October 27, 2009
Hidden in the depths of the Warwick Business School’s web site is an interesting 59 page publication produced in the last month or two, entitled “It’s a culture thing“. It’s a joint production by the Institute of Customer Service and the Local Government Centre within Warwick Business School and contains ten short case studies around local authorities including Bradford, Blackpool and Torfaen.
Some key statements include one on p.48 that “customer feedback should inform service planning and delivery as well as communications strategies.” Folowed closely by the fact that “public satisfaction can also be a driver for service planning.”
The report concludes (p.54) that:
“The customer and citizen focused council is therefore likely to be one that:
- is driven by a thorough understanding of local needs and preferences
- puts users and citizens at the heart of its thinking on service development and delivery
- has a clear view of what it is able to deliver and communicates it well
- is capable of embracing new techniques and ways of working
- and finally, is open to change.”
The conclusions are thoughts gathered from the case studies and perhaps some detailed reference is needed back to practices at the authorities into practice but the actual fact that they have put greater focus upon what their citizens think may be part of the key?
Leave a Comment » | 
citizen, customer satisfaction, engagement | Tagged: Howard Davis, Institute of Customer Service, Katrina Ritters, Mike Tricker, Warwick Business School | 
Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
October 25, 2009
A new document out from the OECD “Rethinking e-Government Services: User-centred Approaches” (240 pages) demonstrates how long its taken to turn the e-government aircraft carrier around to facing the citizen! Along with the recently published Cabinet Office guidance on Channel Strategy it would appear a new world has dawned upon the apparatchiks.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a subscriber, just take out the 7-day trial subscription and you have access!
The first chapter is entitled “A Paradigm Shift Towards Citizen Centricity” and what is states is that the message from the OECD leaders was that “the focus in public service delivery should be on user needs, demands, and satisfaction – not on the tools and service delivery channels governments have been focusing on since the mid-1990′s.” If we want a date for when the aircraft carrier started turning, this pronouncement was apparently made to the OECD Network of Senior OECD E-Government Officials 6-7 March 2008. My detailed research wants to get to the why’s and wherefore’s of the initial route and then the change twelve years later, but for the moment I’m just celebrating the move!
The chapter also asks whether “a user-centric approach forces governments to rethink whether a transformational” perspective on public service development and delivery is still the right one.” Importantly for the UK we have had the shift from e-government to t-government and presumably this statement leverages both towards the door?
The fourth chapter is entitled “Monitoring and Evaluation User Take-up” , which lists the UK as having a national measurement framework, which may be a white lie, since what the document ultimately states is that “traditional metrics such as counting website hits and page impressions are not sufficient and often provide a very narrow and simplistic view of user take-up. Monitoring and analysing patterns of use, traffic volumes, user likes and dislikes, user satisfaction and attitudes towards information and data use, seasonal variation, audience breakdown, e-mails and feedback, and the use of search terms are all important elements in understanding how users consume electronic services.” Unfortunately (for me), it doesn’t pick out the most advantageous metric(s) nor suggest that channel management requires all channels to be similarly measured but the next chapter does state that “countries have moved towards rethinking not just their Internet-based service delivery, but their service delivery in general without regard to delivery channel – to meet the users with services on their terms.” unfortunately, no examples are provided of the latter.
Strangely, I missed any mention of Web 2.0 or Government 2.0. whilst Andrea and others feel it’s still a hot topic?
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: cabinet office, Channel Strategy, OECD, Rethinking e-Government Services | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
October 22, 2009
I haven’t before reported upon discussions at the Local CIO Council and since we try and operate within Chatham House rules, I won’t often, but in this instance I don’t believe I’m breaking them!
On the 20th October 2009 the packed agenda for the day included a presentation on the Socitm benchmarking scheme and its status in the current climate of the Operational Efficiency Programme etc…
Since part of the impetus for this blog is metrics, I have a vested interest in anything that considers channel shift and channel service comparison, which the benchmarks can, so I’m interested!
