The ‘invisible hand’ writes on…

September 24, 2008

Owen, another member of the W3C eGov IG  responded to a mail of mine there that:

“ Having discovered CCSR as a result of your message, I converted its “aims” (goals) and objectives to StratML format for inclusion in our collection at http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm#Nonprofits or, more specifically, http://xml.gov/stratml/CCSR.xml

Googling for CCSR’s site also prompted me to discover CPSR. Their goals, objectives, and values are now documented in StratML format as well:
http://xml.gov/stratml/CPSR.xml

They are the 361st and 362nd plans indexed in Mark Logic’s StratML search service prototype – http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm#SearchServices — in
which they, respectively, rank:

    1st & 8th of 97 on the term “social”
    1st & 5th of 121 on “responsibility”
    200th & 4th of 205 on “technology”
    NA & 1st of 46 on “computers”

The prospective purposes of StratML are outlined at http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm#DefinitionPurposes Under the auspices of AIIM, we aim to establish it as an international voluntary consensus standard for potential use by all organizations worldwide, as well as individuals who choose to take *responsibility* for leading mission/goal
directed lives.  AIIM’s StratML Committee page is available at http://www.aiim.org/standards/article.aspx?ID=34121
In light of their missions, it would be good if CCSR and CPSR could play roles in helping to specify and foster widespread usage of the StratML standard.

BTW, the eGov IG’s plan is also available in StratML format, at http://xml.gov/stratml/WEIG.xml, and the use case I drafted for the IG’s consideration is at http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/IG/wiki/Use_Case_1_-_Strategic_Plans Also included is the plan of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA: http://xml.gov/stratml/NAPFAstratplan.xml  
It would be good if organizations like CCSR, CPSR, and the eGov IG could partner with organizations like NAPFA to ensure that government agencies are making readily available (in XML format) the information citizens need to understand and be held accountable for not only their personal responsibilities but also those their governments are imposing upon them.”

Whilst Owen in the USA promotes the NAPFA perhaps the Power of Information lobby might like to consider this?

Tagging one’s potential resources as one identifies them seems a constructive exercise – any takers?

Owen has also pointed out to me the Web Content Managers Council and I thought another view of metrics is always welcome – http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/improving/evaluating.shtml - its big, its commercial and its not what I’m looking for! But thanks all the same Owen!

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Measuring what matters!

September 23, 2008

Having wondered in the last blog if I was a lone voice crying in a wilderness, it now appears even less so! Not hot news but current and relevant is the fact that the Government of Victoria, Australia has taken out a two year licence on the Canadian Common Measurements Tool (CMT)! The CMT is a set of survey questions and scales that allow individual agencies to survey their own customers’ satisfaction and identify service delivery improvements for service users. This follows on the Government of South Australia  doing the same thing but Victoria is frequently seen as a leader in matters e-government. 

My personal view is that whilst the CMT might be a great instrument for large governments its a little too big for those without the resoiuces to act upon the feedback.

A further reinforcement was reading relatively recent papers such as  Understanding Customer Experience by Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager (Harvard Business Review, February 2007), which demonstrates a move from thinking about customer relationship management to customer experience management. Schwager is a founder of Satmetrix Systems that actually produces software to collect customer feedback.

I believe government organizations, despite being in a different market, need to collect the satisfaction data but instead of comparing with competitors, allow for the gap with  public expectation and monitor changes and feedback across channles. If expectation levels are managed honestly and the gap identified, management can then be attempted for any major variance. This needs to be done across all public facing channels to ensure adequate resourcing.

Primarily there is a need to be realistic with expectations.

 

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So, what’s the vision?

September 20, 2008

Socitm were presenting last week on Web 2.0, I’m arguing for a Citizen-oriented Service Architecture to be planned across the board (including a metric model), the Invisible Hand gang argue for access to data and central government and its contractors continue to lose public trust by losing their data!

Having completed the splendid book by Jeffrey Roy about E-Government in Canada, a great deal of which covered the above issues, particularly public trust, I’m now onto a book that Mantex promoted.(I’ve subscribed to Roy’s newsletter since it started and its always worth a read, even if only for the ‘pub quiz’ questions that flow through it! 

