E-GOVERNMENT BULLETIN – ISSUE 262, 28 April 2008

April 30, 2008
++Section Two: Policy

- E-Government Metrics.

+07: Introducing The Great E-mancipator

by Mick Phythian.

Back in the days before Implementing Electronic Government Statements (IEGs) and Priority Service Outcomes (PSOs), a local authority IT manager filled some of his evenings writing a thesis entitled ‘Service delivery using internet technologies.’

The data, to which many district councils contributed, was shortly afterwards subjected to further analysis and with Bill Taylor the manager published it as a paper entitled ‘Progress in electronic service delivery by English district councils.’ He also wrote a piece for E- Government Bulletin in 2001 entitled ‘Fighting their corner – the problems of territorialism’, which argued for greater co-operation between government bodies to further e-government.

As the IEGs wore on and wore him out, the manager was sure things could be done differently, but had less and less time to ponder great thoughts. He worked in sub-regional and regional partnerships, Socitm, the ESD-Toolkit and Exchanging Information with the Public (EIP) but the frustration with the duplication haunted him. Then one day, long after the heady times of IEGs and PSOs, he felt another piece of research coming on.

What had been missed during that period, the manager believed, was some way of obtaining a wholesale view of what the public, citizens or customers wanted or did not want from electronic service delivery, and having some way of measuring it. Lacking the steely will and discipline to just start the research the IT manager floated the idea of making it a doctoral dissertation and as the outline developed the concept found some moral support from colleagues and academics, which instead of dissuading him, simply encouraged him further.

Thus it was that this manager became an addict of Google Scholar and various university libraries, as well as a subscriber to a range of mailing lists and web forums on the various topics within electronic or transformational government. He pulled a title together, tidied up the outline with some academic references to satisfy the university paperwork, and read and read and read.

And so to today. With currently over 200 references and approaching 20,000 words, I – for I am that manager – have arrived at the stage of asking people for answers, instead of just looking in books and journals. The literature, so far, has indicated that improvements for the citizen are dependent upon organisational change involving the end-to- end processes, that benchmarks or metrics have been absent but that customer satisfaction may be of use in determining movements in public value or social capital brought about by transformation. It has also suggested that there is a strong historical basis for many of the government structures and care needs to be observed when changing them. The latter is a nod in the direction of New Public Management (NPM) that was, and still is in some places, a fad prior to electronic government and which has created some of the issues that transformational government potentially has to resolve.

The research methodology that I settled on was Action Research. This enables me to consult directly with the community of users and feed back to them without the probable wait involved for the completion of the research or inaccessible academic papers.

So in order to establish a conversation with those at the t-government coalface I have established a weblog entitled The Great E-mancipator -  

http://greatemancipator.wordpress.com – containing extracts of the research, models that come to mind, with the opportunity to comment, along with linking off to occasional surveys that can get some background to what is happening and what is wanted, which enables me to propose or develop any models with some sort of consensus support.
The title of the blog refers to Abraham Lincoln, known as the ‘Great Emancipator’, who was assassinated on 14 April 1865, precisely 143 years before the creation of the blog.

Everyone is invited to contribute opinions to the site (I’m an IT manager, I have no feelings!) and local government practitioners are begged to respond to an initial thirteen-question survey. Although the quantitative data is not expected to be representative, it would be useful to have as many practical solutions or propositions from the real world as possible.

[Section Two ends].

 +HOW TO RECEIVE E-GOVERNMENT BULLETIN.

To subscribe to this free fortnightly bulletin as an HTML attachment

email: egb-html-subscribe@headstar.com

or for the plain text version email: egovbulletin-subscribe@headstar.com .

To unsubscribe from the HTML version email: egb-html-unsubscribe@headstar.com and to unsubscribe from the text version email: egovbulletin-unsubscribe@headstar.com .

