Porism Ltd

London, United Kingdom
www.porism.co.uk

Porism Limited is a private sector company that supports business improvement, particularly in the public sector, by using web-based tools. Porism is the technical partner in the UK electronic service delivery toolkit (esd-toolkit – see www.esd.org.uk), having founded the toolkit on the Web in co-operation with three UK municipalities in 2002. esd-toolkit is now used by several hundred UK municipalities and is managed by a board of their representatives. esd-toolkit supports evidence-based service improvement within local government, providing a set of tools which local government officers can use to share and compare information on services, including metrics that are collated according to a set of standards.

Porism is involved in two pilots in the Smart Cities Project. Porism is developing a Local Government Business Model (LGBM), which is an ontology (i.e. a classification framework) that describes the components of local service delivery in the public sector and sets out the relationships between them. It models:
• life events, need and circumstance to provide a structured way of understanding customers and where services should be targeted, and
• the elements of service delivery, including delivery channels and the generic processes that are involved in transacting a service.
This work builds upon existing work with UK municipalities that defined the services they offer and how they are delivered. A transnational EU service list is being developed that will cross-reference the services that are delivered in each partner country to one another and to the LGBM model.
Porism will be using the Local Government Business Model to developing tools and guidance for developing Customer Insight. These tools will:
• show how different customer characteristics apply to different geographical areas,
• relate outcomes to demographic factors,
• profile surveys,
• help understand the costs that are involved in service delivery, and
• help identify customer channel preferences and identify ways to migrate customers to more appropriate or more efficient channels.
These tools will inform efforts to redesign business processes to deliver more efficient and better targeted services and improve customer journeys.