Unsurprisingly, one of my colleagues, Glyn Evans, commented upon Birmingham’s employment of ‘business value’, an approach that was generally found acceptable given that much of the value of I.T. initiatives is sometimes lost in the tradition of ‘bean counting’, hence I’ve labelled the soft alternative ‘beat counting’!
My own researches have included side investigations into ‘public value’ and ‘social capital’ as possible metrics, which whilst of no assistance on their own, may be able to be employed as parallel accounting contibutions, given sufficient focus upon what the citizen wants and needs.
Any thoughts out there?
1 Comment | Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement | Tagged: bean counters, beat counters, Birmingham, Glyn Evans, Local CIO Council, Operational Efficiency Programme, public value, social capital | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
October 20, 2009
I found out quite by accident, on Tuesday 20th October 2009 at the Local CIO Council at the Cabinet Office, that the long forecast PWC/Martha Lane-Fox report on Digital Inclusion had hit the same tables we were sat around on the day before, and after a bit of digging here it is on the Race Online 2012 web site.
A quick glance and no surprises, and I can’t same I’m impressed!
Leave a Comment » | citizen, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: Martha Lane-Fox, PWC, Race Online 2012 | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
October 18, 2009
At last we have an e-government Minister in the UK! It’s Angela Smith, not that one , who is for ID cards and against transparency, but this one - who’s not sold on ID cards and is sitting on the transparency fence.
Interestingly, Angela has been nearly there before. She was under under-Minister for local e-Government at the DCLG with responsibilities for the expensive and much slated Directgov publicity campaign of which she said “The whole aim of the campaign was to encourage public awareness. It appears to have been successful.” It certainly did appear to be, with local government screaming how much better use they could have made of the money! She also obviously slept through the early years of e-government stating in 2006, according to the Guardian’s Michael Cross , that a big barrier to e-government is people simply not knowing that the option is available - ”Until three weeks ago, I hadn’t realised the possibilities.”
Anyway as e-government Minister, along with other responsibilites, she’s now back in charge of Directgov.
She does appear to have been good over her expenses, so it can’t be a punishment!
She also has a tangential link with the Great E-mancipator being a graduate of Leicester Polytechnic, which under the title of De Montfort University is the academic home of the researcher.
Let’s see how long this one lasts?
Leave a Comment » | e-government, transformational change | Tagged: Angela Smith MP, Basildon, Directgov, e-government minister | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
October 14, 2009
Although I wanted this blog to be an opportunity to reveal discoveries in the academic literature to a wider practitioner world, I admit that I haven’t put forward many gems recently. This is despite clocking up almost 500 references in my dissertation’s bibliography to-date! This is probably because the industry literature produces enough stuff to comment upon!
A couple of the prominent IT paper authors over the years have been Kenneth Kramer of the University of California, Irvine and John King of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In a paper from 2006, from the International Journal of E-Government Research, that is easily available on the web, entitled “Information Technology and Administrative Reform: Will E-government be Different?”, they ask some searching questions based on the history of IT’s employment in government. Despite the title it is still highly relevant!
What are the points they raise? -
- “IT application does not cause reform and cannot encourage it where the political will to pursue the reform does not exist.”
- “IT application has brought relatively little change to organization structures, and seems to reinforce existing structures.”
- “The benefits of information technology have not been evenly distributed within government organizational functions: the primary beneficiaries have been functions favoured by the dominant political-administrative coalitions of public administrations, and not those of technical elites, middle managers, clerical staff, or ordinary citizens.”
Yhey finally conclude on page 12 that :
“claims that E-Government will fundamentally alter government structure, performance, citizen engagement and so on are likely to be dashed, given that IT in and of itself has consistently proven to have little bearing on those kinds of government reforms. IT is a general-purpose engine that can enable reform efforts, but unless the other factors required for reform are in place, the role of IT is immaterial.”
So what’s the answer? The answer is that we need to employ benefits realization at the outset and measures (with initial ones) to determine whether we are doing what the citizens want. A good one to start with is satisfaction with the end-to-end service!
