforts to help ensure digital technologies and data benefit the whole of society, including those relying on in-person experiences, it is essential to consider the entire service design and delivery process. This means building collaborative relationships with the public to understand their needs as well as focusing on the internal culture, processes and resources of government. The OECD Framework for Public Service Design and Delivery identifies three areas as the basis for analysing public service design and delivery (OECD, 2020[1]):
1. The context in terms of representative and organisational politics, the legacy of channels, technology and infrastructure, and societal and geographic factors.
2. The service design and delivery philosophy in terms of leadership, combining disciplines to work across organisational boundaries, understanding whole problems, designing end-to-end service experiences, involving the public, and delivering in an agile way.
3. The availability of an ecosystem of enabling resources and tools that support the quality of experience and outcomes for all users as well as the speed with which service teams are able to respond to the needs of their users in transforming the service landscape.
This chapter presents the existing context for service design and delivery in Türkiye and then discusses the culture and philosophy observed in consideration of this issue. Chapter 6 assesses the third pillar, the enabling resources to support service design and delivery.
Context for service design and delivery
The ability for a country to use the design and delivery of public services to create user-driven value is influenced by the context in which these activities take place, specifically in the areas shown in Figure 5.1.
Establishing a philosophy of service design and resourcing the necessary enablers is influenced in several ways. These include representative and organisational politics and the role of leadership in securing long-term strategic planning, financial investment and the mandate to remove obstacles.
Further influence comes from past public service interventions. The associated processes, data flows and channels can create a confusing landscape of multiple user journeys. The legacy of physical infrastructure, data, technology, channels, brands and supplier contracts all influence the speed and capability of a public sector in pursuing its ambitions for transforming public services.
Figure 5.1. The OECD Framework for Public Service Design and Delivery: Context
Source: OECD (2020[1]), Digital Government in Chile – Improving Public Service Design and Delivery, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/b94582e8-en.
Finally, shaping the context for citizens as they access services are questions of society and geography that may mean digital inclusion, accessibility and literacy need to be prioritised in terms of how services are designed and delivered.
Representative and organisational politics
The OECD measures digital government maturity using the Digital Government Policy Framework (OECD, 2020[2]; 2020[3]). The most mature approaches reflect a culture where government is user-driven and open by default, built on strong digital-by-design, government as a platform and data-driven foundations with the resulting public services being proactive and inclusive. These ideas should arguably be politically neutral, but their success does rely on political stability and ongoing organisational commitment. Thus, the first area informing the context for creating user-driven value in proactive public service design and delivery is representative and organisational politics.
As discussed in Chapter 2, Türkiye has a long-standing history of centrally organised strategies concerning digital transformation with an ambition for creating user-driven value in proactive public service design and delivery that has continued through the transition to the Presidential model and the oversight of the Digital Transformation Office (Dijital Dönüşüm Ofisi, DTO). As a result, Türkiye’s overarching narrative has created a context within which there is a generally perceived sense of urgency to eliminate bureaucracy and to avoid putting burdens onto citizens. From the President down, there is a shared recognition of the importance of good quality service design and delivery as part of the national approach to citizen rights. As with every government, the challenges of the COVID‑19 pandemic highlighted the importance of digital technology and data as an essential tool for maintaining normality and cementing their priority for all political leaders (OECD, 2020[4]).
There is no doubting the importance of the political environment in setting the agenda and shaping the opportunities to deliver on a digital transformation of the public sector. The Presidential model in Türkiye concentrates power at the centre and provides a mechanism for disseminating the wishes and interests of the political establishment throughout public sector institutions. Nevertheless, there is a difference between broadcasting a message and seeing it translate into practical implementation. Bridging this gap relies on the quality and leadership of those within different organisations. The governance for digital government in Türkiye is discussed more fully in Chapters 2 and 3 while Chapter 4 discusses the importance of leadership to establish the right environment and to model the necessary behaviours for a successful digital transformation.
This is important in Türkiye where the DTO is now the focal point for digital transformation but builds on the previous work of other organisations who retain influence over elements of the digital landscape. For example, in terms of national cyber security (discussed in Chapter 7), different responsibilities are held by the DTO, the Ministry of Industry and Technology (Sanayi ve Teknoloji Bakanlığı), Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure (Ulaştırma ve Altyapı Bakanlığı), Information and Communication Technologies Authority (Bilgi ve İletişim Teknolojileri Kurumu) and the Presidential Security and Foreign Policy Board (Cumhurbaşkanlığı Güvenlik ve Dış Politikalar Kurulu). This makes it essential for the working dynamics between different organisations to work in a consistent and coherent fashion. Indeed, during the fact-finding mission to support the Review, more than one organisation expressed their recognition that creating user-driven value in proactive public service design and delivery necessitates co-operation between different institutions. In this respect, the “Mitigation of Bureaucracy and Digital Türkiye Meeting” (discussed in Chapter 2) is vital in co-ordinating, prioritising and identifying the challenges and opportunities for digital transformation in Türkiye.
Indeed, distributing organisational responsibility for the detail of digital transformation can help its success. Chapter 4 discusses not only the importance of individual leaders in shaping their organisations to deliver a transformative approach to service design and delivery but also how important for embedding a culture of service design and delivery are the opportunities for all politicians and public servants to develop digital government skills (OECD, 2021[5]). In Türkiye, the leadership or vision to realise this potential is not yet in place in every organisation. As a result, the imperative for transformation is not motivated by advocacy for users and their needs. It is instead framed in terms of an urgency to eliminate bureaucracy with technology as the answer for increasing speed and reducing cost. The result is a focus on meeting specific targets and not embedding a sustainable and self-perpetuating change in the way in which organisations think about the role of digital technology and data to underpin transformation.
A further challenge in achieving full-scale digital transformation of the design and delivery of public services is the variety of organisations reflected in the Turkish public sector. Alongside the central government entities and Ministries, the country also counts state-owned companies and utility companies as elements within the public sector. The presence of these entities introduces a different experience in terms of responding to the needs of users as paying consumers and consequently having a responsibility to design services that support the commercial side of their operations.
Furthermore, many of the day-to-day interactions between citizens or businesses and government services are in the context of municipal government. In 2019, the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change (Çevre, Şehircilik ve İklim Değişikliği Bakanlığı) published the 2020-2023 National Smart Cities Strategy and Action Plan (Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation, 2019[6]). The Action Plan contains commitments to responding to the service design and delivery needs of municipal governments through the expected creation of a service catalogue and improvement to service channels. While the DTO is responsible for co-ordinating digital transformation at the local level, the more active oversight and contribution falls to either the Ministry of the Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı) or the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change (Çevre, Şehircilik ve İklim Değişikliği Bakanlığı). Externally to central government, the Union of Municipalities of Türkiye supports the use and dissemination of information technologies.
