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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Between rocks and hard places

September 9, 2008

Local government IT, as regularly occurs, finds itself between a rock and a hard place. This time, at one side it has the supporters of the ‘invisible’ hand who want liberal access to the data and at the other side, as a result of repeated co**-ups by central government we have the ‘security experts’ demanding increasing levels of security on the data held by local authorities. Of course, the ‘security experts’ don’t do owt for nowt and increasing budgets are now destined for their coffers.

This is, in part, stimulated by the need to use services of the long-awaited Government Connect, some four or five years in the wings, which councils are now being complelled to use if they want to exchange data with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) amongst others. A local authority cannot link to Government Connect without having completed and had approved a Code of Connection, which requires in many cases the purchase of additional hardware, software and services, none of which had been budgeted for at the time they were all sent the ‘command’ by the DWP a few months ago.

Hot off the press is an Experian/QAS report entitled ‘Electronic authentication: bridging the technology gap’ which has surveyed public sector managers and the general public to find representative opinions about security. Unsurprisingly it states that 32% of the public questioned had ‘no trust at all’ in central government, whilst local government it says fared ‘slightly better’ without revealing the figure! It also states that only 54% of customers of local government can apply online! Of course, Experian/QAS are selling an authentication system that avoids the citizen repeatedly presenting some form of identification when they apply online. This is potentially in competition with the government’s own tool, the Government Gateway, which is the authentication tool pushed by central government and to some extent avoided by local government, since it is, as yet, not compulsory!

I think citizens deserve their data being held securely , which in local government’s case it normally is, and on this basis they trust LOCAL government. I also think we need to remember that, according to the Data Protection Act and other legislation, much data can only be used for the purpose for which it was collected! It doesn’t even get recycled around councils due to the fact that its illegal to do so!

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Further feedback to the Invisible Hand!

September 8, 2008
Pete Thompson stated:

“Paul and Mick are right to flag up trust as a key part of this debate.

Mick comments on his blog:

> Government gets complaints for issuing incorrect bills and the public  redress but what if there is an intermediary displaying your Council Tax and getting it wrong?

Some years ago my own council had the experience of a local organisation displaying contact details for our services and getting them wrong. This wasn’t exactly an intermediary, they had no connection with us at all, but the way the information was presented made it look “official”. This was a strong incentive for us to develop and promote our own website (yes, we did need that, I said it was some years ago). Much more recently, other councils have had similar experiences with various other web services. They tend to leave us thinking: you can’t trust other organisations to present your information accurately, you have to control it yourself. Or if we’re being customer focused: customers will learn they can’t trust information on the web in general, so we have to build the reputation of our own website as a source they can trust.

The democratic engagement versions: you can’t trust discussion in other forums to be representative, non-abusive or on topic. Citizens will learn that they can’t have a sensible discussion on the web in general. So we have to create our own forums where we can ensure our standards of debate prevail.

Each of those positions contains, perhaps, just enough truth to make it supportable, plus a good dash of FUD, and an assumption that the government organisation still has the power to control what happens. In David’s analogy – if this area seems too rough for us to organise a public meeting, there may be some groups in the pub or on the street corners talking about the issue, but we can safely ignore what they’re saying.”

And Tim Anderson partly agreed:

“Pete is right in some areas – people quickly learn what sites they can trust to be accurate and fair and generally local council sites are trusted to be accurate. Fair I’m not sure about as public scepticism around inbuilt bias of public sector led debates is a bit high for comfort.

Whether we can ignore debates in other places is a separate issue. One of the findings of the e-Voice Interreg project (n ot to be confused with ICELE’s VOICE) was that you need to understand the groups you want to engage with and what the best channels for them were rather than a one size fits all process. Intermediary groups and individuals are often key in this as the private sector knows. If you want to engage groups with existing web presences you engage via those places rather than setting up a new one. You may want to direct them to the new site so there is cross fertilisation but the starting point is where they are now.

We also have a duty to weigh up the validity of responses as well as their volume. We know the middle classes are more likely to participate and there are strong pressure groups who will mobilise their supporters to take part. There are other groups who are woefully under-represented and who we need to work harder to woo. The group in the pub cannot be ignored but you have to think about how much weight their views have and how considered a response you are getting from them.

