Electronic government costs

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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Analysis paralysis

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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Survey finishes 31st August 2009

If you are interested and, preferably,  in UK local government please complete the survey, it doesn’t take long at all.

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Optimization techniques

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.

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Foresight

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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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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Developing e-government

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?

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