A final factor in the political context shaping the service design and delivery agenda is the relationship of Türkiye with the European Union (EU). Although the negotiations for full membership of the EU are currently stalled, the process has informed and influenced digital transformation in Türkiye whether in terms of guiding the development of domestic data protection legislation or enhancing the cross-border interoperability of services, data and technologies such as digital identity.
Legacy of channels, technology and infrastructure
The second area of activity that shapes the context for the design and delivery of public services is the legacy of channels, technology and infrastructure. As discussed earlier, digital transformation in Türkiye has a significant heritage. There are areas of the public sector that have embraced initially an e‑government model and then latterly a digitally transformed understanding to the design and delivery of public goods and services.
Since its creation in 2018, the DTO has had a wider ranging and holistic responsibility for digital government than previous organisational structures. Given that the organisation had only been in place for a little more than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, this relatively new structure will take time to bed in. As a result, there are existing strategic activities that concern the infrastructure, technology and channels that are being used for the design and delivery of services across Türkiye.
Perhaps the biggest challenge from a legacy point of view is not technological but operational in the history of organisations in the Turkish public sector. Some organisations, often associated with core functions of the state, were established during the Ottoman Empire and this long-standing organisational heritage often means they have been working to establish their digital and technology functions as well as the necessary associated skills over many years. However, such history can sometimes be a barrier to innovation or collaboration. For example, one of the interviewed organisations reflecting this history spoke of their capacity to work in an Agile way but had given little thought to the opportunities for contributing to the Open Government Data agenda despite their domain being well suited to this.
These well-established organisations are also aware of the significant time, money and energy that has been invested to establish their services and channels. For example, the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre (Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü, TKGM) and the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) spoke proudly about all that they had done and are doing to achieve the digital transformation of their organisations as their priority. These services are critical to the daily functioning of Turkish society and so any change to their organisationally-focused operating model in pursuit of a more collaborative model involved shared resources or common components must be able to demonstrate its security, resilience and suitability.
Türkiye is pursuing a model of emphasising a single, centralised access point into services through the e‑Government Gateway (which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6). The strategy is for the e‑Government Gateway to continue to co-exist alongside organisation-specific channels and infrastructure. Maintaining this twin structure makes it critical to understand the short, medium, and long-term implications of the interplay between the e-Government Gateway and the channels of those organisations who administer services and provide information both online and in person.
Sat behind these public facing channels is one of the most important foundations for digital government: web infrastructure. The quality of that web infrastructure informs how well digital public services can handle greater than expected throughput without breaking. Of the 113 public institutions that took part in the survey to support this review, 102 felt that they had access to sufficient data storage capacity and IT hardware, software and network services.1 While these localised models for data storage and IT infrastructure are understood to meet the needs of their organisations, the OECD peer review team was concerned to find a lack of strategic vision at the organisational level for the benefits of moving to cloud hosting models compared to organisation specific, on premise data centres. It is hoped that this gap will be addressed by the strategy and action plan being prepared by the DTO to encourage greater use of cloud services among public institutions which is expected in autumn 2022. It is important that any shift to a cloud model provides confidence in maintaining security and reliability while working to reduce the existing overheads currently associated with interoperability, reuse and sharing. A cloud-based model for hosting could also allow for a more effective use of Web Operations talent, an often in-demand skillset, as there are currently 78 organisations with teams ranging from one person to as many as 55 individuals.2
Part of the reason for this is the extent to which organisations are operating legacy technologies where the capacity for integration or the scope for iteration are constrained, if not impossible. Several organisations reflected that while they were pleased to rely on their existing technology stacks, they were monolithic in their architecture and not suited to moving quickly in pursuit of transformative solutions. The peer review team heard of a desire to refactor several systems to implement cloud-friendly micro service architectures but where the need for long-term commitment, funding and support to do so was a constraint.
Alongside the constraints of legacy technology in terms of flexibility for developing new services are the processes and procedures that exist around the collection, storage and sharing of data. Examples of Türkiye’s infrastructure for data sharing, including the Public Application Center (Kamu Uygulama Merkezi), which supports the e-Government Gateway, are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7. Across the Turkish public sector, there are multiple technology platforms for data exchange serving the needs of different groups of users. Some of these, such as the Electronic Data Delivery System (Elektronik Veri Dağıtım Sistemi, EVDS) for data relating to the banking sector, are well regarded in meeting the needs of that sector. However, they reflect a scattered and fragmented strategy concerning the handling, processing and storage of data within the Turkish public sector. The legacy of these data efforts is not consistent with the vision for user-centred services and delivering on some of the wider national strategies, such as that associated with artificial intelligence (Ministry of Industry and Technology/Digital Transformation Office, 2021[7]).
Some of the organisations interviewed during the fact-finding mission to support the Review highlighted existing legislation as a further barrier to digital transformation and effective service design and delivery. Where the need for an in-person appointment, or a particular paper-based process, is set down in law there is a need for that to be revisited for transformation to happen. Several OECD countries have been exploring the “Rules as Code” model allowing for a more fluid relationship between the design of services and its associated legislation (Mohun and Roberts, 2020[8]).
Society and geography
The final area that shapes the capacity of countries to meet the needs of their users through the design and delivery of public services is the societal structure and geography of a country. This is reflected in the contextual factors for the governance of digital government discussed in Chapter 2.
When governments design public services, they need to acknowledge the needs of society as a whole and not only respond to the needs of easily served users. There was in general mixed recognition of challenges around access to the internet or digital skills. Some of the organisations interviewed during the fact-finding mission were quite blasé about the digital skills of their users but others drew attention to their work to increase digital proficiency. These included the Small and Medium Enterprises Development and Support Administration (Küçük ve Orta Ölçekli İşletmeleri Geliştirme ve Destekleme İdaresi Başkanlığı, KOSGEB), which exists to increase the role and efficiency of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As part of the “Digital Türkiye Roadmap” they have a particular focus on the digital transformation of SMEs.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic had also brought some of these challenges to the fore. The Ministry of Education, whose Education Information Network (Eğitim Bilgi Ağı, EBA) platform will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 6, provided the basis for ongoing education. However, in order to maintain the continuity of provision, the challenges of digital inclusion needed to be addressed in order to ensure no one was left behind in terms of the affordability or availability of Internet access or suitable devices.
One of the factors contributing to a greater focus on developing solutions within Türkiye is the challenge facing the country in terms of purchasing power. As discussed in Chapter 2, since 2018 the Turkish economy has seen a significant reduction in the value of the Turkish Lira (TRY) alongside high inflation and rising borrowing costs. Where some country governments are comfortable in using the services of international providers of digital services, the fact that many of them operate in US Dollar (USD) or Euro (EUR) introduces financial challenges. As such, there is a greater push towards achieving national solutions in the fields of technology and data. However, these industries cannot be replicated overnight.