Or to register on the web, visit:

 

 

http://www.headstar.com/site/scripts/register.php

 +TEN STANDARD: This newsletter conforms to the accessible Text

Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard, developed by our sister newsletter E-Access Bulletin. For details see:

 

 http://www.headstar.com/ten .

 

Leave a Comment » | customer satisfaction, e-government, Metrics, NI14 | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

Re: Pete but not a repeat!

April 29, 2008

What a coincidence, just as Pete suggests a pilot, the following report gets published, which actually suggests doing something but wouldn’t it be nice if they piloted it for the rest of us or ran a couple of differing pilots and took up the most successful.

Parliament has today published the Committee of Public Accounts  report on Government on the Internet: Progress in delivering information and services online (16th) HC143

A fascinating document, especially if one reads the committee proceeds at the back!
Two of the key conclusions, from my view -

16% of government organisations have no data about how their websites are being used, inhibiting website developments.

The Government does not know how much it is saving through internet services, nor whethere any savings are being redeployed to improve services for people who do or cannot use the internet.

The Committee has requested improvements for the future but as the dialogue in the committee infers but not the recomendations, these need to bear in mind all channels.

But I’m not too concerned about satisfied customers, although that’s very nice, my thinking (as opposed to the perverse NI14 imagination) is to pick up the disatisfied, the unhappy, the failed customers and find out what pi**ed them off? Great, count the postives as well to get some sort of scale but concentrate on correcting the issues – a rotten ‘phone system, poor navigation on the web site or unhelpful opening times for the reception could affect a channel and if its a lower costing one, cost the council money.

Some of this type of work is being done by Govmetric (rol) as one example and one style, but the MP’s have now picked up on lack of metrics but lets not spend a lot of money doing something silly, lets pilot some well researched, straightforward methods>

Leave a Comment » | customer satisfaction, e-government, Metrics, NI14 | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

Satisfaction? Responding to Pete…

April 28, 2008

Thanks Pete – my personal response beloe yours but I’m not saying the final one!

“Is “satisfied”, a satisfactory service, the limit of our ambition? Of course it may be a challenge even to get to that, but it seems to me you would ideally want to get beyond it, to something like excellent or “delighted”.

I have (once!) been asked to rate my satisfaction with a service from 1 (bad) to 10 (good), and then asked “if we didn’t score 10, what would it take to get us there?”. That maybe sends a more positive message than “if you’re just about satisfied, that’s good enough for us”. It might also throw up some new ideas for improvement.”

That’s what I started this blog for! According to some recent marketing literature, its all to personal. Offering people 1 – 10, 1 – 7 or  1 – 5 makes no difference according to the analysis, so which scale? My concept was, and I don’t claim originality, I’m just seeking adoption of it, is to leave it as either satisfied or dissatisfied (this too has papers supporting it) and ask for the reasons behind the choice. Nice and simple. Another academic paper states that offering different people the choice between 1 and 10 for the same service you’ll get different scores, its all very human, so again get the reasoning, if possible.
There’s also another angle in that concentrating on the one’s dissatisfied with a service is better practice than getting satisfied service users up to excellent. I know ideally we’d like all our users to consider us excellent but whilst we have some that aren’t satisfied, lets sort them out – there’s another marketing paper on that, too!

“And about steering the public to cheaper channels – surely you need an element of that? Improvements don’t usually come for free, and budgets are finite, so if you don’t realise some savings, sooner or later you have to settle for something less than excellence.”

Agreed, but there is a temptation to push rather than pull. We’ve all seen what’s been happening to banks and now they’re changing back. Many council services can actually require a mix of channels to be used. First of all a visit, then a few emails or maybe a ‘phone call, then a visit, then an email. The great British public in most cases will use the most convenient once they have confidence in our ability to deliver good services that way, what we need to do is develop their confidence in using those channels. But there will always be some people who can’t or won’t use the Internet or ‘phone and we still need to provide a quality service, probably mediated by humans but facilitated by the Internet to them?

What do YOU think?

