Systems thinking, balanced scorecards and satisfaction

June 12, 2008

I have heard it stated that ‘Systems Thinking’ and ‘Balanced Scorecard’ are different paradigms and cannot co-exist. I think that in the sense that Kuhn originated the concept this is incorrect, one is not a massive conceptual leap from the other improving understanding for mankind – they are just different tools.

On that basis I wonder whether it is possible to be flexible with these tools, and others in order to bring a workable rationale for transformation? It is quite possible that I am misunderstanding the principles of either or both and so am happy to be constructtively criticised.

Is it possible to use systems thinking on the processes under investigation, rationalise them whilst continuing to record dissatisfaction against the channels that the processes operate over and finally report the measures of usage in a scorecard? If that is viable, we have mechanism through which we are able to consider both the customer and provider, whilst using some statistical method to observe channels and encourage change?

This isn’t a solution to NI14, just a different and newer paradigm!

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Customer insight: an online conference

June 10, 2008

The Improvement & Development Agency (IDeA) are this month (June 2008) hosting an online conference on the subject of ‘customer insight’. The’ve neatly started off by inviting Mary Tetlow to provide a piece with her views and a video of herself.

I believe Mary’s piece is a  reasonable criticism of the National Indicator set and Place survey, reflecting the views of the public and in two A4 pages she explains some of the issues faced by many local authorities having to do something that is of little or no value  (which perhaps echoes back to the government’s own NI14).

Anyway, the debate has opened but registration is required to partake. Please take a look!

Having read about and discussed customer insight, need, satisfaction etc., I believe we can make this as complex or as simple as we want, but on this occasion, please, please, lets opt for the Occam’s razor of solutions and go for something that is easy for councils to operate and gives the public what they deserve!

 

1 Comment | customer satisfaction, e-government, NI14 | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

Satisfaction

June 5, 2008

Yesterday I was at an ESD-Toolkit TLC meeting (Electronic Service Delivery Toolkit Toolkit Learning Community) apart from the healthy debate over NI14 (thank you Bob and others), there was also some chance to discuss customer satisfaction and insight. Tony Hinkley dropped a name that I was unto unaware of – Robert Johnston of Warwick Business School – so I will now spend the next month reading his uncollected works – shed loads of stuff on satisfaction, complaints, service excellence etc, so I will try and summarise some on here – but there is a lot of it! Many thanks Tony (and Bob for writing it all).

The other big news this week was the launch by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) of the eGovernment Interest Group. There is also a forum there. Lots of potential to debate the Web 2.0 and the future! 

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Change and channels – what government isn’t good at!

June 2, 2008

According to a new study marketers were asked:

Which of the following sectors do you rate as effective or very effective at combining different marketing media/channels to achieve significantly higher response rates?

Government & NHS were at the bottom!

Glyn Evans of Birmingham City Council is reported as stating at a conference in Berlin that:

“Most senior managers in the public sector are still of the generation that grew up without IT,” he said. This led to a limited understanding of IT, which is the reason why the public sector has not been successful in using IT as tool for change in the past.

“We have got to move away from the central government view that it is all about efficiency savings and shared services. It has got to be more than that,” Evans said.

“IT is the enabler, but transformational change has to be systemic. It has to address organisational structures, job roles, processes and cultures.”

Thanks Glyn, we’ll eventually get that message through…

 

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Why government IT fails…

June 1, 2008

To demonstrate the networked world we live in I thought I should point out that following the postings I’d made on the E-Democracy network, which are collected in this one, Pete Thompson posted on the E-Democracy one with a link to a CapGemini magazine with an article by Philip Virgo about why Government IT fails. Paul Canning has nicely summarised it, saving me a job and iy can all be found here! There is much is the article that reflects my research into electronic government and the need for metrics…

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