How many visitors?

June 9, 2009

A quite recent piece (March/April 2009) in the M.I.T. Technology Review considers some of the issues around web site visitor statistics. In “But Who’s Counting” Jason Pontin considers the problems with the techniques employed by such as ComScore and Nielsen Online which include employing panels as they do for TV, along with log analysis.

Unfortunately, the pretty crude alternative to this seems to involve tagging by third parties to allow them to analyse the result. More unfortunately, despite venture capital investments there are clearly no bright ideas yet.

Having supported the work by the Socitm/GovMetric CAIS on visitors, I’m still surprised at how many visitors council web sites are purported to get in comparison with other channels, and this is obviously the case in the private sector with businesses wanting to gain accurate feedback on their web investments.

In the case of council sites I suspect its just as important as the private sector to employ qualitative feedback to improve the sites. The numbers, however counted, will increase.

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What shall we do?

June 7, 2009

It was an interesting week (w/c 1 June 2009). On Wednesday morning I met up with Vicky Sargent of Socitm who was presenting the latest consolidated feedback from the GovMetric/Socitm Customer Access Improvement Service. Vicky and I are old acquaintances and so had time before and afterwards to compare notes, and I am pleased to say CAIS supports what I have been saying on this blog that we (government or any service provider) need to collect and compare feedback across all channels and use it to improve services across them all in a coordinated manner.

On Thursday morning I was travelling around the beautiful northern reaches of the very rural district that I work in, checking on polling stations. The fact that at one I managed to get a mobile signal by standing in the middle of the village green next to the tall steel maypole might indicate the limited coverage. If an emergency had occurred it would have meant looking for one of the BT K6 phoneboxes that are still around these ‘chocolate box’ villages! So, what about datacomms in these areas? What about modernising elections in these rural village and church hall ballot stations, many of which don’t have disabled access let alone Internet?

Friday saw me at the Yorkshire International Business Convention discussing broadband services in between listening to excellent presentations from John Cleese, Dave Stewart, Tim Sanders, Matt Pritchett, Tim Smit and Tracy Edwards about creativity, innovation and inspiration. One message was to be positive and stay that way.

The deep thoughts left me thinking about what should change, what could change, and how we change it.

My current conclusion is to use the above described multi-channel feedback and remodel services around it. When technology permits other things will be facilitated.

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More on Parity

June 4, 2009

I got hold of the previously mentioned report from Parity today. It sheds some additional light but it still confirms my view that despite surveying a thousand people there’s something basically wrong with the study.

The researchers need to understand what people do online, what people do offline, and why; which is something they fail to do in this study!

Shopping online cannot and never will be the same as booking a hospital appointment. In the last two years I’ve made dozens of hospital appointments and even if you don’t want it to be, its different than buying a CD.

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Researchers in the dark

June 2, 2009

On the Computing web site 1 June 2009 appeared a piece entitled “Public in the dark over e-government”, which states “Whilst 92 per cent of those surveyed shop online and 81 per cent used online banking, just 41 per cent had paid their car tax online and only 22 per cent paid council tax online.”

I was unable to find the detail of this  research, commissioned by IT services group Parity,  but find the survey conclusion rather like comparing apples, oranges and bananas!

People do online banking and shopping because, as well as being convenient, they can be substantially cheaper.

The relatively recent refinements at the DVLA means that renewing ones Road Fund Licence online annually (or every six months) is much easier than filling in a form, writing a cheque and queuing at the Post Office, however people do it very infrequently compared to shopping and banking.

The easiest way for both councils and residents to pay Council Tax is by Direct Debit. It’s cheap and convenient. Only if someone needs to pay by cheque or cash, or have issues with the bill do people use face-to-face or post. Online payment of Council Tax is perhaps an option for those who don’t use online banking?

What this survey indicates to me is that the researchers are in the dark about how public services are delivered!

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If you are interested and, preferably, in UK local government please complete the survey, it doesn’t take long at all. I’ll keep feeding back through these pages, which are also covered by localgov.co.uk and PSF.

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Expenses anyone?

June 1, 2009

I was trying to examine the UK Parliamentary kerfuffle in relation to my research area, which although pretty broad, first appeared inappropriate but then a thread appeared.

We have lost trust in the ‘professional’ politicians caught so far, it’s not the actual amounts that appear to matter, it’s the fact that they’ve been caught with their hand in the public purse. So loss of trust in representative democracy is one area of concern.

What about the so-called overseer’s of the poor MP’s, those government employees that approve these expenditures? Are they so afraid of their jobs that they let their masters get away with murder? There has been a recent energetic cry for the regular release of government data for public analysis, perhaps this is another route?

The even bigger revelation is that a disgruntled public has managed to unseat a few of them! We have moved on from representative democracy to active, participatory politics, which is or was one of the hopes for electronic government.

A recent paper I’ve been reading: Paul T. Jaeger, Deliberative democracy and the conceptual foundations of electronic government, Government Information Quarterly, 22, 2005, pp 702 -719, contains an interesting conclusion -

“In 1944, Americam jurist Learned Hand admonished, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.” Through the presentation of multiple perspectives, e-government Web sites could be used to help promote free and open discussion of political issues. If built on a conceptual foundation of participation, e-government has the potential to help foster participation and reasoned reflection about political issues in democratic societies.”

If our politicians are learning, let them also learn to consult on a broad plane, let them learn to consult widely but let them learn to consult!

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