Rob Smyth's Blog

One area where Public Sector customers have a different requirement form their commercial counterparts is the arena of Case Management.

I have recently worked with customers who are interested in a whole variety of Case Management Solutions.  The functional requirements include the likes of Immigration services where tracking exit and entry is a key requirement through to social services where child referrals have to be dealt with sensitively and in a regulated manner.

There is a really good brochure that shows how the Siebel solutions are effectively addressing these and other themes in Public Sector here:

Siebel Public Service solutions

I would basically say that there are 5 main themes which can help in understanding what is on offer, these are:
1) Citizen Centric Service
2) Benefits Case Management
3) Revenue Case Management
4) Investigative Case Management (such as immigration or child welfare which may or may not be a linear process)
5) Analytics

Details for each of these areas are include in the link above.  The investigative case management for social services, and the immigration type cases interest me particularly at the moment.

The above titled Varney review has just been released, available for £18.00 or downloadable here

There are a number of key findings in the report

Chapter 2 discusses how to deliver service around common themes giving an example of change of circumstances

Chapter 3 talks about using multi-channel and e-services in consultation with the citizens and businesses which use them

Chapter 4 talks about how government will focus on citizens and businesses by working between departments.

Chapter 5 discusses shared identity management systems and better overall use of public information assets.

Chapters 6 to 8 then focus on how to gain performance improvements on the different channels that are used.

Hopefully these illustrate how important the service elements of Public Service are, I look forward to this approach on how government should interact with its citizens.

One of the aims of many government organizations is to get citizens to use their services and then to keep them using their services.  It is not necessarily to sell a product at the end of it which is a common aim for commercial concerns.  To this end Siebel Loyalty Management is an interesting module. 

From a commercial perspective the obvious candidates for this module are Hotel and Airlines who have cards with attached loyalty points.  However this idea of members who receive relevant information and can be sent rewards can also work well in government areas, examples of types of government departments I have had this discussion with recently include University Alumni societies and Regional Development Agencies. 

For more information take a look at Siebel Loyalty Management

Often when demonstrating functionality to do with Case or Customer Relationship Management, I get asked about how secure the application is.

This generally falls in to two types of conversation:
1) Oracle accredits its applications, see
http://www.oracle.com/security/external-security-evaluations.html

2) Oracle's whole stack has security features of particular interest.  So as well as the role based access into applications, questions also get asked about how to secure the data from prying eyes.  There are many ways of doing this but some new technology at the data layer is particularly interesting.  Called Database Vault it allows the management of the database to be split from the access to the data.  So for instance a DBA can be set up so that he can add a column to a table, but cannot look at the data within that table.

Other areas of interest tend to be with managing Identity.  So the question arises as to which single area serves as the master for the user, can you manage directories virtually and a whole bunch of stuff on identification and authentication and authorization.  This is a good launchpad for looking at these here.

Have a nice Christmas.