The book by Merholz et al, Subject to Change, encourages us to use customer experience to shape the product development process. In my simple way I thought this might project an opinion around service delivery to the citizen, and it does.

My developing model has the citizen in their community of needs at the front. They approach the resolution of those needs or services approach them, potentially, via the full range of service channels depending upon the service or the citizen’s needs. This will include appropriate security, it may also include Web 2.0.

Overlapping the service channels but feeding back to the citizen and the service is the performance layer that will capture information from those served and those serving about satisfaction and numbers.

Feeding into the range of service channels are the serices themselves, presented in a citizen-oriented service architecture that may allow ‘invisible hands’ access or third sector users, subject to secuity and legalities but taking and delivering transactions and information as required by the media of the service delivery channels.

The performance layer will tune the service layer or refine citizen expectations at the front end, according to feedback.

Where does Merholz et al fit in? Right at the beginning they state that a persons experience of a service emerges from certain qualities which are:

Motivations

Expectations

Perceptions

Abilities

Flow

Culture

This all means that we need to deliver to expectations and abilities (social inclusion), engaging well with citizens to ensure that the experience is of value! If none of these are fulfilled we want to know why, so we can try and sort it out!

On Friday morning on the 26th September my supervisors Ben and Richard will be presenting the initial research into this realm at Ethicomp 2008 at the University of Mantua. My thanks to them, I hope it is found interesting and no hard questions are asked in my absence. I’m hoping to refine the measure(s) and model at the EiP Conference in November and also at the ESD-Toolkit Customer Insight Working Group in Preston in October.

So, I’m not a lone voice crying in the wilderness, I’ve found a few wildernesses to cry out in!

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Rock on Canada

September 14, 2008

My current interesting read is ‘E-government in Canada’ by Jeffrey Roy published by the University of Ottawa Press in 2006. Its a companion volume to ‘Digital State at the Leading Edge’, edited by Sanford Borins et all, published by the University of Toronto in 2007, which I found really useful. With the Canadian model of government (although federated states) being close to the British one, I find it a much better example of e-government usage for the UK than either the USA or Singapore.

The Canadians claim to examine examples in other countries, including England, before trying anything there but they must implement it so much better, since it seems to be original in many cases!

The bookpoints out two paragraphs from the Government of Ontario’s web site:

“The Government of Ontario is proactively moving towards becoming an e-Government, a government that will be able to meet the challenges of the 21st century. In the e-Government Strategy, we recognize the considerable complexity of transforming the way government operates. The current focus of attention for e-Government in Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, is what we call electronic service delivery, or ESD. ESD enables us to provide government information and services to citizens and to businesses through electronic channels.”

“To make e-Government happen requires a complete re-design of the internal operations of the government and the operating systems of the broader public sector. Our I&IT Strategy guides these efforts. However, much of this re-design work is, and will remain, invisible to the general public. More visible will be another area of e-Government: citizen engagement.”

A side window further emphasises this:

“To strengthen its citizen-centred approach to government, the province has begun to develop a strategy on citizen engagement. One component of this strategy is intended to expand the use of electronic channels, mainly the Internet, to help bring citizens closer to their government. The goal is to ensure citizens have access to a wide range of tools and information that will enable them to participate more fully in the democratic process.”

Not a mention of ‘customer’ or ‘insight’, rock on Canada!

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The Public Office

September 10, 2008

Styled rather like the Guardian and with more pictures than content (probably what the Guardian is heading for), this new resource, the Public Office was dreamed up in Whitehall and is to ” improve the design and delivery of citizen-centric public services.”

“ThePublicOffice enables participants to view public services through the eyes of service users. From this starting point of empathy, ThePublicOffice showcases case studies of exemplary and innovative services, and through facilitated close-encounter workshops gets participants to work together to create new public service design principles. These memorable experiences are designed to build collective commitment to doing things differently and to stimulate action.”

“The price per head is less than you would pay for a conventional leadership intervention or top-level course, and we offer something much more memorable and engaging.”

Using video ethnography (sic) the system of ‘training’ appears to assist managers to gain an understanding of their customers real-life situations. If I’m not being too simplistic, wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to talk to them?

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