Public savings do not come from development cuts – but from investing in development
Public services should be delivered more efficiently without compromising their quality and humanity. This cannot be achieved through uniform budget cuts, but rather by leveraging technology, argues Sofigate’s Ville Väärälä.
There is a fairly broad consensus among economists and politicians alike that fiscal revenues and expenditures need to be balanced in order to contain debt. A significant proportion of the public also accepts the inevitable cuts.
The sustainability gap in public finances stems from the fact that the share of public sector workers in Finland’s total labour force has been growing strongly for decades. The situation is particularly difficult in the labour-intensive social and health sectors.
The situation is made more difficult by the fact that almost all Finns need and use the services provided by society. We should therefore be able to find a way to resolve the situation so that a smaller number of public sector workers could provide services at least of the same kind and quality as at present.
But how can public sector costs be contained? And an even more difficult question: how can savings be made without compromising the quality of services?
Across-the-board cuts are unfair to everyone
In Finland, the usual method for adjusting costs has been to apply uniform cuts across all expenses. At the same time, investments and development work are indefinitely postponed.
Uniform cuts may seem like a fair way to save, but in reality, both the professionals working in public services and the customers who rely on those services end up bearing the burden. These cuts diminish the experience for both workers and users, and reducing investments in development ensures that the quality of services will continue to deteriorate year after year.
The most efficient and best way to deliver quality services for both workers and users is to invest in service development, technology, and innovation.
AI helps innovation, but is no substitute for people
Developing services by using technology means something entirely different from buying technology. Rather, it is about enabling organisations to take full advantage of modern technology platforms to automate and streamline processes and routine activities. More broadly, AI can be used as a tool for innovation, for example by describing the current state and challenges of your organisation and allowing AI to generate suggestions for improvement actions.
It is not a question of replacing customer service with AI. On the contrary. The process automation and use of AI is more about reducing the time professionals spend on administrative routines and duplicated activities, and allowing them to focus on what matters most: using their expertise and meeting people.
Public sector workers themselves have an important role to play in how to contain costs without compromising on the quality and humanity of services. Instead of developing organisational processeses through top-down power mandates, practitioners must play a role in how processes are developed through experimentation and sharing best practices. There are also ready-made, freely available models for the use of technology that have been proven effective in different organisations.
The human-centred approach also emphasises the principle of synergies. For example, a person visiting a health centre is not seen as a patient of the health centre alone, but as an active individual who uses a wide range of services and participates in society in many different ways.
From projects to continuous development
The development and innovation work of public organisations has so far focused on individual development projects. It is therefore easy to see these as targets for savings.
However, there is a need for organisations to move from individual development projects to continuous change and development. The aim is to use technology platforms more and more effectively, freeing the best trained professionals in the world to focus on what is essential to their work.
It is therefore wrong to think that we cannot afford to develop public services. Rather, if we want to deliver quality services at lower costs, we cannot afford not to invest in development.
Read more:
Are we sub-optimising ourselves to death?
Author
Ville Väärälä leads Sofigate’s public administration and social welfare and healthcare sector business in the Nordic countries with the aim of helping society deliver people-centred and impactful services.
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