This ambition to grow the technology sector in the Turkish economy is the focus of the National Technology Move, which follows from the experience of the Turkish defence sector where strong national planning and co-ordination increased domestic product usage from 20% to 68% (Ministry of Industry and Technology, 2019[9]). It is recognised that achieving this ambition will be a long-term pursuit, as evidenced in the reflections of interviewees from the Ministry of Treasury and Finance (Hazine ve Maliye Bakanlığı) who described the 1 Million Employment project as equipping people with the basis to pursue a career in the technology industry, rather than necessarily immediately getting them into work.
A further important aspect of society and geography is the relationship between the public sector and other sectors. Non-government actors can play an important role in helping to understand the needs of society and increase the vitality and health of democracy. The survey to support this review indicated that although 59% (65/111) of service providing organisations involve the private sector, only around a quarter of these organisations are likely to involve academic (28%, 31/111) or civil society (24%, 27/111) actors.3 Türkiye has been observed to have room to improve the level of engagement with the civic space in general with the Right to Information Index placing Türkiye 26th in terms of OECD members and 97th out of 136 countries overall (Global Right to Information Rating, 2021[10]). Moreover, the current assessment of CIVICUS judges Türkiye’s civic space as one of the 49 countries in the world that is “Repressed” (CIVICUS, 2021[11]).
Finally, Türkiye hosts the world’s largest refugee population. The UNHCR estimates that there are 4 million refugees and asylum seekers in Türkiye with 3.65 million from Syria alone (UNHCR, 2021[12]). This population accounts for the majority of the 5.5 million foreigners living in the country whose needs for access to public services of all types is another factor in the context for service design and delivery in Türkiye whether in terms of language support or geographically concentrated areas of heightened demand among others.
Philosophy of service design and delivery
The second aspect of analysing and therefore understanding how to better meet those needs is the philosophical approach to service design and delivery and the extent to which it reflects the six ideas shown in Figure 5.2.
Figure 5.2. The OECD Framework for Public Service Design and Delivery: Philosophy
Source: OECD (2020[1]), Digital Government in Chile – Improving Public Service Design and Delivery, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/b94582e8-en.
The philosophy and culture of service design and delivery helps to create a sustainable environment in which inclusive digital transformation and good services flourish by default. The most effective experiences are those that are simple to complete, and re-use data to anticipate and proactively address processes that might previously have involved further interactions. A necessary precondition is that their design reflects the needs of all those in society, including vulnerable groups who may have accessibility needs or a preference for being supported in a face to face setting. Doing this requires working across organisational boundaries with diverse, multi-disciplinary teams to understand whole problems and design the end to end experience for users and staff, which means involving both those groups throughout the process. Finally, as discussed earlier in Chapter 3 (and visualised in Figure 3.7), agile approaches help to embrace continuous learning and iterative improvement in order to keep adding value to the service being developed over time.
Providing leadership and setting vision
The Recommendation of the Council on Digital Government Strategies (OECD, 2014[13]) calls on governments to secure leadership and political commitment to the overall strategy and this remains true in the specific case of service design and delivery. In order to embed a user-driven philosophy throughout the public sector is it important to have consistent messaging from leaders, whether they are elected following a vote, appointed to serve or recruited into a role, that services will use digital technology and data to be proactive and user-driven (OECD, 2020[1]; 2021[5]; 2020[3]).
As discussed in Chapter 2, Türkiye has had consistent political leadership since 2003 which has supported continuity in terms of a user-centred narrative and which has culminated in the DTO being established as an office of the Presidency and therefore benefitting from greater authority in its responsibility for the digital transformation of services. This commitment can be seen in the Eleventh Development Plan and is expected to form a core part of the new strategy that is currently under preparation (Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2019[14]).
The DTO is also responsible for strategies in other ‘digital’ areas including artificial intelligence, distributed ledger technologies (Blockchain), information security, cybersecurity and cloud computing. Developing a mature approach in these areas can help provide a strong foundation for public service design and delivery. However, although these topics have a focus among the higher-level political tiers, the organisations interviewed and surveyed as part of this review, tended to view these discussions as part of a national technology narrative rather than being relevant to the needs of their organisations. Although some projects are experimenting with novel technologies, the priority for organisations was on ensuring solid technical foundations to support the core needs for digital transformation. In some cases, organisations were interested but found staffing constraints in terms of in-house technical capabilities with these technologies, and consequently requiring external support with, for example, machine learning.
Chapter 3 (and Figure 3.5) highlighted that there is a lack of organisational digital government strategies and this potentially reflects a gap in terms of translating central vision into operational practice. Nevertheless, the peer review team was impressed by the leadership displayed within certain sectors such as Justice and Health where there was not only a clear awareness of opportunities for paperless operation and administrative efficiency but also for the transformative impact of digital government inspired service design and delivery. Furthermore, at the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change (Çevre, Şehircilik ve İklim Değişikliği Bakanlığı), ongoing strategic activities include the active review of all the services they offer to identify the priorities for transformation. Similarly, the Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı) is considering economies of scope to identify opportunities to combine disparate transactions into a single service. The hallmark of these discussions was that these organisations are not just solving the immediate problem, they are continuously looking for ways to improve the overall quality of the services they provide.
The challenges of leadership are amplified in the local government context where there are reduced budgets and access to fewer technical resources or skilled employees. One response to this is building partnerships with other municipalities or organisations elsewhere in the public sector. However, such efforts are still dependent on the leadership within their organisation, particularly among senior or middle managers. One of the municipal administrations reported that several directors continue to request paper versions of digital documents while another shared that getting approval to migrate a 20-year-old desktop application to a cloud solution had taken three years and required the eventual input of the Mayor.
One of the most powerful demonstrations of leadership is not necessarily from the top of an organisational hierarchy but the evangelists who extol the virtues of digital technology and data and invest their time in persuading their peers and superiors. The Ministry of Labour and Social Security (Çalışma ve Sosyal Güvenlik Bakanlığı) shared an impressive story of how demonstrating the merits and benefits of service design and delivery could secure support and turn blockers into champions. Their experience was not easy and it took several years to build the momentum but the benefits of having done so are now being felt in the speed with which they are developing new services.
Diverse, multi-disciplinary teams working across organisational boundaries
One of the biggest challenges in achieving the transformation of public service design and delivery is maintaining the ownership of the service from its inception to its ongoing iteration. As can be seen in Figure 5.3 there is a traditional paradigm for delivery on the left. Here the delivery process starts with 1) policy teams developing an approach before handing it to 2) the commissioning team that specifies deliverables for 3) an external supplier who, in turn, provides the “finished” service to 4) a fourth team to operate it. Policy decisions taken in this way are isolated from lessons learnt in the context of delivery and are completely unaware of operational realities. This creates silos and disconnection in the ownership of the problem and the quality of the eventual outcome. On the right, is the alternative – the idea that you could bring together a multi-disciplinary team contributing a multi-faceted understanding of the problem and helping to support well-designed public services.
Figure 5.3. Two paradigms of delivering policies and services
Source: OECD (2020[1]), Digital Government in Chile – Improving Public Service Design and Delivery, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/b94582e8-en.
