Activity based recharging?

December 11, 2008

 In the bid to place a rationale against electronic or transformational government there has been a further exercise to build an accounting process that supports it. Some have used Activity Based Costing (ABC) or a similar range of fairly simple tools to put figures on processes.

 Quite a long while ago in terms of this new world I had concerns about electronic processes transfering costs to third parties or the citizen in this way and indirectly adding costs to their equations whilst subtracting them from government’s.
 
OK, not having to travel to an office to see someone and being able to ‘phone or do it via a web site is cheaper but a number of government bodies are not offering the web option and pushing services via the ‘phone – this may be easier for the council but frequently fails on the 24 x 7 x 365 preference.
 
Do these accounting methods handle both sides of the equation, the citizen and the government?
 
When electronic forms are made available or council documents posted electronically, the citizen or their representative might now need to print them out (instead of the government body) – is that cost and time accounted for?
 
This may be penny-pinching and nit-picking but I saw recent publicity claiming vast savings for online services when in one case they were only available by ‘phone on a nine to five basis and the other was Internet payment which actually costs the local authority a lot of money to establish and run.
 
Are we being economic with our economics?

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NI14 – paying the piper

December 10, 2008

Two new works on NI14 have appeared very recently, one from CRM developer Lagan, the other from LGITU magazine. Both annoyed me! …

The Lagan report notably for making a number claims for e-payments as a means of avoiding avoidable contact, along with an interesting typo on page 12 that York got 19,050 Internet payments in 1997…other than that, in its bid to sell expensive CRM systems it failed to emphasise strongly enough that NI14 is a process issue and that as the new Socitm report points out, web sites appear to be currently creating dissatisfaction not removing it! I also note that the www.lagan.co.uk link shown on the back of the report doesn’t go to them, at least not on my Internet connection!

The LGITU reports the results of a survey sponsored by the IDeA, who are funded by government, so are hardly going to put down NI14.

Page 3 sees the statement that “The primary means of collating this information is expected to be an existing CRM system”. Who has said? It is also confused in the following sentences as to who and where it is collected – I thought all channels, front or back office?

On page 4 they state that the number of IT respondents indicates that NI14 is “not being seen as a key issue within technology.” Whiich I support as a view and as an action – its not an IT issue – IT is a potential facilitator to measuring or resolving issues but ‘avoidable contact’ is the most corporate issue of all and needs the attention at all points of contact be they front or back office or elected members.

NI14 is of little benefit itself and the additional work in capturing it will be a hindrance to the day job of public service. The perceived downside noted on page 6 that it may not be accurately reported is more of a certainty has missed the point – its not the cumulative figure that matters its the process of capturing demand failure at the points of contact that matters and then sorting those processes out.

Page 7 catches up with the rationale behind NI14 but the understanding of what its like to try and deliver services across multiple channels to a high standard on retracting budgets with performance indicators to record isn’t there.

The commentaries from CLG & IDeA are as expected, the ones from Mouchel and Microsoft also try and sell their wares. My colleague Steve Palmer hits a lot of points about NI14 on the head but of course is promoting the joint Socitm/GovMetric service which while not perfect in NI14 terms probably does a better job in picking up the citizen dissatisfaction data and helping improve the end-to-end – but there are others! (I published my list of alternatives here)

As to the data in the report - as with NI14, its the qualitative feedback that really matters and this was quite interesting, supporting all my fears and not so much the spin LGITU have wrapped around it in their press release.

Remember, its the one who pays the piper calls the tune!

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Citizen or consumer – command and control?

December 8, 2008

In re-reading David Marquand’s excellent small volume (168 pages) as I continue to write up my dissertation, I ‘ve extracted a few choice quotes. I’d love to know if anyone can present reasoned responses why they are not nuggets of truth?

Marquand, D. (2004). Decline of the Public, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Page 135

“The goods of the public domain must not be treated as commodities or surrogate commodities. Performance indicators designed to mimic the indicators of the market domain are therefore out of place in the public domain, and do more harm than good.”

“By the same token, the language of buyer and seller, producer and consumer, does not belong in the public domain; nor do the relationships which this language implies. People are consumers only in the market domain; in the public domain, they are citizens. Attempts to force these relationships into a market mould undermine the service ethic which is the true generator of quality in the public domain. In doing so, they impoverish the entire society.”

Page 140

“[Yet] if the history of the last century has one sure lesson, it is that change imposed from the top, measured and policed by procedures contrived at the top, rarely produces the desired results. Command and control destroyed the Soviet Union, inflicted untold damage on Mao’s China, and went badly adrift during the post-war Labour Government’s planning phase.”

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NI14 back in the news?

December 3, 2008

A recent survey from supplier Rostrvm included the addendum that:

“Other problems identified by the contact centres include the ambiguity of what is required (19%), the necessity of training staff to comply (11%) and preparing the back office and service support systems to handle the extra data (10%). A further 8% would struggle due to a lack of resources and time constraints. Just 4% of the local authorities surveyed did not perceive any problems preventing them from meeting the target. “

I was actually surprised at the large numbers doing anything, although at the recent Tower NI14 event I was the only one who admitted their authority wasn’t being particularly active, I suspect I was the only one stupid enough to do so in front of the Audit Commission and Government Office!

The problem demonstrated by the survey is that in its true conception the indicator is not just for call centres and should cover all citizen contact be that face-to-face, email or web, so it needs to be dealt with as a CORPORATE issue! I wonder how many can truly say that?

 The fact that ‘avoidable contact’ or whatever is not just for call centres is proven by The ‘Half-yearly review and results summary’ of the Socitm/Govmetric Customer Access Improvement Service where on page 8 was the revelation that  not all channels are equal that whilst telephony was favoured for many there was an clear lead on the web for adult services and that in satisfaction terms the web was less satisfactory across all the services listed! This is a clear vote for Citizen Engagement Exchange to dig into the reasons why, especially when most of those using the telephone for all services were satisfied. I’m afraid the publication is for users and Socitm Insight subscribers so I can’t link to it here, but it just proves what those of us looking at the breadth of channels will have realised! It also showed just how great the web channel usage was compared with the others…despite lack of satisfaction.

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Citizen Engagement Exchange

December 1, 2008

Having continually exercised my model against the literature and now against the supplers ideas, along with the growing challenge of government expectations for measurement, I am now reassessing it and fortunately haven’t found it wanting.

 Where the model does need development is in ensuring that the expectations gap is met at the level of politicians, management and citizens. I’m currently concluding that the power of the model is proven by the fact that expectations are not the same across channels and that they also change with channel usage, also that using citizen co-development to transform channels is the ideal. I’m calling this ‘citizen engagement management’ and the review process whether that be that a dashboard, scorecard or whatever, the ‘citizen engagement exchange’.

Feeding into this ‘exchange’ we have the channels, the management and politician feedback to the citizen feedback, which may be management or political priorities, along with citizen and officer feedback, this provides some measure of importance to the feedback, especially if it is low or high from the citizen perspective i.e. lots of complaints or few. The output from the ‘exchange’ is then directed into refocusing management, reviewing processes or systems, or even examining how channels are used.

I need to re-emphase that engagement is qualitative and not about pure numbers, it is about watching out for the variation that throws processes, systems or management out of sync and putting them back on track. The ‘Gemba‘ has to be the whole, the end-to-end systems, and this is refined by the ‘exchange’, which is core of the customer engagement process.

company-table-v3 of the supplier list is now available with a further addition. These systems or applications are just a way of collecting data when engaging with the public, they only become of value when the information supplied is used to change existing practice.

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