And we must never forget that at the end of the day politicians were elected to decide on what they see as the best alternative. If we left it to public consultation we would never site any bustops. “

An example I used in conversation at work was the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, people collect family history data from there and expect it to be correct, one of my colleagues would like access to the raw data, but when presented by a third party having been open to additional editing, who can confirm its value? Any family historian will tell you that despite its value the data collected by the Mormons in the form of some massive database is full of errors and anybody who compiles a family tree from it without checking original source data is asking for a very shaky family tree!

I think we need to decide what data, how it will be verified and how the ‘trusted’ can demonstrate it?

 

 

 

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The Invisible Hand?

September 6, 2008

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) e-gov network is one of a number of online communities where I’ve received a recent paper, Government Data and the Invisible Hand -

 Abstract: If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.

The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large. “

Robinson, David, Yu, Harlan, Zeller, William P. and Felten, Edward W.,Government Data and the Invisible Hand. Yale Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 11,  2008 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1138083

This has also been seen to relate to The Power of Information: An independent review by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg (http://www.commentonthis.com/powerofinformation/#marker10550) and its response from government: The Government’s Response to The Power of Information: An independent review by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg (2007) http://www.opsi.gov.uk/advice/poi/poir-government-response.pdf

This also went on across the way at the UK E-Democracy list where Paul Canning offered the difference between widgets (http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2008/07/wouldnt-it-be-better-if.html)
and Web 2.0 (http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2008/07/wouldnt-it-be-better-if.html)

Pete Thompson picked this up with: “Well, you can see them as two distinct things, but then (as Tim’s response starts to indicate) the boundary isn’t necessarily obvious. The people who make policy decisions may not understand enough of the detail to draw it correctly. More important, if you draw a boundary, you want people to cross it – to have both easy access to routine services and the opportunity to engage with decisions about those services.

So it’s tempting to keep everything in your own branded site. You may think of that as not drawing the undesirable boundary, but actually it draws the boundary coterminous with your brand identity. You’ll probably object when the masher-uppers start to erode that, you’ll struggle to generate significant levels of real engagement, and any debate about your services that goes on elsewhere doesn’t engage you.

Those brave enough to resist this temptation, it seems to me, are still struggling with the boundary problems.”

To which Paul has replied:

“It seems to me less about boundaries than simple misunderstanding of how services are sold online. the only vague sense I can understand this in is the one generated by online advertising when you don’t have 100% of the context in which your ad sits.”

But whilst we debate between back versus front office for optimisation, are we missing something? Does the citizen care who provides the information or collects the money? Can government trust the private sector to provide accurate information. Currently local authorities are examined for ‘data quality’ by their external auditors, will the same apply when sucked up onto a web site by a private front-end? Paul’s example of the London maps provided by UCL may have a level of trust provided by their academic credentials and we are quite happy to accept Google maps but how will it be if planning boundaries are displayed, will the citizen or business have any come-back?

Government gets complaints for issuing incorrect bills and the public redress but what if there is an intermediary displaying your Council Tax and getting it wrong?

Is there still a need here for trust, satisfaction and democratic duty?

I had a conversation with a fellow researcher about intelligent software agents, apparently the military are keen on these, and ultimately I see a world where making a request on the computer (by whatever means!) sends the agent to retrieve and present the data, the first step then is to prepare and present quality data. This requires the back office to have a Service Oriented Architecture to enable retrieval by whatever mechanisms and the front office to have a Customer Oriented Architecture that can collect, collate and present data for a face-to-face, telephone or computer customer.

Some way ahead, but I’ve seen software agents work, so the initial work could be preparing the front and back for this evolution, or should it? How then do we measure anything?

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Conference call!

September 5, 2008

If you don’t want to go to ETHICOMP 2008 in Italy to hear about my research I am doing a session at the EiP Conference in London on November 11, 2008.

After a key session by Wendy Schratz of Egg there will be a “whole group” discussion led by Angus Doulton and I concluding with a debate on ‘measures’. The aim will be to get as close as we can in conference to agreeing a small set of measures that are worthwhile. We will then test and develop these measures in group work through the year.  What do you think? Can we do it? It’ll all help towards phase two of my research!