There was widespread recognition across the Turkish public sector that co-operation is essential in responding to the needs of the public. A notable example of cross-cutting collaboration in action is the work of the Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı) and the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) in developing an integrated model for birth notification across 231 public health institutions. A further example came from Gaziantep where the municipal government had first developed a piece of software to support people with Alzheimer’s disease and then established a non-profit organisation to enhance and share this solution with other municipalities.
Türkiye’s e-Government Gateway is an impressive achievement that creates a consistent experience for citizens in accessing the transactions it hosts and enables the Turkish public sector to operate across organisational boundaries. There was universal approval for the e-Government Gateway and the level of support provided by Türksat to institutions of all sizes and operational models in migrating to the e‑Government Gateway. However, there are risks that changing the responsibility for understanding the user need and then delivering to meet it by handing over to an outsourced provider can lead to a loss of collaboration between policy, delivery and operations. Since the establishment of the DTO, Türksat has come under its oversight, which has increased accountability and moved decision making into the DTO, which may help to mitigate these risks.
The need to maintain a continuous thread in advocating for the needs of users highlights the importance of disciplines such as product management, user research and service design within all organisations. However, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, the DTO reports that multi-disciplinary teams are not promoted within the Turkish public sector.4 There are some exceptions, perhaps most notably within the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) where service design, user experience and user research are identified as being a priority. As an organisation with such a broad remit, there is an understanding of the need to provide any type of service required by a citizen that may require different sources of information. As a result, they employ different actors from different fields to take a multi-disciplinary approach to meeting the needs of their users.
While some of the established guidance and narratives within Türkiye are supportive of transformed service design and delivery, other elements are less so. One of those is found in the Public Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Project Preparation Guide (Ministry of Development, 2017[15]; Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2021[16]) which encourages organisations to compartmentalise their projects into separate investment types that create a distinction between research projects, system development or improvement, data generation or update, IT infrastructure or capacity building. These are then subsequently broken down into further work packages according to the focus of the project. There is a risk with this approach of reinforcing the left hand model of Figure 5.3 if these investment types or work packages are managed by discrete teams separately and independently focusing in isolation on a particular speciality or technical challenge rather than addressing problems in ways that bring different skills together to understand how different elements contribute to meeting the underlying need across professional or organisational boundaries. The OECD Framework for Digital Talent and Skills in the Public Sector proposes that governments recognise “service professionals” whose role is to take ownership of the end-to-end user experience and wield the political, administrative and financial authority to bring the necessary actors around the table to address a whole problem (OECD, 2021[5]).
Understanding and responding to whole problems across government
To transform a service, governments need to avoid focusing on discrete, individual interactions in isolation from understanding a whole problem. In order to meet the need of a user in full it is critical to map and understand their experience as well as the flow of information and data between different parts of the public sector (see the example from Finland in Box 5.1). The practice of service design may take this insight to identify a minor change and dramatically improve an outcome or obtain the evidence to justify a fundamental redesign of the service.
Box 5.1. Finland’s National AuroraAI Programme
The AuroraAI programme aims to implement an operations model based on people’s needs, such that AI can help citizens and businesses use public and private services in a timely and ethically sustainable way. Within the AuroraAI network, the activities of relevant organisations (both public sector and non-governmental) are organised to support people’s life events or businesses’ events, facilitating seamless, effective and smoothly functioning service paths. The system learns what combinations of services are most popular with a particular user at a point in time, and will prioritise and promote the combination to people with similar characteristics. This is only possible with information exchange and interoperability among different services and platforms, and a digital identity
Source: Welby, B. and E. Hui Yan Tan (2022[17]), “Designing and delivering public services in the digital age”, https://doi.org/10.1787/e056ef99-en.
The 2016-2019 National e-Government Strategy and Action Plan recognised that the current experience of services often lacked integration, favouring a process-oriented rather than user-centred approach (Ministry of Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications, 2016[18]). User research helps to avoid these disconnected outcomes and move away from well-meaning but flawed assumptions about the way in which a particular problem might manifest in reality. Making a commitment to understanding the perspective in relation to a given experience helps to ensure an awareness of how different interventions contribute to, or detract from, the desired outcome for both the user and service provider, especially between organisations and different transactional elements that should be considered as part of the same overall experience.
The e-Government Gateway will be discussed more fully in Chapter 6 but underpinning its creation is the idea of allowing services that might otherwise be provided by different institutions through different channels to be available through a single location. Its value is clearly visible in orchestrated services such as “My Working Life” and “My Vehicles” which compile the data from multiple organisations into a single view. Users can see the relevant information about these aspects of their life in one place without having to retrieve information from multiple locations. These are exemplar models of how Türkiye hopes to transform more of the user experience. One of the vital elements of the efforts to understand whole problems in Türkiye is the Electronic Public Information Management System (Elektronik Kamu Bilgi Yönetim Sistemi, KAYSİS) which will also be discussed more fully in Chapter 6. The DTO and its oversight of the e-Government Gateway are clearly important focal points for co-ordinating the activity of multiple organisations in terms of the service design for online public services.
The e-Government Gateway and KAYSİS are identifying opportunities to bring together disparate sources of information and provide solutions that are valued by users. In addition, there have been sector-specific efforts to address whole problems. For example, when foreign visitors to Türkiye seek a work permit, efforts have been made to reduce the documents required for those applications with most of the service available online. This is the result of working with other ministries and doing the research to understand the experience of someone crossing the border. The Small and Medium Enterprises Development and Support Administration (Küçük ve Orta Ölçekli İşletmeleri Geliştirme ve Destekleme İdaresi Başkanlığı, KOSGEB) has reduced bureaucracy by making data sharing protocols with 23 institutions and organizations that mean businesses are not required to provide data that they have already shared.
A very impressive example of solving a whole problem is that found within the Ministry of Family and Social Services (Aile ve Sosyal Hizmetler Bakanlığı). Historically, applications for social assistance programmes were entirely paper based and different programmes involved their own processes, with people needing to produce information from up to 17 different organisations. A 2005 decree established one-stop-shops that would task a public servant with collating these documents but this still took up to 15 days for the information to be collected from different organisations. Further improvements have followed and eventually resulted in the Integrated Social Assistance Information System (Bütünleşik Sosyal Yardım Bilgi Sistemi) bringing together data from 28 institutions and simplifying the full user journey.
One of the best indications that an organisation has thought about how it can contribute to solving whole problems is the frequency with which other organisations mention its systems. In Türkiye, the most mentioned organisation is the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) with its services being integrated across the public sector and it was impressive to note the importance placed on taking a systematic approach designed around building bridges among different organisations. The Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) has had a co-ordinating and stewarding role that organises the sector and brokers the necessary relationships. The fruit of this approach could be seen during the COVID-19 pandemic as the underlying foundations built up over many years came to the fore. In addition to Health, the Justice and Education sectors have similarly developed impressive platforms, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. These approaches recognise the importance of developing solutions that respond to the needs of users in particular sectors but also across those organisational and sectoral boundaries, including between municipal and central government.
