New blogger on the street

July 29, 2009

As a member of the Local CIO Council I know John Suffolk, Her Majesty’s Government’s Chief Information Officer and the person responsible for the existence of the Local CIO Council. However, it took Public Sector Forums to advise me of his new blog. As I should have already written, I’d met and spoken to John in July at ECEG 2009 before he’d opened the second day with a presentation about the future of e-government. In the blog John develops upon the presentation he gave, along with the goings on at the CIO Council.

It also informs me of what I’d missed at the last CIO meeting, since being ‘down south’ for the conference I needed to get back to work and couldn’t attend. It was apparently regaled by  Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt assisting thoughts on the way forward for government IT and e-government, so I look forward to the next meeting of the council, along with the up and coming entries on John’s blog.

A single criticism, as if I’d dare, but where are the mentions of multi-channel operation, citizens, metrics - those little things that have been swept under the e-government carpet for the last ten years?

I’ve added it to my blogroll, anyway!

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Posted by greatemancipator

World Class

July 26, 2009

Another document recently appearing on the Cabinet Office web site – if only you all had time to read them all – is “Power in People’s Hands: Learning from the World’s Best Public Services“. Its 70 A4 landscape pages may be picking up on the interest Liam Byrne and David Milliband have been demonstrating in Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen’s work, whose latest book “The Idea of Justice” is freshly published.

I don’t know if the Cabinet Office realise how insulting works like theirs can be, since many of their examples of good practice are actually in use in the UK, but people are too busy doing them to shout about it! At least on this occasion they have started calling the government’s customers “citizens” and taking a look at all the good practice from Canada, who probably do better at service delivery since they have insited upon calling the users of government services “citizens” for many years!

Key conclusions of the report – common standards, greater incentives for improvement and promotion of equity!

I didn’t need a study tour to tell me that, just a bit of study!

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Getting Techie

July 22, 2009

Tim  Berners-Lee has made one of his not-too frequent posts upon the topic of e-government. In fact it’s not really e-government its about putting data online. The article is on the W3C web site.

This is probably highly appropriate since the W3C eGovernment Interest Group has reached its latest phase and published a draft charter.

With everyone working on data handling and information management, what I’d like to see is that we can use linked data, as envisaged by Berners-Lee but in a coordinated manner, so that the tools we emply internally can produce the data for external use by ourselves (which we may not need when external hosts can do it) and others.

Anyway, Berners-Lee provides lots of suggestions plus some ‘do’s and don’ts’. Lets do some.

The same metter is picked up in a piece in the McKinsey Quarterly entitled E-government 2.0, which reinforces the method but accepts the cultural hurdles to be leaped or stumbled over. Very importantly for me, Baumgarten and Chul, also consider it in a multichannel context by stating the need to “provide consistent experience and share learning across channels.”

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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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Metrified

July 19, 2009

Those of you who aren’t subscribers, for want of any other description, to GovMetric might like to take advantage of a free peek at some consolidated data from it being made available through localgov.co.uk. You’ll have to register upon their site, which results in a weekly email newsletter, but the data from GovMetric can be useful in supporting channel delivery arguments.

Lots of conclusions can be generalised from the data, such as the fact that while the web may be quicker, it doesn’t always have what the citizen wanted, so they may then be back to you by ‘phone or face-to-face. There are also some differences between particular services.

I think its splendid that GovMetric have made public the outputs of a tool to help us mend our ways! If you read the introduction to the section, you’ll find my comments upon the benefits of citizen engagement.

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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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Posted by greatemancipator

Listening to the front line

July 15, 2009

If you don’t look at the Cabinet Office web site you might have missed the launch of a new report ‘Listening to the front line’, which has appeared in response to another report ‘Engagement & Aspiration’, from the Sunningdale Institute.

The essence is that the higher echelons of the Civil Service need to experience the work along with listening to those dealing with citizens. This is not a bad ideal, but what about listening to the citizens themselves, at the same time? Their view may be somewhat in contrast to the person the other side of the wire-mesh or glass panel, or the desk firmly screwed to the floor.

It’s a good start anyway…

PS – If anybody is wondering who the Sunningdale Institute are, I can only presume its a group from the National School of Government which is based a lengthy walk from the small Berkshire town of Sunningdale. It’s a lovely spot, rural and well forested.

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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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Posted by greatemancipator

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