Early bookings have started!

Another session I’ve been invited to attend but don’t think I’ll make it is:

Scot Web 2

When
Friday, October 31, 2008 from 10:00 AM – 04:00 PM (GMT)

Location
Edinburgh University Holyrood Campus
Paterson’s Land
Holyrood Road
Edinburgh, Edinburgh City EH8 8AQ
United Kingdom

 

 

 

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Researching local government, Web 2.0 and Service-oriented architecture

September 2, 2008

Adrian Barker of the IDeA posted the following on his blog on the 30th August 2008

“Practical, up-to-date research?

Read a fascinating article [1] today which uses a mixture of statistical techniques and semi-structured interviews to show that inspection on its own has no impact on performance, that a strategy of innovation does, and that supportive inspection can enhance an innovative strategy.

Good as this is, it was published in 2008, the article was submitted in May 2006, based on fieldwork in 2002-3.  I don’t blame the researchers: that’s the way the system works, but there must be innovative ways to combine current practitioner insights with academic rigour to produce practically useful research with rapid turnaround.  Sounds like a job for LARCI.

[1] Rhys Andrews, George Boyne, Jennifer Law and Richard Walker, ‘Organizational Strategy, External Regulation and Public Service Performance’, Public Administration, Vol. 86, No. 1, 2008 (185-203).

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119395659/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0“

I actually got to it later at:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119395659/PDFSTART

In response I posted the following on 1st September 2008:

“Adrian

Interesting post and I’ll read the paper once I’m at home – work system doesn’t like cookies and Interscience forces one!

As a current practioner/researcher (as you know) there are reasons for this that LARCI won’t influence:

My current research questionnaire (13 questions) has managed around 31 responses – hardly statistically significant but my supervisors consider that good for local government! In fact when I circulated the link to the questionnaire at a meeting the President of Socitm stated that he didn’t respond to academic research because ‘once they’d got you they never let you alone’. So researchers find getting feedback out of government like getting s**t out of a rocking horse! So not a popular topic.

Papers take some time to turn around with peer-review unless you are lucky! If a reviewer reccomends major changes it can take ages and then has to go through the process again! Luck has a lot to answer for. I submitted a paper at the start of this year April and the conference is in September – that’s pretty fast! I’m currently drafting abstracts for 12 months ahead – you also need to be psychic!

I know people get bothered by undergraduate or MBA researchers but the only way to train people is to let them loose! I am provisionally presenting work through ESD-toolkit and EIP to get it out to the practitioners along with the blog – any other suggestions? I’m not sure the CO, DCLG or AC want to know the truth otherwise they might assist but I’m always impressed by Audit Scotland and CIPFA who circulate some good stuff!”

Research was never easy but practical research in the government community is a cross only a few demented people seem to chose!

Dave Briggs circulated the following:

“Just a quick note to inform you all about an event I’m running with Peterborough City Council for local government types to find out about what’s going on in the sector with social media, web 2.0 and whatnot.

More info at http://davepress.net/2008/09/01/readwritegov/ with booking at http://readwritegov.eventbrite.com/“

To which I reponded:

“Thanks Dave, I’ll circulate to colleagues – is it in competition with the Socitm event? ;-)
http://www.socitm.gov.uk/socitm/Events/Web+2+seminar+10+September+2008.htm
By the way, I was reading up on the history of SOA (service oriented architecture), which was posited by a Gartner consultant (Yefim Natis in 1996) and there is a recent Gartner paper suggesting that Web 2.0 is distracting from SOA, which should be the real concern. Its one of those front versus back office dialogues. This is in the general business sector.

For the public sector, to confuse metters, I’m trying to develop a Citizen Oriented Architecture which is a mix of front office and performance tools that could then meet with the back-office SOA.

Any views on SOA versus Web 2.0?”

And I’ll ask here, too – any views on SOA versus Web 2.0 – is it the cart before the horse or what? Of course one does need to have done one’s system/process stuff before implementing SOA but scraping, blogging and mashups are very front-end tools!

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