Many organisations in Türkiye report that they hold certifications from the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) covering Customer Satisfaction Management (ISO 10002:2018), Information Security Management (ISO/IEC 27001:2017), Information Technology Service Management (ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018) and Quality Assurance (ISO 9001:2015). The most common of these is the certification for information security management. These international standards are a common framework for delivering within an IT Service Management framework and help to assure organisations and their clients that service requirements will be fulfilled.
However, the fact-finding mission found that ISO certifications are not translating into a high priority being given to user research and the proactive pursuit of understanding the needs of users. This is further supported by the survey to support this review identifying that only 22 organisations employ user researchers.5 Of the 142 people identified with this specialism, 70 are employed by the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) meaning that there is on average three user researchers per the remaining 21 organisations.6 This means that 91 organisations in the Turkish public sector are unaware of the benefits and value that user researchers can offer.
The Public ICT Project Preparation Guide could be a powerful tool in helping to close this gap in the philosophy of service design and delivery in Türkiye (Ministry of Development, 2017[15]; Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2021[16]). In its current form, this template for spending on ICT related research projects, system development, data, infrastructure or capacity building projects focuses on the needs and involvement of stakeholders to justify spend. Although certain project teams may use their knowledge of their users and their needs to inform their submissions, the template currently places the emphasis on internal requirements rather than encouraging teams to be clear about how they are addressing a well understood whole problem. It could be helpful to revisit the focus of this document to support teams working on all types of ICT related projects to broaden their perspective so that user needs and user research inform their project proposals.
The “Mitigation of Bureaucracy and Digital Türkiye Meeting” (discussed in Chapter 2) is potentially valuable for helping to co-ordinate, prioritise and identify whole problems that can be addressed. This monthly meeting benefits from high-level representation with the DTO setting the agenda and monitoring subsequent progress. In order to help further cement a culture and philosophy of service design and delivery it may be powerful to include a standing item on the agenda for user research from a service to be presented to the participants.
Designing the end to end public service experience, for users and staff
Investing in the design process, conceptualising user journeys from beginning to end, and providing support throughout is foundational to good service design. However, the evolution of public services delivered by different organisations can ultimately lead to fragmented user journeys. The interplay between different channels may also be unforgiving of attempts to move between the online and offline and make things difficult behind the scenes for public servants. The OECD Framework for Service Design and Delivery proposes that transformed public services should be approached in a channel-agnostic fashion and understood as follows (OECD, 2020[1]):
From when someone first attempts to solve a problem, through to its resolution (end to end).
On a continuum from user experience to the processes for back-office staff (external to internal).
Across any and all of the channels involved (omnichannel).
In Türkiye, as with everywhere else in the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the transition from providing services in-person to functioning on a remote basis. However, the need to offer an experience that reflects the needs and preferences of the public across a variety of channels has not diminished. While there are clear advantages to moving services online for both public services and their users it is important to consider the role of providing access to services in-person or via a telephone call as part of an omnichannel strategy (analysed in Chapter 6). Efforts to introduce “digital by default” approaches that completely remove offline access should be resisted as they fail to respond to the needs of particular parts of society and may exacerbate digital divides. The successful establishment of the e‑Government Gateway over time has brought considerable benefits, but it needs to be complemented by a clear strategic understanding of the country’s entire channel landscape.
Indeed, some organisations will always be responsible for services that involve a physical, in-person experience. It was encouraging to see that the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (Yurtdışı Türkler ve Akraba Topluluklar Başkanlığı, YTB) was approaching the challenge of providing services that involve borders with a recognition that design is the mechanism by which they will achieve fast, effective and efficient services to all. The Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı) also shared how they have developed solutions that record the birth of a child while the family is still in the medical establishment and that this proactively triggers the automatic distribution of the child’s identity cards to their home address.
The flexibility to allow users to access a service according to their convenience is one of the reasons why it is important to consider the mobile availability of services, whether through the appropriate development of apps or at a minimum in ensuring that web content is responsively designed to adapt to the device being used. This is a relevant consideration not only for the needs of the public but for public servants in many organisations such as those operating in the agricultural and forestry sectors. Often those who conduct fieldwork are not seen as a priority for transformation and while it may be quicker to respond to the urgent web-based front-end needs of the public this model of prioritisation may come at the detriment to the overall quality and reliability of the services an organisation provides.
While the simple appeal of going paperless may sound immediately transformative, the benefits will not be realised if the online experience perpetuates any of the flaws of the existing solutions. Instead, a design thinking approach is essential for creating end-to-end experiences that simplify the overall system by avoiding unnecessary steps, reusing data or deploying innovative applications of technology to create value for users. There can be significant benefits to designing out errors and improving outcomes. The Presidency of the Turkish Court of Accounts (Sayıştay Başkanlığı), for example, reported that after four years of operating their new software they had seen errors fall by 40%, allowing for data to be submitted on time, every time. The existence of KAYSİS (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6) is an exemplary model of a service catalogue to help understand all the parts of a journey involved in a service and for identifying opportunities to design a more consolidated approach but faces challenges in being kept up to date and accurate.
In considering the experience of over 100 public sector organisations as part of this Review, there is a wide spectrum of understanding and application of these ideas. For example, there is a consistent and sector-wide focus on using surveys to capture post-implementation feedback, which many organisations saw as the route to understanding the needs and experience of uses. Very few organisations described a culture of seeking up front user research and conducting co-design sessions or other forms of participatory design as part of developing services. Indeed, one organisation considered themselves a model of user-centred design despite there being no expectation of designing a service in light of user needs and their experience in the description of a process where engineers analyse colleague requests before working with Türksat to develop prototype interfaces.
Despite the frequency with which user-oriented services are mentioned in national strategic documents and a majority of public sector institutions reported emphasising user-centred design in their approach to skills, the country does not yet have a formal strategy concerning the design, delivery and evaluation of government services. It is important to recognise that efforts to establish such a framework are under way. Such a document or methodology, that builds on the most relevant elements of existing ISO certified practices and expands it to embrace the opportunities and needs of public service design and delivery in the digital age to reflect the Turkish context for service design and delivery could help to create a systematic model for public sector organisations to follow.
Involving the public as early and as often as possible
The Recommendation of the Council on Digital Government Strategies sets the expectations for governments to encourage the engagement and participation of public, private and civil society stakeholders in policy making and public service design and delivery (OECD, 2014[13]). A second OECD Recommendation of the Council on Open Government compliments this and calls on governments to move towards a “culture of governance that promotes the principles of transparency, integrity, accountability and stakeholder participation in support of democracy and inclusive growth” (OECD, 2017[19]).
These ideas are enshrined in the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework through the twin dimensions of “Open by default” and “User-driven” (OECD, 2020[3]). These practices work together to ensure that governments find ways to be increasingly participatory and therefore responsive to the needs of their citizens, leading to greater benefits to well-being and trust in government beyond just resolving a particular need at a particular time (Welby, 2019[20]).
