A New Focus: Service Delivery from People’s Perspectives
The biggest innovation of the OCLS is that it has changed the focus of delivery to citizens, breaking from a one-sided, top-down approach to decision making and prioritizing user perspectives. By eliminating the need to deal with similar matters multiple times, the OCLS has cut socioeconomic costs significantly. The program has not been created from scratch, but by integrating existing services from a new perspective. This change in delivery scheme has saved taxpayers time and money.

Creating Success with Minimal Costs
Another significance of the OCLS comes from the fact that it is a highly cost-effective program. Instead of developing a new service, the government looked at existing ones and then integrated them from user perspectives. This has alleviated user inconvenience considerably without incurring additional administrative costs. It has helped earn the trust of people by sending a message that the government cares.

The OCLS has undergone the planning stages and has now reached the implementation phase.

Planning: the Big Picture
Public services are chronologically structured to meet the needs of people in different stages of their lives, like birth, education, employment, marriage, childcare, and death. The MOIS categorized these services into groups when developing a framework for the OCLS. First launched was the OIS to enable heirs to view all the property left by the deceased at once, which was then followed by the OSPC which improves much needed services for pregnancy and childbirth.

Implementation through Collaboration
The MOIS has engaged other agencies to share goals clearly and work together to provide solutions.
Thanks to the government’s promotional efforts via channels such as social media, use of the OCLS has grown since its launch. OIS applications rose from 28% in 2015 to 48% in June 2018, a 73% jump, while OSPC applications increased 12% from 88% in 2016 to 98% in June 2018.

Central Government : Silos Removed
The central government led policy design since it had the relevant resources. As a coordinator, the MOIS developed a delivery scheme by integrating functionally fragmented services into a package, and played a key role in removing agency silos.

Local Governments : Implementation
The OCLS is provided through local governments, its contact points with people. For a smooth delivery, community service centers across the country have staff that handle OCLS.

Benefiting Both the Government and the People
In the past, people made multiple visits and applications for similar issues. The OCLS allows users to take care of everything at once, saving them time and money. With only one application now required, the government also benefits from reduced costs.

One-stop Services for All
People undergo different stages in their lives, and birth and death are unavoidable for everyone. The OSPC and the OIS are intended to serve all the citizens of Korea.

Greater Convenience and Reduced Costs
In 2017, applications for the OIS and the OSPC numbered some 130,000 and 340,000, respectively, and the resulting cuts in social costs amounted to KRW 12 billion. In the past, people had to visit seven organizations for inheritance services and 5 government offices for pregnancy and childbirth services, proving their eligibility with seven different documents. With the OIS and the OSPC, they now have only to visit one organization and submit two different documents at most, which leads to far greater convenience and much lower social costs.

Inclusive Delivery
The government informs people of the OCLS to prevent them from losing the benefits they are entitled to. As of June 2018, 96% of those who registered births also applied for the OSPC.

Higher Satisfaction
Satisfaction levels with the OCLS are much higher now that it delivers various services at once. Shortly after its launch, the program received positive reviews from both the media and users

Lack of Collaboration
The first challenge was collaboration. The success of the OCLS depended on cooperation among agencies, but they didn’t see eye to eye at first. They were reluctant to be involved due to concerns about potential disruption in their work processes. To tackle this issue, the MOIS exercised a strong leadership and successfully made a business case. It also mustered strong support from relevant agencies by dividing work and clearly communicating its future direction.

Strained Resources of Local Governments
The second challenge was the difficulty in engaging frontline staff who felt their hands were already tied. The MOIS formed a consultative body with local governments and incorporated their feedback. It also delivered presentations to staff in local governments to help them understand the need for the program. The work environment was also improved to minimize manual work by enabling information sharing between systems and building automated work processes.

Consensus and Collaboration
The OCLS was made possible through consensus and collaboration. Agencies shared the need to resolve the issues faced by those who have to visit multiple organizations to receive services. Viewing issues from people’s perspectives and working closely together to find solutions has been key to the evolution of services like the OCLS, leading to much greater user convenience.

Enhanced User Convenience
People can access the OCLS via various channels including postal mail, text messaging, and the Internet. User convenience was enhanced further when the OIS went online in August 2017 and the OSPC in November 2017.

Engaging Users in Policy-making
In September 2015, the government collected opinions on pregnancy and childbirth services from housewives and expectant mothers. It held a meeting with pregnant women on September 21 to listen to their concerns and conducted online polls among 471 expectant mothers, incorporating the results into the service policy.

Universality
Inheritance services could be made available in almost every country, and various pregnancy and childbirth services are already provided in many nations. Although the OIS and the OSPC are specific to Korea, the overarching framework of delivering proactive one-stop services can be applied in other countries as well.

Sustainability
The OCLS is cost-effective as it focuses on improving existing services instead of creating new ones, and it doesn’t undermine the freedom and creativity of the private sector. The demand for the OCLS is consistently high since everyone is a potential user. In addition, the program is separate from other social systems and can be delivered irrespective of time and circumstances.

Interest from Other Nations
In 2017, government officials from 18 countries including Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and Thailand visited the MOIS and attended a presentation on the OSPC. They showed great interest in it, its focus on improving service delivery in particular.

The Need for Personalized Services
The environment surrounding administrative services is becoming more complex, and issues faced by people in different phases of their lives are increasingly diverse. Resolving these issues requires policies, programs, services, and systems that are tailored to meet the needs of individuals.
After the OCLS was launched the response from people was extremely positive, as evidenced by postings and comments on social media. This demonstrates that delivery of services that meet the actual needs of users results in slow but increasing confidence in the government among the general public.

The Importance of Inter-agency Collaboration
Inter-agency collaboration is not an easy process, and thus requires prudent coordination. In the process of creating the OCLS, the MOIS played a crucial role as coordinator of the project. It fostered collaboration between relevant agencies to create a comprehensive, user-focused, and customized delivery scheme by integrating functionally fragmented services.

The Journey Begins in Earnest
In an effort to proactively provide the services needed in different stages of a person’s life, the Korean government started the OIS, the first ever OCLS, in June 2015, extending the success of the service by launching the OSPC nationwide in March 2016. It plans to emulate this success in others areas, such as startups, employment, education, and senior citizen services in order to create a greater experience for public service users down the road.
We have learned that user satisfaction doesn’t necessarily require huge resources and can easily be achieved by simply looking at existing services from the perspectives of the general public. The ultimate goal for government agencies should be to design their work processes for the benefit of people and integrate the services they need into government-wide synergies. The journey toward a government for the people has now begun in earnest.

The Korean government categorized public services into groups based on different stages of life to provide the One-stop Customized Lifecycle Services (OCLS). It launched the One-stop Inheritance Services (OIS) in 2015 and the One-stop Services for Pregnancy and Childbirth (OSPC) in 2016.
The biggest innovation was making the OCLS user-oriented. Now users can take care of multiple issues at once, the OCLS has greatly reduced costs. The government plans to emulate this success in other areas.