Mortgage brokers changed the banking industry and its accompanying service ecosystem. Mobile mortgage brokers took that to an even greater level. The public sector has for many years offered service capability extensions for transactional type activities through outlets including Australia Post for everything from rates to passport processing, and car dealers for vehicle registration. Wider attempts to institutionalise complex multi-authorisation processes have been either project based, transitional (such as the ATOs original GST help teams), or unsuccessful.

It is not that the model doesn't exist. Cite badge-carrying ATO or Customs agents or clip-board wielding inspection agents, or the entire Police force. But rather than the negative association of an IRS agent showing up at your door, the Canadian government found that their shared service initiative proved that a positive government service experience can actually increase votes. Yet a positive experience engendered via the partnership of personalisation and automation remains a policy white elephant.

The argument for mobile service representatives is that they recognise the way in which businesses wish to conduct business. To separate these interactions from a transaction, while complex activities may start on the internet, they cannot be completed there. The internet is the start of the inquiry or referral process that begins the "Please come and see me about a business license" process which hypothetically ends through increased employment, revenue (taxes), and economic contribution. For individuals we need look no further than our aging population. Grey nomads aside, the aged are loyal and don't like to travel very far as the community banking sector has discovered. Mobile reps would represent the face of government when so often it has none.
 
Aside from votes (the political equivalent of increasing revenue), and constituent satisfaction (customer satisfaction), the other reason that mobilising and personalising government is process optimisation (the bureaucratic equivalent of operational savings). The business of government essentially boils down to two types of services: transactional, or what people financially give or receive, and informational, or what people want to or need to know. It is the interface of these two types of services that can be utilized to highlight the current inefficiencies within any jurisdiction. For businesses, mobilising government services would highlight which beaurucratic processes were really important.

For example, how important is it really that we remain GITC (or similar such as WA's SPIRIT) registered with the Queensland Government, and expend effort in renewing the process each year when the industry is aware that the data is simply put on file and isn't even captured electronically. The question of why certain information is collected is the most enduring in government. The consequence of unnecessary data collection is a slippery slope towards a big brother complex which is both unhelpful and unproductive. From a commercial perspective example, if APRA didn't ask for the banks to supply certain information on loan requests then you would never see it on a bank loan application. Sitting face-to-face with businesses and individuals in their environment would allow the government to understand and capture these lifecycles of data and dispense with immense waste.

Beyond process, mobilised government services would support decentralisation, and regionalisation. They would also increase a more efficient rural coverage through the traveling "salesman" empowered with target based outcomes for calls, requests, and authorisation processing milestones. It would hasten the requirement for constituent allowed access to cross-agency system integration and provide a platform for workflow process improvements through e-form implementations.

While the absence of well defined services through ITIL-like service catalogues on the business side of government remains prevalent, the largest challenges and impediments to such policy is the new business models themselves. They work counter-culture to the clustering and hierarchy of public sector organisational management. The separation of agency specific policy implementation and measurement from constituent-based cross-agency lifecycle policy is the analogous Mt Everest of public policy.

Yet I for one would be happy if an agent showed up at my workplace, just like my banker or broker, and was empowered to process all of my government services on their laptop simply by accessing my personal information (with my authority) using my smartcard to administer the necessary distributed applications of each of the agencies responsible for processing either my requests or legislative obligations.

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