The Bandwagon Effect

October 16, 2008

A few years ago I did a journal review of Bandwagon Effects in High Technology Industries by: Jeffrey H Rohlfs (01 October 2001) and the book keeps springing to mind whenever I’m dealing with a new technology…

The bandwagon effect states essentially that people’s preference for a commodity increases as the number of people buying it increases. This interaction potentially disturbs the normal results of the theory of supply and demand, which assumes that consumers make buying decisions solely based on price and their own personal preference.

In consumer electronics this has seen the demise of betamax video and the videophone amongst others.However, what’s this got to do with the Great E-mancipator? A good example might be the current limited take-up of digital television, which reflects upon its limited use by the councils responding to my research. It also presents a difficulty in trying to plan customer access, what if we’d spent a fortune investing in technology around videophones, as happened, never made it? I have concerns around Web 2.0 and similar technologies.

Someone complained recently that local government was a couple of years behind the private sector in web terms, I would ask if that is a bad thing? Some technologies like colour TV in the USA took ten years to take hold, can local government follow every whim in the hope of backing the right horse on every single occasion, I don’t think so.

What we need is to be coordinated, cooperative and communicating in order to learn what is going on and be prepared to use technology for the citizen, when it suits the citizen to use it!

The issues are entirely human, as in the words of the author of another good book, The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage – Epilogue page 199:

“The hype, scepticism and bewilderment associated with the Internet – concerns about new forms of crime, adjustments in social mores, and redefinitions of business practices – mirror precisely the hopes, fears and misunderstandings inspired by the telegraph. Indeed they are only to be expected. They are the direct consequences of human nature, rather than technology.”

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A history lesson!

October 11, 2008

Part of the long exercise of doing academic research involves an initial and continuing review of the literature around the research area. In researching electronic government this potentially covers a wealth of material including politics, sociology and information technology for a start, and it doesn’t all come in historical sequence.

Just recently I fell over a short article in the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)‘s journal ‘New Economy’ from the year 2000 (volume 7, number 1, March 2000, pp 41-45), which made me wonder if the author, Damian Tambini, had visited the Oracle at Delphi when he wrote ‘The Ulysses Effect: Targets in electronic service delivery’?

He argues that target setting in the area of electronic service delivery (ESD) could be both a strength and weakness, he calls this the Ulysses effect due to the bravado of the Blair government in nailing a set of targets to the mast and having to face the whatever happens as a result. This foresight would shortly fail, making the challenge even harder, since the government then proceeded to make the targets even harder, bringing the 100% target date forward from 2008 to 2005!

The problems Tambini envisaged back in 2000 included data protection, privacy and access – I don’t believe these were ever satisfactorily resolved in the timescales and we are now bearing the brunt of a very late Government Connect in local government as a sort of solution.

One thing he does remark is that the ‘flexibility and fudging’ required in a choppy sea of technology would mean that improvments might not be as effective in improving  ESD as expected, which I don’t think it has been but mainly due to a lack of process improvement, which was not given the necessary impetus in the plans. He also realised that government advisors had done far too much comparison with the banking sector, which had resulted in naivity as to deliverables and also that costs would be added in the short term to maintain the exististing channels.

Tambini’s vision can then be compared with the editorial from the Computer Law & Security Report 22 (2006) by Dr Stephen Saxby when he quotes a speaker from the Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Manchester in 2005 as saying: “I’m bored with eGovernment. There’s so much bad eGovernment around and it has made things worse. If we don’t learn the lessons we will carry our mistakes into the transformation era.” I would ask whether we have learned and admitted the lessons from eGovernment but whilst Saxby contends that ‘public value’ is the aspect of transformation that has the opportunity to change services due to its focus on user needs, I suspect that there is a lot more to it than that, a particular area being having flexible and developing measures from the citizen view to replace that 100% target that I believe even in 2008 has only been reached by a great deal of fudging.

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Promises, pledges and satisfaction

October 6, 2008

One of my regular correspondents, even if he doesn’t respond on the blog, is Angus Doulton of EiP, who I am presenting with at their annual conference in November.

Angus had been considering my conference paper and was criticising my proposal about using ‘satisfaction’ as a measure! I admitted that I had come to agree with that – its use for things like the Place survey had reduced any value it once had, citizens probably provide the quality of their last experience with the organization as a value, not an average figure or something of use!