In order to understand whole problems and achieve an end-to-end solution for citizens and staff, it is imperative to involve the users of a service. Public services designed and delivered for the digital age need to involve the public as early and as often as possible in creative ways that reflect a genuine effort to engage. Public service teams that provide opportunities for citizens and businesses to work with them can more easily embrace innovation, experiment and continuously iterate to increase the public value they produce (OECD, 2020[1]; 2022[21]).
Equally, it is vital that providers of government services look for opportunities to be transparent about their procurement and commissioning activities, to be open about the decision-making involved in administering a service including the nature of any algorithms and to generate value through publishing Open Government Data. In terms of measuring “Open by default”, Türkiye has not participated in either the Digital Government Index or the Open, Useful and Reusable Data Index and so there are not comparative benchmarks available for the Turkish experience. However, the Digital Government Review process would identify the opportunity for significant improvement.
The DTO has a participatory and inclusive model to follow in terms of developing the new digital government strategy and this Review process has sought the input of over 100 public sector institutions. However, there is limited evidence of a proactive, openness by default centred on collaboration, especially with citizens, academia and civil society. One exception to this is the work of the Ministry of Family and Social Services (Aile ve Sosyal Hizmetler Bakanlığı) whose Civil Society Vision Document and Action Plan (2022-2023) was created through five workshops and a series of activities involving more than 200 non‑governmental organisations as active stakeholders with follow up interviews and questionnaires offered to those unable to attend (Ministry of Family and Social Services, 2022[22]). The Ministry plans to establish a ‘Social Incubation Center’ with four modules designed to encourage and support the active participation of stakeholders throughout the activity of the organisation.
The leadership rhetoric surrounding the benefits of taking an “open by default” approach is well defined under the 4th Strategic Objective for the 2016-2019 National e-Government Strategy and Action Plan (Ministry of Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications, 2016[18]). Under the heading “Increasing Use, Participation and Transparency” the expectation was set out to involve stakeholders in all process, to see services shaped by the feedback of users throughout its lifecycle, and for Open Government Data (OGD) to increase transparency and accountability, generating economic value and make services more effective. Furthermore, objective 3.4 of the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (2021-2025) emphasises the importance of open data sharing (Ministry of Industry and Technology/Digital Transformation Office, 2021[7]).
However, these ambitions have not yet translated into a widespread enthusiasm for exploring greater transparency and participation (as will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7). There are well-maintained and supported resources for obtaining certain statistical information but gaps remain in several areas of the OGD agenda. The DTO is addressing some of these with work in progress on data management procedures, regulations and guidance, as well as establishing a dedicated OGD portal.
In terms of co-operation and collaboration there are clear signs of strengths in terms of inter-agency dynamics which could be used as the basis for encouraging open exchanges between citizens and government where there is room for improvement. The Presidency's Communication Centre (Cumhurbaşkanlığı İletişim Merkezi, CİMER) is valuable in facilitating interaction with government in offering a vital route for the public to raise their concerns and seek resolution for complaints about government. However, this allows for a one to one dialogue and not a collective engagement of all those sharing similar concerns. Nevertheless, CİMER sets a new and important benchmark in terms of the expectation within the Turkish administration of developing a greater participatory and transparent mindset in pursuit of strengthening the relationship between government and citizens. A further example comes from the context of developing new legislation. When legislation is proposed documents are prepared and published openly online as HTML and it is updated in real time as it makes its way through the legislative process. While making this open is beneficial it is not supported by any wider activities to encourage the participation of the public and invite feedback from civil society. Indeed, only 15% (17/111) of the service providing public sector institutions that completed the survey to support this review, reported using public consultation websites.7 This contrasts with the general trend found by Government at a Glance 2021 of 27 countries making efforts to develop a “one-stop shop” for citizens to learn about past, current and future opportunities for participation as, for example in Slovenia (see Box 5.2) (OECD, 2021[23]).
As has been noted earlier in this chapter, Türkiye ranks 97th out of 136 countries in the Right to Information Index (26th in terms of OECD members) and the current assessment of Türkiye’s civic space by CIVICUS is “Repressed” (Global Right to Information Rating, 2021[10]; CIVICUS, 2021[11]). However, there are some positive elements within the right to information legislation, Law No: 4982 (Republic of Türkiye, 2003[24]). There is a solid foundation in terms of its underlying provision and the scope for request. However, little effort is put into the user experience of this activity making quite a lot of the overhead fall on the requester without much in the way of support. Moreover, and this further highlights the need to consider how to create a culture that is “Open by default”, the legislation is lacking in terms of efforts surrounding training or promotion, that will embed these ideas into the way in which public sector organisations consider requests for information. There is a close relationship between the way in which public sector organisations consider requests for information, the opportunities offered by open government data and a participatory model of service design and delivery. In order to fulfil the ambition set out in the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework of being ‘Open by default’, a strategic approach is needed that understands the spectrum of open, participatory digital government efforts from inclusive approaches to service design, through publishing open government data and to the way in which requests for access to information are handled. These are all part of the same continuum.
Box 5.2. Participatory platforms for engaging citizens in Slovenia
Stop Bureaucracy
Since 2005, Stop Bureaucracy (stopbirokraciji.gov.si) has been a single point of access for all stakeholders to share ideas for improving legislation or services in the business environment. Since its inception Stop Bureaucracy has saved EUR 350 million which reflects a 25% reduction in the identified levels of administrative burden in Slovenia.
I Propose
I Propose (predlagam.vladi.si) is a single point through which to communicate and send opinions, ideas, remarks or complaints about government services.
Open Data of Slovenia (Odprti podatki Slovenije, OPSI) and hackathons
Slovenia’s open government data portal was launched in 2016. It is the single national website for the publication of open data for the entire public sector, replacing a number of separate locations where data was published. The team behind the site is proactive in communicating with citizens and companies and organising events such as hackathons in order to unlock the value and encourage greater engagement with open government data in Slovenia and beyond.
e-Democracy
eUprava, Slovenia’s single government domain for services, houses the e-Democracy sub-site which provides a public route for providing feedback on proposed legislation, expressing satisfaction with government services, and contacting elected representatives.
Source: OECD (2021[25]), Digital Government Review of Slovenia: Leading the Digital Transformation of the Public Sector, https://doi.org/10.1787/954b0e74-en.
While there is evidence of post-implementation feedback being used by a variety of organisations to help improve services the majority of communication is one-way and cannot be said to reflect a “User-driven” mindset. The survey to support this review found that amount service providing organisations, 69% (76/111) of organisations follow guidelines or standards relating to the engagement of users in the design process of government services.8 However, only 31% of all the surveyed organisations (35/113) are using data to develop a deeper and more rounded understanding of the needs of citizens and engage citizens as co-creators of value.9 Furthermore, Figure 5.4 shows that of the 111 public service providing organisations that were surveyed, one in four (28%, 29/111) engage no external users in the design and development of their services and less than half, 40% (44/111) involve end users. There was more consensus around involving the private sector with business interests being recognised by 59% (65/111).
