Clearly defining roles, responsibilities and competencies is fundamental to delivering human-centred administrative services. The OECD Recommendation on Human-Centred Public Administrative Services, calls for clear political accountability and administrative leadership over service design and delivery to ensure strategic oversight, co-ordination and effective implementation. The design and delivery of human-centred services also requires the relevant skills and competencies to be systematically identified and developed. The strategic use of digital public infrastructure and common digital building blocks (e.g. digital identity, data-sharing systems, digital notifications and post) are also essential for integrated and seamless public services (see Section 7.2 on “Digital Public Infrastructure” in Chapter 7).
Most countries have designated a government agency to lead the improvement of administrative services (26 out of 30 countries, 87%). These are most often public administration ministries or their equivalent (12 out of 30 OECD countries, 40%). In several countries, responsibilities are shared across bodies. In Japan, responsibility is shared by the centre of government, the interior and public administration ministries, and the digital government agency. Similarly, Israel assigns responsibilities to the centre of government, its finance ministry and digital government agency. In Korea responsibilities are shared by the centre of government and the interior ministry (Figure 4.14).
Most countries have appointed bodies to oversee the improvement of services within the central/federal government (20 out of 30 OECD countries, 67%). These bodies are responsible for a wide variety of tasks, most commonly enabling co-ordination across government entities and monitoring strategy implementation (13 out of 20 countries indicated their body is responsible for this, 65%, in both cases). Many are also responsible for simplifying multi-agency services (11 out of 20, 55%) and monitoring service projects (8 out of 20, 40%). Publishing performance data (6 out of 20, 30%) and setting service targets (5 out of 20, 25%), are less common. The bodies in Austria and Estonia cover all of the responsibilities assessed, and Canada’s body also has a comprehensive mandate (Figure 4.15).
Identifying and addressing skill gaps among public servants is critical to ensuring effective service delivery. Most countries systematically assess skills gaps (17 out of 29 OECD countries, 59%), more frequently at the agency level (11 out of 29 countries, 38%), than government wide (6 out of 29 countries, 21%). Providing training is essential to addressing gaps and 24 out of 30 countries (80%) provide some form of human-centred service training. In most cases, the training is voluntary (20 out of 30 countries, 67%), with only 4 countries (13%) making it mandatory (Figure 4.16).
