Following the success of two projects in the North West, "Counting Cumbria" and "Calling Cumbria", April 2009 saw the announcement of £5 million government funding for 13 pilots and the addition of a new phrase to the local government lexicon: Total Place.

Total Place: a Google search gives over a hundred hits - has been talked about at both the Labour and Conservative conferences and was a feature of the Solace conference in October 2009. It has been reported at least twice on Radio 4’s Today programme and featured in the Guardian newspaper. In fact, some of its conclusions have been fed back to the Treasury to inform the Pre-Budget Report, with more likely to follow and influence both the Budget and the CSR11 spending round. So what is Total Place? Simply put, it is a three-stage process that maps public sector cash flowing through a locality from central to local bodies, looks at the way existing organisational cultures help or hinder the process and then identifies opportunities for collaboration between agencies on local service redesign and use of resources.

Initial results have only just been published and are primarily focused on the first, cash-counting, part of the initiative. We have seen nothing particularly dramatic from this stage so far other than that total public spending in the pilot areas is BIG. For example, total public expenditure in Birmingham is around £7.5bn; in Central Bedfordshire and Luton £3.4bn; and in Worcestershire just over £4bn. The Treasury is already very interested because imagined savings of only 1% would translate into big numbers too; £75m in Birmingham, £34m in Central Bedfordshire and Luton and £40m in Worcestershire.

Big money indeed, but how does this impact the customer? Answer: the third (and probably most exciting) stage focuses on what this all means for how services are delivered. For Leicestershire, alcohol and drugs misuse is an area of focus: the county has found a multitude of agencies involved in the treatment of alcohol addiction, but all working separately. This behaviour is reinforced by fragmented and tortuous funding paths down a long chain from central government to the front line. Leicestershire’s aspiration is for money for alcohol and drugs misuse to be pooled, with a single point of access for customers. Croydon is looking at support for vulnerable children. Its hypothesis is that public organisations are spending too much public money reacting to serious problems experienced by, say, 11-24 year olds, which could be reduced significantly by more and better-targeted expenditure in the early years.

The other upshot of all this is that the customer has to deal with a confusing medley of different agencies; not something that helps them, and not the best solution to deliver value for money.

So what is the best solution?

The clue is in a technique called Customer Journey Mapping. Using this approach it is possible to map a service from the daily point-of-view of the customer: following the service delivery from agency to agency and mapping the palpable frustration of the service user. Not only in most cases does this make agencies focus organisational design on what is best for the customer, but it normally ends up being more efficient too. Simply put, Customer Journey Mapping allows organisations to unshackle themselves and focus on: