Making contact with NI 14

February 24, 2009

The electronic version of the Municipal Journal we will be streaming a live debate on NI14 this Thursday (26th February 2009) at 12:00 noon. If you tune in you can ask questions to the panel via an interactive service. You may have to register (free) on the site if you haven’t already.

http://www.localgov.co.uk/index.cfm?method=webinar.item&id=2

Further to that,  Ruination Day, as it was named by Gillian Welch, approaches!  The 14th day of April will soon be here, the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the Titanic striking the iceberg and probably many other things (well, there’s a one in 365 and a bit chances).

The 14th day of April is the date I chose in 2008 to launch my questionnaire around e-government metrics, along with first publicising the blog I named the Great E-mancipator, another Abe Lincoln link. The blog has had a steaday stream of visitors since, the questionnaire received sufficient responses to make it worthwhile, so many thanks to those who have contributed to this piece of action research.

This year I’m repeating part of the survey to discover any developments in the past twelve months, along with a slight extension to pick up any vibes around recording satisfaction, dissatisfaction or engagement. Although, as the literature advises I’m keeping the number of questions within reason i.e. less than fifteen “real” questions, but ethical research requires I add five more!

The recording of “avoidable contact”, if properly done, could have benefits, in that users might reconsider their systems from the point of view of the citizen interaction, but what if the citizen is largely avoiding contact due to poor channel implementation? How will we ever find out? My view of measurement has come about by looking at the options reviewed in the literature, and in the private sector, and seeing engagement proposed. We can measure the amount of contact over the channels and see which ones are being used and, possibly importantly, when. We can encourage feedback across all the channels from both citizens and staff, to highlight issues with the employment of those channels for service delivery and how the service is delivered. We can used this combined information to improve service delivery, along with channel usage. It goes a little further than systems thinking and “Gemba“, it reaches out to the citizens, and, rather than employing sophisticated forumulae as proposed by Parasuraman and particularly those who have followed him most recently, it keeps it simple and monitors developments over time.

Are there any suggestions out there? What questions would you ask about NI14? What measures can you imagine being used to improve service delivery across the range of current and future channels?

Leave a Comment » | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, Metrics, NI 14, NI14, Systems thinking, transformational change | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
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World Wide Web Consortium

February 18, 2009

If you thought nothing much went on at W3C in relation to e-government you’d be sadly wrong. Churning away in the background is the e-government Interest Group which has produced amongst other things a list of up-to-date international reports relating to e-government available at:

http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/IG/wiki/Reports

Another very recent report is the 240 page one done by Deloittes for the EU – STUDY ON USER SATISFACTION AND IMPACT IN EU27

The report is basically the preparation for a more detailed study but is testing the instruments (i.e.surveys) to be employed in the bigger exercise. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the main outcome is that  home users lag behind business users, along with the fact that measuring ‘satisfaction’ is not straightforward, perhaps one of the reasons I’ve started looking towards collecting dissatisfaction.

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Oysters and pearls

February 16, 2009

My current bedtime reading is biography of Lawrence Sterne. Sterne, who operated as a vicar outside York was apparently famed as a preacher but regularly got his source material from printed sermons that were available such as those by my old favourite Jonathan Swift.

I accidentally fell over this article on medical matters, Creative Dissatisfaction, and it its so appropriate I could almost follow Sterne borrowing from Swift. Not that I would date compare myself with either author. Perhaps the important thing is that this shows a doctor encouraging others doctors and patients to register their concerns on the Obama administration MyPolicy website in the US, to hopefully change things. I just hope the Obama administration makes use of the feedback they get!

I’ve come across a number of papers about improving patient satisfaction with medical treatment, which, in some ways parallels the customer versus citizen ambiguity that has been posed by managerialism. In the UK, we’ve had 60 years of a National Health Service, and as with government we are all shareholders in it, and also have rights and duties, particularly at the sharp end, as patients. If we are not satisfied we need to have the opportunity and confidence to say and the management need to adjust accordingly, if feasible.

Incidentally, Zuger’s paper can be found here, outside of the NEJM.

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Get real Read!

February 14, 2009

An article in this week’s Computing – has some interesting feedback, some of it rather challengeable, from the Government IT conference the week before in London. According to Martin Read, former chief executive of Logica, apparently brought into the Treasury last summer to try to improve back-office and IT efficiencies in the public sector. (The old managerialist story that the private is better than the public sector, so they can sort us out?). Read is due to announce his review intentions alongside this year’s budget.

Read told delegates that measuring expenditure in the public sector, particularly local government, was very hard to do: “Little detail is kept on what is getting spent and what it is getting spent on,” he said. “The public sector is big and very fragmented.”

Read and his team claim to have used five different methods to evaluate public sector IT spend, and came up with results as low as £13bn and as high as £21bn, finally settling on an average figure of about £16bn in 2007/08, though he admits this is a “very inexact science”.

Read is reported to say that his team had used six different methods to evaluate the extent to which spend could be reduced, and they all came up with about the same figure – although he cannot reveal it until the budget is announced in March and is quoted as saying: “All six methods of evaluation concur on the same amount – and it’s a significant amount.”

I would contest that measuring expenditure in local government is hard to do, after years of privation, unlike central government, every penny is known about and used constructively, especially with the year-on-year Gershon savings. Unlike central government capital and revenue expendiure has to be accounted for on an annual basis, hence the difficulties encountered when the DWP expected local government to find the many thousands of additional expenditure required to comply with Government Connect!

If he can’t get a handle on central government, that’s the problem of the Treasury Green Book, government management and a bureaucracy that’s become even more complex thanks to the managerialism imposed over the last thirty years or so. I just hope it doesn’t result in further cuts on an already strangled local government IT. I’m not saying local government IT is perfect everywhere, but at least it has the checks and balances of local democracy accounting for it.

1 Comment | e-government, transformational change | Tagged: , , | Permalink
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