New thinking

March 15, 2009

Since reading Gerry McGovern’s book The Caring Economy when it came out ten years ago (doesn’t time fly), I’ve been a fan. I don’t always agree with everything he has to say but about web publishing in general he’s frequently correct, although not always on the specifics relating to government.

His latest email newsletter concludes as follows:

“Websites fail when they focus on the content or the technology. We must instead focus relentlessly on our customers’ top tasks. We must measure success based on our customers’ ability to quickly and easily complete these top tasks.”

I’d extend this to all service delivery mechanisms, whether ‘phone, face-to-face or via the Internet. His newsletter describes how the Microsoft Office team improved their site by focusing on the customer and culled a great deal of useless content in the process.

Take a look and subscribe yourself, it only arrives once a week:

http://www.gerrymcgovern.com

Leave a Comment » | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

The many angles of multichannel service

March 13, 2009

A recent piece on MyCustomer.com on the multichannel customer experience by Rod Street takes its approach from the retail sector but can be interpreted through a government lens.

Where ‘click and collect’ is being used in retail, i.e. you order something online but travel to the store at your convenience to collect it, the vision in government might be the option of making an appointment online, along with partially completing the paperwork,  and visiting an office at a booked, convenient time to sign off the actual paper work and complete the transaction. If the proposed date of the visit isn’t possible, a call is made to the citizen from the contact centre or a text sent and the visit rearranged. This involves analysing customer (citizen) journeys and examining the best solutions.

Importantly, the article points out the need for metrics and aligning the vision, metrics and channel activity. If your channels are closed when journeys or metrics identify the need, its a complete waste!

How do we start? First, we need metrics of channel activity, then we develop and employ a vision to analyse journeys in the best BPR fashion (but now from the citizen angle), we then examine the mutual value obtainable by restructuring the services around the multichannel mix, never forgetting that, unlike the retail sector, government has to be inclusive.

Leave a Comment » | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, Metrics, Systems thinking, transformational change | Tagged: , | Permalink
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A paradox we can’t work with?

March 10, 2009

As if responding to some of the recent comments upon this blog, I’d ordered an offprint of the editorial to the October 2008 edition of Government Information Quarterly an American-based academic journal of high standing. The article, since it is rather more than a usual editorial and is six pages long with a healthy set of references, bears the title: “The E-Government paradox: Better customer service doesn’t necessarily cost less.”

The first page is quite clear as to what the authors, John Carlo Bertot and Paul T. Jaeger, believe, as they state:

“here is the dilemma: to develop citizen-oriented E-Government services that achieve cost savings implies that governments know what citizens want from E-Government. And if they do not know, governments are actively seeking to discover what citizens want from E-Government. These sorts of information collection by governments, however, are rare at best. To engage citizenry in E-Government requires a range of iterative and integrated design processes.”

I entirely agree, in fact the processes I would argue are as rare as rocking-horse s**t, and I go further than that in my model by expecting the the iteration to occur across all channels, not just e-government ones.

The editors conclude that: “E-government is iterative and requires commitment, a desire to measure service quality, and a willingness to implement the lessons learned.”

Here, here! I also commend their use of the term ‘citizen’, this may indicate a turnaround in US thinking, away from the ‘customer’ focus of New Public Management days.

Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P.T., (2008). “The E-Government paradox: Better customer service doesn’t necessarily cost less.” Government Information Quarterly 25(2): 149-154.

Leave a Comment » | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, Metrics, transformational change | Tagged: , , | Permalink
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Paper in the pipeline

March 7, 2009

The researcher behind the Great E-mancipator has had another conference paper accepted, this time for the European Conference on e-Government in faraway Westminster on 29th and 30th June 2009. Last year it was a paper at the University of Mantua in Italy and I didn’t raise the readies to go, this time its but a couple of hours away, assuming the trains are running! Perhaps I should have cast my net wider to such as the International Conference on e-Government in Boston, USA, this year, but with the state of the pound, everybody is probably rushing to the UK.

The latest paper bears the snappy title: “Developing Measures of E-government Progress Using Action Research”, which describes the iterative process I’m using to survey, blog, survey, blog, interview, ad nauseam, and present my findings as I go along, allowing practitioners to think about them and hopefully employ something of them. I do share the outcomes via this blog, it just means reading it all rather than a snappy twenty minute presentation in a room full of academics with questions at the end. You could, of course, use the comment box below to ask anything related to the hundred-and-something blogs I’ve done now?

Leave a Comment » | e-government, engagement, Metrics | Tagged: , | Permalink
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Web 2, yoof and snouts in the trough

March 5, 2009

A Register piece warns of the danger of chucking money at Web 2.0 and youth with mobiles and not thinking about your audience first.

I wonder what metrics the DCSF is employing in evaluating the success or otherwise of this expenditure of taxpayers money? Answers on the back of a £50 note to the Great e-mancipator, please!

Let this be a warning!

2 Comments | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

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