Figure 5.4. Involvement of external actors in the design and development of public services by organisations in Türkiye
Note: Based on the responses of 111 institutions.
Source: OECD (2021[26]), “Digital Government Survey of Türkiye, Public Sector Organisations Version”, Unpublished, OECD, Paris, Q. 3.8.2.
Therefore, when it comes to finding ways to involve the public as early and as often as possible, the OECD identified three categories into which the service providing organisations in Türkiye fit. Firstly, a small proportion of organisations are operating consistently in line with the ambitions of service design and delivery in terms of their practice and their culture. Secondly, around a quarter of organisations are not engaging users at all. Finally, there is a large group of organisations that can describe the right approaches but did not offer any examples to evidence that the theory was being put into practice.
In some cases, there are organisations who have fully embraced the opportunity provided by the e‑Government Gateway to migrate their services. However, in doing so they have introduced an abstraction layer between themselves as the custodians of their users’ needs, and the e-Government Gateway team responsible for the experience of users accessing the service. A similar concern was voiced by the Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) in terms of the relationship between their organisational website and the e-Government Gateway around the risk of outsourcing work without a consistent link between user and need. The OECD Framework for Digital Talent and Skills in the Public Sector identifies the “service professional” approach as possibly suitable here, where someone takes ownership of the end-to-end user experience and ensures that the user, and their needs, are well understood by all those working to meet a particular need regardless of their organisational affiliation (OECD, 2021[5]).
In other cases, organisations demonstrate a complacency about claiming to be ‘user-centred’ but where internal prioritisation processes do not actually engage their end users. The Ministry of Youth and Sports gave a very compelling description of their Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which sees multi-disciplinary teams developing projects based on an initial analysis of the experience of personnel within the organisation. However, while the organisation considered the approach to be highly successful, its description was missing the experience of external users and gave the impression of reinforcing siloes between analysis, databases, design, software and testing. Merging the boundaries between these discrete silos and creating a multi-disciplinary team as well as amplifying the user voice may help to make these services genuinely user-centred and user-driven.
Nonetheless, there are important signs of good practice from across the public sector. At the local level, the Municipality of Çankırı has a dedicated department whose focus is specifically on identifying the needs of their communities and are constantly engaging in dialogue with several citizen assemblies focusing on the needs of children, youth, elderly, and other groups. The outcomes from these assemblies feed into the planning and implementation for the council. Within the General Directorate of Istanbul Electricity, Tramway and Tunnel Operations (İstanbul Elektrik Tramvay ve Tünel İşletmeleri Genel Müdürlüğü) the feedback from passengers is regarded as one of the most crucial tools on which to base a service design approach that champions the usability, comfort and security of the end user. In justice, the team behind the National Judicial Network Information System (Ulusal Yargı Ağı Bilişim Sistemi, UYAP) have been aware of the need to understand the different types of users involved in the justice process whether courts and judges, lawyers, mediators, or citizens. Finally, the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) is consistently demonstrating the aptitude and practices to create user-driven value and this can be seen in their “What is wrong with me?” (NeyimVar) service. In health, patients are understood to be the primary focus and so everything about the way in which these organisations operate hinges on understanding their experience. The fact-finding interviews with the institutions revealed that in the past up to 6% of patients chose the wrong kind of appointment and so “What is wrong with me?” (NeyimVar) helps users to triage their need and identify the correct medical practitioner. The only way to develop a service that can overcome that challenge is to work extensively with users to design the content and the user journeys to achieve the best outcome for both user and public sector organisations.
Delivering in an agile and iterative way
The final aspect of the philosophy for service design and delivery in the digital age is to adopt practices that allow for delivering in an agile and iterative way. In the outsourcing models of delivery that characterised the e-government era, the preference for systems integrators and governments was to take a “waterfall approach” (referenced earlier in Figure 5.3). Requirements would be identified before undertaking any work that meant that in order to limit uncertainty there were limited opportunities to interact with the emerging solution and make revisions until the final product was delivered. This approach locked down delivery and meant there was only one chance to get each part of the project correct. Should any changes be needed then high costs could be involved, particularly if those changes involved revisiting any core decisions.
The digital government era of service design and delivery is motivated by the role technology and data can play to deliver value to users in order to meet their needs. As such, many governments are favouring delivery methodologies that allow iterative improvements to be made over short periods. An agile approach to service design and delivery encourages teams to start small with limited scope to understand the needs of their users through researching, prototyping, testing and learning. As they go through this cycle, they can reduce the level of uncertainty and ensure that the work they prioritise is adding the greatest value.
As discussed earlier in this chapter, multi-disciplinary teams are an important foundation for enabling work across organisational and professional boundaries. This model is also essential in supporting research findings and experimental, hypothesis-led interventions to be incorporated into the service itself and tested quickly to understand whether they help to achieve either the policy intent, or improve outcomes for the users of a service.
The Republic of Türkiye has an interest in understanding how delivering in an agile and iterative way might allow for the use of prototyping and testing techniques, encourage feedback loops and underpin an iterative culture of service design and delivery. However, more than any other ambition for the service design and delivery agenda, these ideas were hard to discern in the observed cultures and activities of the organisations that participated in the Digital Government Review.
Only one of the organisations that responded to the survey to support this review, the Turkish Natural Catastrophe Insurance Pool (Doğal Afet Sigortaları Kurumu, DASK), was explicit about the way in which agile was used to respond to the needs of the organisation while several others mentioned their familiarity with delivering in an agile and iterative way. For example, those organisations reliant on the e-Municipality platform reflected that the service would continually improve with new functionality available every few months and the Turkish Statistical Institute (Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu, TÜİK) reflected on their long-standing commitment to agile because of the speed with which it allows them to deliver value to their users. In other organisations, a gradual transition is taking place. The Revenue Administration (Gelir İdaresi Başkanlığı) has responsibility for over 80 applications, many of which need regular updates and make it critical for the governance of deployment to function effectively. They are exploring how to increase the proportion of teams working to deliver in an agile fashion.
The most actively enthusiastic organisation to talk about working in an agile fashion was one of the public enterprises, the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (Türkiye Radyo Televizyon Kurumu, TRT). They are working with an external supplier to replace their internal software. Observing that embracing agile is a question of organisational culture, they found that this was actually more challenging for the supplier. However, working together with a shared commitment to getting something concrete into the hands of their users quickly has paid dividends for not only the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation but the supplier too. A further encouraging experience came from the Istanbul Electricity, Tramway and Tunnel General Directorate (İstanbul Elektrik Tramvay ve Tünel İşletmeleri Genel Müdürlüğü) and their iteration of the MOBIETT application into a ‘Public Transport Assistant’ combining route planning, timetables, nearby stops, reloading points for the Istanbulkart as well as future plans for car parking, bike rental and the ability for passengers to rate their drivers.
