The Service Model
The following is the general content of the introduction I gave to each of the Meet the Candidates evenings.
Background
I’m Pete Harrison, and I’ve been a resident of Wamboin for the past 15 years. I was raised down on the border, in Albury, where one of my grandfathers was an orchardist and the other ran a family hardware store. My father followed his father into the hardware business. I started working in the store when I was about 7 years old, and this is where I received my earliest training in customer service. My father and grandfather were also central figures in services clubs, Apex and Rotary, and much of my early life revolved around the activities of these clubs. I also spent my entire youth in the Scouting movement.
I moved to Canberra back in the seventies to study at the ANU, where I met my wife Barb. I spent several years as a research chemist while completing my PhD then moved into the services sector of the IT industry, working initially with scientific mainframe computers, then moving on to the design of data communications infrastructure and ultimately managing a team of engineers who delivered these services throughout the Asia/Pacific region.
We designed and built national networks in Pakistan and India, and mission critical networks for organisations like Hong Kong International Terminals, one of the busiest container ports in the world, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. We even got to do a bit of work in Australia, designing the internet infrastructure for Primus Telecommunications and data networks for the ASX and the Sydney Futures Exchange. These projects all involved the analysis of the specific business requirements for the respective organisations, and the design of infrastructure to support those requirements.
I retired from that job, which involved a huge amount of travel, to spend more time with my family and to help home school our son Steve.
These days I am still (mostly) retired. I spend my time helping to run the local Scout Group and in various capacities with the Wamboin Community Association. I have been actively involved with Council matters since Palerang was formed, and have attended almost every meeting of the present Council, including those involved with the development of the new Palerang Local Environmental Plan.
It is from this foundation that I would like to make a few observations about the operation of our Council and comment on how I can contribute to its effective operation.
Council as a Service Organisation
I’d like to start by simply asking: "What is Council all about?"
Of course, we can come up with all sorts of descriptions like “They are the elected members of our community that perform the function of a Board of Directors... blah blah blah”. But at a practical level, aren’t they really about providing direction to a service organisation?
As I see it, our council is a service organisation, and service should be its essential focus. Following the adage that charity begins at home, the culture of any organisation is invariably passed down from its executive team. It is therefore our councillors who should be setting the standard when it comes to service and this will invariably be reflected in their behaviour in the Council chamber and their interaction with the general public. The problem is, and this is especially relevant in a service organisation, that if the management team of an organisation is dysfunctional, the clarity of their direction will inevitably suffer. After that, it becomes very difficult to effectively deliver much at all.
In the service model, the solution is to focus on the customer, on the customer’s needs, and in Council’s case the customer is the broader Palerang community.
In my experience, the issues that cause the most anxiety within the community are ultimately the result of inadequate community engagement. The Macs Reef Road waste facility problems, and the recent issue with staffing in Braidwood, problems from the opposite ends of the shire, are cases in point. In the first case, the community was consulted, on several occasions, but ultimately ignored. In Braidwood, it seems no one was consulted before they were ignored. It’s difficult to know who got the worst deal: those who were consulted and ignored, or those who were just ignored. Probably the only thing that’s important is that no one was at all happy.
And here I would like to make an important distinction: engagement is more than just consultation, as we have come to know it. Engagement involves acting on the input that has been provided through consultation.
The final observation I would like to make relates to transparency in the governance of Council affairs. At one level, this is just another aspect of engagement: transparency is effectively the openness and honesty with which Council communicates with the general public. Both of the issues to which I referred earlier suffered seriously from a lack of transparency in Council’s activities. Community frustration and mistrust was the result.
The new Integrated Planning & Reporting requirements that have been introduced by the NSW State Government have the potential to address this issue. The original Palerang Council struggled with the concept of forward planning. Some might suggest that this had much to do with keeping hidden agendas hidden, and that this attitude seems to have carried over to the present Council. These new, State-driven initiatives target this sort of practice and promise to create a more productive Local Government environment. To have any real impact, however, these processes must still be implemented in the spirit of their intent, not just by the letter.
The Service Model in a Nutshell
I would like to suggest that our Council could benefit by adopting the model of many successful service delivery organisations, with the following effect:
- Since it is generally recognised that the culture of any organisation comes from its top level management, they would display the same level of professional respect and etiquette that they would expect the organisation to show to its customers;
- They would seek to engage with their customers in such a way that they were always aware of their customers' needs, and acted to the best of their ability to fulfil those needs;
- They would aspire to build a relationship of trust by being completely open and honest in all of their interactions with their customers.
Perception is Reality
No matter how good a job some individual councillors might think they are doing, and in fact no matter how good a job Council as a whole might be doing, their customer, the ratepayer's perception of what they're doing is critical. It is all too easy for Council to work in isolation, creating perfectly reasonable solutions to the problems they believe exist. But this smacks of 'The hospital with no patients', of Yes (Prime) Minister fame. If the problems being solved are only part of the customer's problem, or not the customer's real problem at all, the solution will be unsatisfactory.
In the service business there is an adage: "Perception is reality". The fact is that while the customer may not always be right, it is what the customer sees, or perceives, that must be addressed. That is the customer's reality, and that should be the focus of a responsive service organisation.
In the service industry, the solution is genuine customer engagement, and true transparency in all customer interactions.
Summation
I’d like to conclude this introduction by reiterating that I have been involved in service delivery and community service almost all of my life, from working on Saturday mornings in my grandfather’s hardware store, to my present Scout, community association and Council involvement. I have run a very successful, international services business, and I have been actively involved with the present Council since it was elected. As a result, I am familiar with most of the issues facing our Council, including the gritty details of the LEP.
On this basis, if elected, I will be able to begin serving the wider Palerang community immediately, and I beg your consideration of my nomination.