August 30, 2009
The UK Planning Portal has a news item, which reports upon the latest news on the new Northern Irish e-planning system – e-PIC. I followed the link to the Northern Irish Executive’s press release but that shed no light on the fact the a system that was planned to cost £5.5 million and be online in 2006 (it started in 2004) was now expected in at £12.7 million and was still not c0mplete.
Whilst I think an obvious saving is made by having the single planning system across the six counties and numerous authorities that make up Northern Ireland, I do hope that when calculating the service costs compared with face-to-face and telephony, all those millions are taken into account…
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Posted by greatemancipator
August 26, 2009
An interesting feature on the Register. IBM are offering less-well-off (the report used the term threadbare) councils off-the-peg data analysis. John Ozimek, the author, reviewing the history of similar approaches, gets my support for his challenging comment that:
“Without exception, evaluation of ratepayer/customer satisfaction was carried out on the basis of how far these schemes met internally set targets, as opposed to actual customer needs. The danger, therefore, of the IBM initiative is that it will provide the Public Sector with a formidable array of tools that will enable them to grapple with their client base more efficiently – but unless this is accomplished by a change in overall culture, they will not do so more effectively.”
Also, I suspect that in the time-honoured fashion that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, IBM will be expecting to sell a shed load of disk space to store all this data upon!
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August 23, 2009
Hot off the McKinsey press comes a piece about optimization techniques using customer satisfaction as a metric.
Authors Sebastien Katch and Tim Morse in the latest McKinsey Quarterly describe how the public sector, unlike the private one, can’t use metrics around cost-to-serve or profit and describe the approach taken by a US federal agency wanting to improve its call centres and paper-processing better i.e. two services channels.
It sounds like quite a complex mathematical model was created to shuffle staff between the two tasks, while attempting to maintain customer satisfaction at an optimum level.
In my simple view, the key learning is that citizen satisfaction is a useful and straghtforward metric for controlling channel quality and hence juggling priorities between them.
Gerry McGovern picks up this theme in his current newsletter, pointing out that:
“Before we can measure success we need to understand the customer’s task.”
and
“Measuing success based on volume encourages bad practice.”l
His attack on what he describes as the “cult of volume” is appropriate to the other channels as it is to the web one.
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement | Tagged: Gerry McGovern, Katch, McKinsey, Morse | Permalink
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August 19, 2009
The latest report from ForeSee Results has picked up some points worth noting, for example that “effective social media will drive more citizens to federal websites, and their experience once they get there must be good, or they won’t come back.” (page 2)
The study employs the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) that has now been in use for fifteen years, both on and off line.
A key finding was that “E-gov that satisfies citizens is still the most efficient and cost-effective channel.” (page 3) Please note the ‘satisfies’ that I’ve italicised, if it doesn’t satisfy it is not necessarily the most efficient or cost effective!
They also find that ‘functionality, navigation and search remain top priorities for improving many government websites’ (page 3). These are believed to have the largest impact on satisfaction.
OK, it’s the USA, but they do take a lot of trouble to analyse users of 109 web sites there, so there is probably some crossover with other nations.
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August 16, 2009
Fumiko Nagano writing on the World Bank’s blog describes a chapter from a new book the Bank have published. The chapter by Deepak Bhatia, Subhash C. Bhatnagar and Jiro Tominaga is entitled ‘How do Manual and E-Government Services Compare?’ and is a study of recent learning from India.
India may have issues with poverty that put many nations to shame but it has been employing e-government in many different ways to overcome issues with exclusion and communication across its vast and varied sub-continent, so the research is equally appropriate in the so-called ‘developed’ world.
The freely available chapter is only 14 pages, so you can read it for your self but Nagano picks out the key points in the blog. In brief, these include:
“citizens should be made owners of e-government programs”
“analyze user needs and demands”
The blogger notes at the end a comment by the editor of the publication, Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang, that it takes time for people and business to figure out how best to use ICT and this also requires training and adjustment. My added comment here would be that unless the application is designed in consultation with the potential users, the way they decide to use it might be by deciding not to use it…
One major improvement from e-government was the reduction in bribes, something I trust we don’t have too much of in the west?
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang, Deepak Bhatia, Jiro Tominaga, Subhash C. Bhatnagar, World Bank | Permalink
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August 12, 2009
If anyone out there dares moan to me about too many emails let them pity President Obama! According to the blog of Ines Mergel, Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, NY. , he receives 100,000 emails a week, 6,500 paper letters/week, ~1,000 faxes per day, ~2,500-3,500 calls/day.