Although the survey and interviews carried out to support this review did not find extensive evidence of the Turkish public sector embracing agile delivery methodologies in terms of a culture of software engineering, one of the most mature aspects of the service design and delivery experience in Türkiye is around feedback loops, with performance data and feedback being recognised as a critical contributor to improving services.
A majority of organisations in Türkiye are using performance and satisfaction data to improve the user experience whether in terms of the speed with which pages load, the time it takes to process a paper‑based request or the language associated with a particular transaction. Moreover, institutions are expected to carry out the studies into the user experience and associated processes before services are migrated to the e-Government Gateway. While this is broadly encouraging and underlines the ownership of users’ needs by the responsible organisation at the outset, the OECD found organisations considering that they had dispensed with their responsibility in migrating to the e-Government Gateway. As has been discussed, any outsourcing involved in providing a service introduces the potential to lose the connection between user, their needs and the organisations responsible for the service itself.
Other uses of performance and satisfaction data include the identification of unmet needs, the catalyst for bridging organisational siloes to discuss a common challenge, improving the quality of data, business planning, management reporting to senior officials and in some cases revising legislation. Of the 111 service providing organisations surveyed, 68% (75/111) collect data on the performance of their services and 65% (72/111) collect data on satisfaction with services.10 As Figure 5.5 shows, there is a mix in how frequently they do so and a contrast between performance and satisfaction. A significant minority of organisations are not collecting either performance or satisfaction data at all, 40% (44/111) of service providing organisations collect performance data at least monthly, compared to 23% (25/111) who do so for satisfaction. Indeed, it is much more likely for organisations to take a longer-term or even ad-hoc view in measuring satisfaction with 64% (46/72) of the organisations that collect satisfaction data doing so with no structure or once a year compared to 41% (31/75) of those collecting performance data.
Figure 5.5. Frequency with which organisations collect performance and satisfaction data in Türkiye
Note: Based on the responses of 111 institutions.
Source: OECD (2021[26]), “Digital Government Survey of Türkiye, Public Sector Organisations Version”, Unpublished, OECD, Paris, Q. 3.11.2, 3.11.4, 3.12.1 and 3.12.3.
How Türkiye’s efforts to combat COVID-19 benefitted from service design and delivery
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented governments with the most challenging of situations many have faced in a long time. The availability of digital technologies and data offered many opportunities to meet new and emerging needs but also presented challenges in governance, decision making and effectiveness. As part of the survey to support this review, public sector institutions were asked to reflect on how service design and delivery had helped in having a user-driven and proactive mindset in fighting the pandemic.
The Ministry of Family and Social Affairs (Aile ve Sosyal Hizmetler Bakanlığı) faced a significant challenge in the initial outbreak of the pandemic. With responsibility for social assistance, the organisation faced unprecedented demand but did not have an existing digital service to draw on. When the pandemic prevented normal operations from taking place, the service had to be quickly migrated to a digital channel. The Ministry created a pandemic-specific application that was lighter touch but could handle the increased demand in the short-term. Alongside this approach, the digital transformation of the standard procedure was developed covering the more detailed and comprehensive route.
With the pandemic causing widespread disruption and requiring many more individuals to seek support from state benefits such as social assistance there was a renewed awareness of the challenges facing the more marginalised in society in general terms but also specifically in terms of their digital literacy. Any transition that makes digital the default has the potential to leave people behind and this was a particular risk during a time where ordinary, face-to-face services were no longer available.
Possibly the most important resource for ensuring the continuity of government during the pandemic was the e-Government Gateway. As organisations saw that they needed to move quickly and develop new policies to meet the needs of society existing, organisation specific channels and infrastructure could not cope with the demand. This saw many organisations migrating to the e-Government Gateway in a matter of weeks and days. Indeed, some services launched in only 24 hours.
For some organisations, the pandemic unblocked challenges that they had been struggling to address for many years. In one public enterprise, a 20-year-old piece of software had been a barrier to transforming the operations of the organisation, preventing its customers from obtaining a digital contract and requiring home visits to secure a signature. The pandemic prevented home visits and forced this long-standing issue to be resolved not only through their own website but via the e-Government Gateway too. Now, should this wish to, their customers can meet all their needs online.
The most impacted area of service provision by COVID-19 was of course the health sector. Türkiye was fortunate that the health sector, as a whole, had been working towards its coherent digital transformation for many years. As such, when the pandemic broke out they drew on digital capacities that were already in place to develop Türkiye’s contact tracing application in 30 days. Strong connections to the other ministries helped to navigate more complex interoperability and integration based on the existing networks and the knowledge of how to deliver the greatest impacts. While the Ministry of Health (Sağlık Bakanlığı) took the lead in providing a technical solution,11 the challenge of addressing the whole problem in making it viable and usable required good partnerships across organisational boundaries. For example, the Turkish model for restricting movement was to require railway passengers to have a contact tracing code, but such an approach could not be enforced without the Ministry of Interior (İçişleri Bakanlığı) or the railway providers. Years of developing strong, collaborative relationships meant that when the crisis hit, those networks were resilient and capable of helping to achieve the necessary transformative impacts.
References
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Notes
← 1. OECD (2021[26]), Questions 4.6.1: “Within your organisation is there sufficient data storage capacity?” and 4.6.2: “Within your organisation is there sufficient IT infrastructure (hardware, software, networks, services)?”.
← 2. OECD (2021[26]), Question 2.2.2: “How many full-time equivalent roles does your organisation employ to work in the following areas?”.
← 3. OECD (2021[26]), Question 3.8.2: “Are any of the following external actors involved in the design and development of public services by your organisation?”.
← 4. OECD (2021[27]), Question 2.2.4: “Do ministries/administrations promote the use of multidisciplinary teams (involving for example designers, engineers, subject matter experts, content specialists, policy makers, and procurement professionals) for delivering digital, data and technology projects?”.
← 5. OECD (2021[26]), Question 2.2.1: “Which of the following professional specialisms are found in the workforce of your organisation?”.
← 6. OECD (2021[26]), Question 2.2.2: “How many full-time equivalent roles does your organisation employ to work in the following areas?”.
← 7. OECD (2021[26]), Question 3.8.3: “Which of the following methods do you use to engage these external stakeholders?”.
← 8. OECD (2021[26]), Question 3.8.1: “Does your organisation follow guidelines/standards relating to the engagement of users in the design process of government services?”.
← 9. OECD (2021[26]), Questions 4.12.1: “Does your organisation use data to anticipate and plan government interventions (for example, in designing policy, anticipating change, forecasting needs and imagining the future)?” and 4.12.2: “In which of the following areas does this take place? [To develop a deeper and more rounded understanding of the needs of citizens and engage citizens as co-creators of value]”.
← 10. OECD (2021[26]), Questions 3.11.2: “Does your organisation capture performance data about transactional services?” and 3.12.1: “Does your organisation measure user satisfaction about services?”.
← 11. That technical solution, the Life Fits Into Home (Hayat Eve Sığar, HES) app will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.