5 ways to improve the community experience

In a blog about our report, “Wait no more: Citizens, red tape and digital government”, we wrote about carrying out government transactions in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Whether you're applying for child benefit or renewing your vehicle tax, for example, the process is often slow, bureaucratic and frustrating.

We all want transactions with government to be easy, friendly and practical, but how can governments in LAC achieve this? Here's our message to them:

1. Analyse the community experience

   How can you improve transactions without first knowing what the problems are? Use administrative data, surveys, and direct observation and other sources to acquire objective, precise and timely information. Incorporate this information into iterative cycles of evaluation, adaptation and implementation. This means you can constantly refine and enhance your interaction with communities.

2. Cut out unnecessary transactions

   Some transactions are essential, others are superfluous. Eliminate them through regulatory reform or by cutting red tape and duplication. Exchange data between government agencies, don't make communities do it for you. Be proactive - reach out to communities, not the other way round.

3. Redesign from the community's point of view

   Government services are meant to serve communities and should be designed with that in mind - protection against fraud is not the only goal. Design systems so people can go to one place online to access government services. And don't make them enter information more than once - information submitted to one institution should be readily available to others.

4. Improve access to digital transactions

   Moving transactions online means more than just creating websites. We believe there are five crucial steps:

a. Lay the foundations for online transactions - this includes interoperability platforms, digital signature and identity, and electronic notifications and payments

b. Make online access easy for users who have different levels of digital capacity

c. Expand digital literacy programmes

d. Ensure that transactions work from any device, including mobile telephones

e. Provide payment methods that do not require a bank account.

5. Invest in better face-to-face interaction

   Although many countries have made big strides in digital government, LAC continues to be a mainly analogue region where around 90% of government transactions are carried out in person. Thus it's vital to improve face-to-face interactions, which many people still prefer. Invest in staff training and recruitment, and bring together services from different entities under one roof.

And that's how you can cut red tape: understand our needs as communities and respond to them - in person and online.

FURTHER READING:

• Red tape in Latin America: why we suffer and what we can do about it. What can governments do to ensure that their interactions with communities are easy, friendly and practical? Angela Reyes offers some suggestions.

• Government must be made more human or risk becoming irrelevant - our new report shows how #FindingLegitimacy. Nadine Smith reports on CPI's new report on finding the human in government

• How Muove is empowering cities in Brazil to tax and spend more efficiently. Rodolfo Fiori and Ricardo Ramos tell us how Mouvo is helping small and medium-sized cities across Brazil tackle inefficiencies, with a focus on collecting and spending local taxes.

• Going for growth *and* citizen wellbeing. While governments and businesses are united by their hunt for prosperity and wellbeing, how to achieve it remains a challenge, says Enrique Rueda-Sabater.

• 12 Top Tips: How to lead Latin America towards future prosperity. How can Latin America keep moving forward? CPI presents 12 Top Tips from leaders we have previously spoken to from around the world.

• Why remaking public policy in the 21st century should be less technical and more human. Governments need to move from relying on technical solutions to those which are more human, suggests Elena Bagnera

• Becoming a more human government - five behaviours for greater legitimacy. Magdalena Kuenkel reports on CPI's new report on how governments can change their behavior to strengthen their legitimacy

• Going digital:  how governments can pick up the pace. When it comes to digital government, the gap between rhetoric and reality remains far too wide, says Florian Frey, but it can be closed. Here, he sets out five ways government could improve its digital deployment.

• Going digital: smartening up the city of Stockholm. Even in somewhere as digitally advanced as Stockholm there is always more to do, admits the city's chief information officer, Ann Hellenius