She argues for the need to develop tools to digest and extract from this mountain along with all the social networking communications he may be on the end of, or named in. Similar amounts of data will be received by governments and their leaders around the world, and could probably do with a tool, as well.
At least they count it, now for the analysis…
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1 Comment | Metrics, e-government, engagement | Tagged: Ines Mergel, Obama | Permalink
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August 9, 2009
What’s been happening in NI14 land?
I’d been looking at and considering the replies to this year’s survey but having only had 31 responses I wasn’t rushing to do the data analysis. However, Public Sector Forums did another encouraging post about the survey and despite it having little effect I started examining the data.
It’s a bit of a pain for those getting the RSS feed but rather than spend ages transfering a MS Word document into WordPress with the inevitable cutting and hacking at the HTML I decided to cheat and put it as a PDF!
I had a couple of surprises from the results but you’ll just have to look at the Great Emancipator Survey 2009 Interim Report…
For greater comparison, it may help looking at last years at the same time?
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, NI 14, NI14, Systems thinking, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: govmetric, Public Sector Forums, Socitm | Permalink
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August 7, 2009
At last! Someone has bothered to plot public input and ICT budget growth against productivity. On Jerry Fishenden’s blog he has done just that.
Similarly to others recently quoted e.g. Steve Jenner, this means scrapping some major waste-of-time-and-money projects and at the same time thinking about where best to inject funding.
How about into some systems thinking?
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August 5, 2009
In the House of Commons Treasury Committee report Evaluating the Efficiency Programme, Thirteenth Report of Session 2008–09 printed 21 July 2009 there are some recollections to a National Audit Office report of 2007 and its requests when implementing the Gershon programme of efficiency savings. They’re focusing on HMRC but the conclusions are applicable in any application of Peter Gershon’s ‘amazing’ ideas.
In their own words on page 26 of the latest report it is proposed that:
” 75. We welcome the Government’s assurances about maintaining service quality in light of the drive for efficiency savings. However we are concerned that reported measures of service quality are inconsistent with some of the evidence we have received.
We acknowledge that creating new measures may incur costs, but ensuring that service quality is not adversely affected by efficiency savings should be a priority. The fact that departments can select their own measures of service quality may lead to a biased selection of measures that do not give a representative picture of service quality.
Departments should work with the NAO to define adequate service quality measures preferably using data drawn from users.”
Further along on page 28, the committee asks that:
11. To ensure that only true efficiencies are captured and reported, it is important that they are measured appropriately and accurately. We expect Government departments to have implemented the NAO’s recommendations concerning measurement. We expect the Treasury to monitor the progress of departments’ improvement in measuring efficiency. “
I wonder what’s happened the next time they look? How can service quality be measured without analysing feedback from the customers?
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Leave a Comment » | Metrics, Systems thinking, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: Efficiency Programme, gershon, HMRC, NAO, National Audit Office, Peter Gershon, Treasury Committee | Permalink
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August 2, 2009
In considering the citizen versus consumer debate I was reading the latest entry in the online journal of the McKinsey consultancy, “The consumer decision journey“.
Initially, reading about how traditional marketing people had considered the touch points of influencing sales and from this developed the metaphor of a “funnel” seemed a mile away from electronic or any other government but of course this is not the case. Politicians are elected for good or evil, after wanting power for some reason of their own. How do they get elected but by convincing enough people that they can do the best job of running that part of government compared with their running mates.
How then might the “consumer decision journey” operate in a political context? In an ideal world, we would all have the government we deserved, and that government would be excellent. It would cost the minimum, do the most against the majority of citizens’ ideals and not get caught with its hands in the till. In the real world we have two or three parties battling against each other as to who tells the more truths, best balances budgets and gets the most bangs for bucks. How they make the citizens aware of this is that initial part of the journey, they have to have “good press” and lots of it, especially around election time.
How does this relate to electronic government? Well, it doesn’t unless the implementation of it had managed to save money or vastly improve services, which it hasn’t! It primarily relates to how multi-channel service delivery can be made to provide adequate and ethical service for the vast majority of those involved whether tax payers or service recipients. If we consider a job well done the politicians might survive, if not, shall we try somone else who offers a different approach and promises.
Of course, life isn’t that simple and between the citizen and the elected sit those whose job it is to actually deliver the service. The civil service, bureaucracy or local authority officers need to be convinced of the value of change by both or either partyto ensure a successful implementation.
So, how many funnels and which goes into which, and where?
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Leave a Comment » | NI 14, NI14, Systems thinking, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: consumer, consumer decision journey, McKinsey | Permalink
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