UK Department for Work and Pensions: Service-Oriented Architecture

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Accenture worked with the United Kingdom Department for Work and Pensions to create a service-oriented architecture-based solution that allows citizens to receive pension forecasts while they wait. Citizens receive dramatically better service—a key element of high performance for a government agency.

Serving England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom Department for Work and Pensions helps citizens achieve their potential through employment, so that they are able to work, provide for their children and save for secure retirement.

Comprising seven “businesses”—Jobcentre Plus; The Pension Service; Child Support Agency; Disability and Carers Service; The Health and Safety Commission and Health and Safety Executive; The Rent Service; and Debt Management—its main customer groups are children, people of working age, pensioners, disabled people and their caregivers. Over the past 10 years, the organization has looked to strategic planning and major information technology programs to improve organizational and operational efficiency—and to begin evaluating which services can be best offered online.

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In 2000, the political leadership of the UK government directed its civil service to drive all government services online by 2005. One critical challenge faced by the UK Department for Work and Pensions was how to develop an online presence for their core services within a short, five-year period and, as a result, how to improve dramatically the quality and efficiency of customer service to citizens. One service that was identified as ideal for electronic enablement was the process by which working-age citizens could request and later receive a forecast of the amount of state pension for which they would qualify on retirement. Accenture, which is working with the UK Department for Work and Pensions on several major programs, supported this direction and proposed an innovative service-oriented architecture-based approach.

“From the previous month-long waiting period for obtaining pension forecasting information, the online, service-oriented architecture-based forecasting tool allows UK citizens to receive their pension forecasts while they wait,” says Mark Richardson, head of electronic government within The Pension Service.

Accenture brought to bear experts in application development, user interface design, service-oriented architecture technical architecture and security as well as application maintenance and support. Furthermore, a joint Accenture-Avanade team collaborated during the build phase to develop the citizen-facing website, a reusable forecasting engine that hosts the business rules required to perform the forecast and that creates Web services capabilities for retrieving citizen data from external systems. Across three organizations, these professionals built and launched the new pension forecasting application within 12 months.

Accenture’s architecture and development team worked closely with the UK Department for Work and Pensions to develop the overall service-oriented architecture. Accenture used Microsoft Corporation’s .NET framework and Avanade’s ACA.NET application framework to develop the service-oriented architecture capabilities and core system components, along with a number of additional core customized architecture components.

The new self-service, service-oriented architecture-based pension-forecasting tool has reduced phone calls to the UK Department for Work and Pensions as well as paperwork, significantly increasing efficiency within the Pension Service unit. The shift towards accessing and using customer data from other government departments has offered the UK Department for Work and Pensions many opportunities to consider future services development.

The pension forecasting tool used by The Pension Service of the UK Department for Work and Pensions remains one of the first European examples of a citizen-facing service that is specific to the individual and that combines service-oriented architecture, the Internet and self-service.

“One of the clear advantages is the flexible and reusable platform for any relevant, future business applications across the UK government,” says Mark Richardson, head of electronic government within The Pension Service. “The service-oriented architecture-based approach and the industry standards involved reduce the cost of reusing the platform and harnessing relevant data, contributing to our goal of realizing high performance by maximizing the business benefits of service-oriented architecture.”

Read more about Accenture's client success stories with human services agencies.