A very current paper by Oliver James of the University of Exeter entitled “Evaluating the Expectations Disconfirmationand Expectations Anchoring Approaches to Citizen Satisfaction with Local Public Services’ supports this approach. Moving on from the classic work by Parasuraman et al and also Van Ryzin’s practical testing of it, James’ conclusion is that managing expectations and perceived outcomes is very important. He also reflects upon the binary measures of dissatisfaction and satisfaction.

Hence, perhaps slightly in parallel with Angus, I am getting a stronger perception that the value comes in collating dissatisfaction and measuring it as a binary by channel to consider channel use, migration and transfer. We need to have anchored expectations and determine what the gap is between that and what is delivered, these should be the variations that flag up when service improvement is required.

Vanguard (John Seddon and associates) in their latest report on National Indicator 14 (avoidable contact) make the statement that “managing value is the key to removing failure and that in managing value you need measures that relate to purpose from the customers’ point of view.”

Angus himself has proffered ’service promises’ as a solution, which seems, coincidentally, to reflect a proposal in the new future of policing Green Paper about a policing pledge! These are not too far away the anchored expectations gap, the question is: what do we use for the actual metric for the range of services and channels, can promises or pledges be set for them all, or do we seek out dissatisfaction and cure it?

At the EiP conference we will be trying to clarify potential measures derived from promises and pledges and produce something of use to practitioners and of value to the citizen.

James, O. (2007). “Evaluating the Expectations Disconfirmation and Expectations Anchoring Approaches to Citizen Satisfaction with LocalPublic Services.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory: 1 – 17.

Van Ryzin, G. G., Immerwahr, S., (2007). “Importance-Performance Analysis of Citizen Satisfaction Surveys.” Public Administration 85(1): 215 – 226.

Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A., Berry, L.L., (1988). “SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality.” Journal of Retailing 64(1 Spring): 12-40.

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Social inclusion and digital exclusion

October 2, 2008

Some interesting statitics are raised in a recent paper in the awsome sounding European Journal of ePractice. many of the papers are quite accessible (for European academic papers) but this particular one is written by Professor Paul Foley who I know from De Montfort University (but that’s not the reason I’m using it, its because he’s made practical use of some available statistics!)

The paper is entitled “Realising the transformation agenda: enhancing citizen use of eGovernment“. A number of quotations are appropriate, but read the paper!

Page 7.

Willingness to use electronic channels is strongly linked to age – older people are less inclined to use digital technologies than younger people. This has important implications for service designers. Strategies requiring channel migration to significantly reduce the use of (or possibly close down) conventional channels in order to yield major efficiency gains will compromise inclusiveness. New channel uptake will have to be targeted at those with the greatest propensity to migrate and traditional channels will have to continue to be made available to older people and others unwilling to migrate. Service designers will have to be aware of the channel preferences of their users and develop channel strategies accordingly.

This approach does not have to result in a trade-off between efficiency and inclusion objectives. The two are not mutually exclusive; efficiency gains are possible by transforming back-office processes and seamlessly integrating the right mix of channels together to deliver a more effective and inclusive service.

In the Omnibus survey respondents who stated they were willing to deal with government electronically were also asked what type of activities they would be willing to undertake. Ninety per cent are willing to use electronic channels to obtain information about government or services. However, willingness reduces with the sophistication of activities – three quarters are willing to book appointments online and around 60 per cent are willing to make payments to government online.

Along with three paragraphs from page 12.

It is sometimes hypothesised that those who are the most frequent users of government services are also the least likely to use the new electronic service delivery channels. This hypothesis was tested and found to be unsubstantiated by the survey. No statistical association between willingness to use electronic channels to deal with government and general contact frequency with government was found.

This is further illustrated when the sophistication of eGovernment activities on the Internet are compared with the sophistication of general activities undertaken on the Internet. Over 90 per cent of eGovernment web site visitors who have used the Internet to send an email have not sent an email to government. Over three quarters or eGovernment users that have bought something online have not made a payment online to government.

However, a quarter of non-users did not choose one of the potential benefits presented to them as a possible catalyst to start accessing eGovernment web sites. This highlights a sizeable segment of the online population who are not yet convinced of the benefits of using government web sites.

European Journal of ePractice · www.epracticejournal.eu 12 Nº 4 · August 2008 · ISSN: 1988-625X

This would suggest that we are still a long way from pushing at an open e-door!

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