Love Lewisham: A Service Analysis of Public Sector Innovation

By Dr. Alison Prendiville

In 2004 Lewisham’s Environment Department launched Love Lewisham, a website specially developed to address particular community problems such as environmental crime, fly tipping and graffiti. Through the use of mobile devices, smart phones and Pocket PC’s the scheme allows the public and staff to upload photographs of environmental crime straight to the specially designated Love Lewisham site; here the council staff are able to deal rapidly with operational issues and provide news on its removal with a photographic up-date. This scheme has been hailed for its innovative use of technology resulting in improved efficiencies with reduced paperwork and improved response times for the public. As reported recently in The Daily Telegraph 02.08.11, ‘Microsoft can help expand and broaden your services’ the scheme has been hailed to be such a success that the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, gave his support in March 2011 for it to be extended across London.

Love Lewisham’s innovation demonstrates the successful application of Web 2.0 technology to improve and enhance public services. However, from the perspective of the design of a service system, the technology is delivering more than just efficiencies. In order to understand the broader role in making what was once an invisible public sector service visible, it is necessary to provide an overview of the essential features of services and why they are problematic in the public sector and how Love Lewisham clearly demonstrates the elements of a well-designed and effective service.

Services by their very nature are challenging as they rely upon visual cues in order to be understood and more critically their value creation is often dependent on intangible elements such as processes, behind the scenes transaction and service personnel. Services frequently require customers to participate in co-producing the service and in the past, in the public sector, this has involved a very low level of interaction.

Love Lewisham has improved efficiencies and workflow within the council’s environment office. Prior to the website the time delay to log a graffiti complaint and to pass it on to the cleaning team for it to be removed, took, on average, three days. In addition resources were often wasted as the size of the problem could not be accurately gauged from a telephone report; for example graffiti clean-up teams were often presented with only a small offence on a lamp-post. In addition, the lack of feedback on the clean-up process, to those that had taken the time and effort to report the crime, was also missing.

With the introduction of ‘Love Lewisham’, the interactive map enables members of the cleaning team to pinpoint the exact location of the graffiti and the size of the problem, thus allowing a more accurate evaluation of the size of team required to rectify the offence. Once the job is finished the team member photographs the clean-up, enters a job number and sends it in to the system, which automatically up-dates the web site.  

As a service touch point encounter, Love Lewisham offers a real-time window into the working processes, personnel and behind the scenes transactions of Lewisham’s Environment Department. What were previously anonymous and one directional communication processes for reporting environmental crime, has now shifted to provide up-to the minute tangible evidence of the operational processes of the clean-up teams. The feedback mechanism to the website, to confirm the completion of the job, also offers a two way communication channel to exist between the council and the public; any positive feedback from the public when they have been informed of the clean-up is also up-loaded on to the website. In order for services to be effective and successful the mental intangibility (a customer’s inability to visualise what will be delivered) that often surrounds them needs to be reduced. By making the reporting of environmental crime and the clean-up processes transparent, Love Lewisham is turning what was once an invisible low-level encounter into a highly visible service that increases confidence and trust.

If local government is to encourage residents to become ‘partial employees,’ service encounters need to change. Councils must enable residents to participate at an active level thus rewarding and demonstrably satisfying their efforts. In summary, from a service perspective, Love Lewisham’s success is in the delivery of feedback for the reporting efforts of the local residents, through notification, acknowledgement and information on the clean-up. These changes, together with the improved response time for dealing with environmental crime and the knock-on effect this has on the local communities’ perceptions of safety and quality of environment, all contribute to local residents’ sense of ownership and motivation for participating in the service delivery of Love Lewisham.

Summary of the paper ‘Love Lewisham, Improving Stakeholder Satisfaction in Local Government Service: A Case study of Strategic Public Sector Service Innovation’. First Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation.  Oslo 24^th-26^th November 2009.