Au revoir NPM

January 17, 2009

A paper published on PublicNet by Michael Duggett, described as a career civil servant with the National School of Government, who from 2001 to 2006 served in Brussels as director general of the IIAS, entitled The Thinning of a Theory, is a useful start in considering New Public Management (NPM), which is at the roots of e-government. In terms of academic accuracy the paper originally appeared in PMPA Review No 41, June 2008

In my opinion Duggett’s paper is a very mild scavenge upon NPM, which is, I suppose, only to be expected from a career civil servant who has been implicated in it for so many years. This is especially clear when he states, for example, that “perhaps e-government has sometimes been oversold.” With the reacceptance in many quarters of Keynsian economics as a result of the current fiasco brought on by the same free-marketeers that brought us NPM, I think that rather than a thinning down, a long, hard review is required, particularly by those who are covered by Duggett’s statement -”practitioners have on the whole been the victims of NPM theory.” So let the victims, who are primarily the citizens, who NPM calls customers, also review the additional costs and burdens to them. Duggett may argue that as a result of NPM the state has taken a small amount less wealth in the period, but I suspect there has been a siphoning off of a large amount of wealth via consultants and others as a barely visible sideline to the state.

I also say ‘au revoir’, since so often these things return reinvented with a new snappy title!

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Honesty is the best policy!

January 14, 2009

Just to emphasise that this blog is broad ranging, whilst focused upon e-government, I believe the recent news about politicians misquoting statistics  is preventable in some instances by steering away from quantitative performance indicators!

Importantly as this story states: “only one in five people think figures are compiled without political interference”. So with an 80% failure rate, lets not bother and gain some trust first!

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Having second thoughts!

January 10, 2009

I have commented in the past on Gartner consultant Andrea Di Maio’s interesting reports and the latest posting on his weblog is very appropriate since he suggests, when talking about portal strategies, that: “doing a triage between necessary, desirable and optional functionalities, which was advisable at the time, becomes imperative today.” I’d take that one step further and say this applies to the entire e-government approach, which I suspect he may be indirectly making, although some consultants still have a tendency to think in terms of the web, whilst disregarding the broader channel strategy.

Brendan McCarron (http://www.cipfanetworks.net/pin/performance/) has also supplied me some useful information in the past and the latest newsletter, number 94, from the CIPFA Performance Improvement Network bears a useful article entitled Performance Tube around a lecture from Professor Christopher Hood that is uploaded to YouTube! He also provides a nice summary for those averse to the technology.
Primarily, one of the matters mentioned is Goodhart’s Law which states that:

Once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart’s_law

This, I then found raised on another useful blog:

http://atomiq.org/archives/2008/01/goodharts_law_and_social_web_design.html

and one of his comments around web metrics was that Goodhart’s Law works because “Part of the problem in all three cases is that leaderboards and ranking systems encourage people to learn how to work the algorithm rather than engage in the socially productive behaviour that the algorithm is there to promote.”

Hence my dislike of targets and performance indicators and my preference towards feedback as a mechanism for improving services!

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East or west, no-one answers!

January 8, 2009

Whilst I have included  the available research from the People’s Republic of China in my academic research, it appears that weuniversally struggle with citizen involvement.

 According to the China Daily News for the 6th January 2009, “Channels for public feedback remain inadequate despite government efforts in recent years to solicit more views on the ground, a survey has shown.”

According to a survey: “96.8 percent of respondents said these available channels were ineffective.”The results: “also showed lack of response from government departments and the passing of responsibility to other parties as major problems in collecting public opinion” and: “more than half of respondents said it was “very hard” to get through the hotlines and e-mails were usually ignored.”

Guo Weiqing from Sun Yat-sen University said.

“The websites are only the tools the most important thing is the mentality of government officials and whether they are willing and prepared to communicate with the public,” he said.

“The government needs a new mechanism to face public opinion,” Liu Qinglong, a professor with the School of Public Policy and Management in Tsinghua University, told China Daily. and also stated that “most local governments currently do not have effective procedures to deal with public opinion.”

In a graphic representation of the research, 37.5% preferred to visit and only 10.9% used email, whilst hotlines were used by 25.4%. A startling 50.1% got no response either through ‘phone or email and only 3.2% said they received a timely response on their feedback!

There’s obviously a universal market for the Citizen Engagement Exchange!

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How NOT to use feedback!

January 4, 2009

According to a piece in the Guardian that has attracted quite a few comments: “Ministers are planning to force GPs to improve their performance by posting patients’ comments about them on an NHS website.” In the same piece it states: “He hopes consumer power will make GPs offer a better service for fear that patients may switch to another practice with better website reviews.” and “I would never think of going on holiday without cross-referencing at least two guide books and using Trip Adviser.”

This is commodification of public service taken too far!  It contrasts amazingly with two items in my current reading, the first a piece by Callaghan and Wistow from Public Administration Volume 84, No 3, 2006 where they state on page 585 that “Citizen involvement is based on democratic principles and the aim of involvement stretches beyond consumerist notions of individual satisfaction to ensure responsiveness and accountability in the context of public funding.” They have a lot more constructive theory to outline but I believe that sums up where Ben Bradshaw MP is off his trolley.

It is excellent to collect feedback and use it constructively once collated and representative but to use it as some sort of scoring system is managerialism at its worst. In terms of managerialism I have my old acquaintance Robin Ramsey who in the latest issue of Lobster pointed to the reprint Managing Brittania by Protherough and Pick, which possibly gets to the bottom of the whole nightmare. Also, his review of “From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project” has probably saved me wasting my money on it.

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