When seeing John Seddon last week he mentioned another book of his from 1992 with regards to satisfaction and measures “I want you to cheat”, which I found second-hand on Amazon and am reading that plus my usual diet of journals before “Systems Thinking in the Public Sector”. Its a smaller, lighter read, looking at the private sector.

1 Comment | customer satisfaction, e-government, Metrics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

History repeating itself…

April 24, 2008

As well as preparing the dissertation and doing the research, a researcher is expected to contribute a few academic papers and attend conferences. I’ve had a paper accepted for ETHICOMP 2008 in Italy in September which is a summary of the early work I’ve done, here’s the abstract.

All I need to do now is to get someone to pay the expenses for me to go…

It’s been a busy week, this one. Tuesday I had a day off everything to take the Phythian youth up Whernside (biggest ‘ill in Yorkshire) probably more alarming was the fact that in November 2006 I was hospitalised with level 4 heart failure following severe ideopathic dilated cardimyopathy – just proves the wonders of modern science. Not long ago I’d have been in the queue for a new heart or dead! Wednesday, very brave considering Tuesday, I’d got John Seddon locally promoting his new book and a very interesting and forthright one he did too. As one local councillor put it – “good salesman”. I think John sold a few books, too or at least I hope he did!

One of my colleagues brought an elderly (ex libris) volume with him and asked John if he’d read it. I didn’t catch the answer but borrowed it for a quick read, it was entitled “How organisations measure success: the use of performance indicators in government” published in 1992 and written by Carter, Klein and Day.  Voltaire once quoted Marie-Antoinette as saying “There’s no such thing as a new hat”, in other words, nothing new under the sun. This book and the arguments around NI14 etc just emphasise this, to quote from the penultimate paragraph: “Performance indicators have been seen as technical instruments at best and propaganda at worst, and in any case incomprehensible or misleading. There has been no real attempt to use them as instruments of parliamentary accountability: to ask the questions of how the performance of government should be measured and what indicators are needed. Yet this, surely, is what parliamentary accountability is all about – in theory, at least.”

The book has a number of juicy sentences just like that. I’ll have to look at that Audit Commission anniversary volume to see if they’ve quoted any.

 

Leave a Comment » | e-government, Metrics, NI14 | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

Feeding back

April 20, 2008

Having marked the anniversary of the assassination of the Great Emancipator with the launch of the Great E-mancipator blog, I’ve been promoting it across the various lists and mailing lists I’ve been using and accumulating.

In some cases this has resulted in completion of the SURVEY, in others personal emails (all polite, thanks John, Dan and others) and in the case of the e-democracy list, some supportive discussion, thanks Paul and Jeremy.

I’ll pick up some threads from Paul here, since they are very relevant.

  • Channels – “who else uses channels?” “blunt usage”? – has anybody any favourite/preferred alternatives? I had the same problem with my research supervisors and the term “silo“. I also have a concern about channels turning into silos – now that’s worrying if you don’t like either expression! I still believe that customer/citizen contact should be managed as a whole with the I.T. that supports it.
  • Drop-outs from online processes better than user satisfaction – but what about the other channels? The person wanting face-to-face at five-to-nine?
  • “We still do not have a single central resource for gov webbies like the Australian state of Victoria has had for several years > http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/” – again but I like to see this across all communication/service channels?
  • “Strategy is extremely patchy rather than holistic” – this is a ket element of my dissertation, its a Civil Service modus operandi if I’m correct. They have no idea what to do, so ask everyone else to provide exemplars, and then cherry-pick the best or in the worst instance the low-hanging fruit! At the end of the exercise, everybody is doing something different at public expense but central government have a model for all to follow, if it isn’t too late? Prime examples of this in e-government were Implementing Electronic Government Statements 1 & 2, the Priority Service Outcomes and a string of ‘national projects’.

The discussion continued and I’m looking forward to refining the model with such feedback.

Leave a Comment » | customer satisfaction, e-government, Metrics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

« Previous Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.