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: IJEGR, John King, Kenneth Kraemer | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
October 11, 2009
The latest report from Accenture is entitled “From e-Government to e-Governance: Using new technologies to strengthen relationships with citizens”, 99 pages in total with 28 pages of so of pictures and text, the rest being case studies from across the world under headings of outcomes, balance, engagement and accountability.
Interestingly there is only one from the UK under the heading of outcomes and that is one about Public Service Agreements, which makes me think that finding something was a struggle.
The three strategies related to outcomes outcomes are listed as:
- Focusing performance management on actual improvements in people’s social and economic conditions, using outcome-focused performance management to drive enterprise-wide cultural change and break down service silos.
- Continually improving the customer experience by soliciting service user and customer feedback, and interpreting and evaluating that feedback to drive high performance.
- Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of public service provision, using new technologies to reduce the cost of back-office functions and improve service quality and enable cross-government collaboration.
In fact, none-too-different from the proposals from the other bloggers collected in Blogging about other bloggers’ blogs! Perhaps the message is getting through?
Leave a Comment » | Systems thinking, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: Accenture, e-governance | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
October 7, 2009
Having not mentioned Andrea di Maio too recently (4th October), I’d like to pick up on
a recent post of his where he compares the chances of Government 2.0 succeeding in the light of the unchanged issues that pervaded Government 1.0. Amongst these issues he lists “Cultural barriers, turf battles, risk avoidance, a procedural rather than a policy-based approach to accountability.”
In considering the employment of the maturity models and rankings so favoured internationally by consultancies, he states that “In the past those rankings hardly cared about how many people were actually using those online services, let alone what value were getting from them”!
This topic naturally lead onto a posting by Public Strategist entitled “e-Government ten years on”, that in its turn reported on a post or two by Jerry Fishenden. This is all good stuff in the fact that at least some people out there are willing to learn from history. Public Strategist admits their predictions were badly wrong, but my view is not a criticism of the predictions but of the actual failure to measure the progress, success or failure, that wasted millions, if not billions, of the money, we are now so desperately short of!
There are many good points in what Jerry Fishenden raises but a couple of the bullet points from both pieces (
8 September and
1 October) are worth repeating:
“Most day-to-day interactions with citizens happen at the local level. So look at models of online interaction that recognise this reality and that local government and third-parties may provide the entry point for the re-definition of the delivery of public services
Taking existing inefficient services and putting them online won’t deliver the benefits being sought. Public services need to be re-engineered around what ICT now makes possible
Re-designing services needs to put the citizen/business at the centre, not the producer (or the producer’s idea of what the citizen/business wants). Government needs to get away from inappropriate approaches such as department-based CRM, which project internal government silo’s and stovepipes and impose them on the citizen
The main blocker to modernising the UK and the effective use of innovation is the hierarchy and arrogance that exists within much of the public service, particularly Whitehall, which lives in a world that has long since passed and refuses to listen and learn
We should be using the scale of modern technology to get massive and continuing feedback from those the public sector is there to serve, providing a programme of continuous improvement under the tutelage of those who use the services the most”
The history lesson from
Public Strategist was not new to me, having been haunted by it since the beginning, and having had to revisit the sequence of events that led up to the crime as part of the literature review for my PhD. It did, however, confirm the route that was taken and confirmed my suspicions of the foul deed.
From the above three bloggers we seem to have a consensus, which I heartily support. Let us hear again the lessons learned in recent history and hopefully not make the same mistakes!
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, Systems thinking, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: Andrea Di Maio, Jerry Fishenden, Peter Gilroy, Public Strategist | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
October 4, 2009
The latest (Fall 2009) edition of the Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter is entitled “Engaging Citizens in Government” and contains 24 short pieces on the topic from a range of sources in including the UK with Andrew Stott, Director of Digital Engagement being one of the authors.
I’d prefer to pick out two American pieces, one being a short analysis of the latest Pew Internet survey which signifies that the well-off and well-educated are more likely to engage in political dialogue, i.e. no change, although there are some hints that social media may change this.
The second is a two-page piece on page 32 by Kathryn Brasier of Pennsylvania State University, entitled “Planning for Citizen Engagement”, which should be read by every politician.
A slightly bizarre newsletter of a document but full of interesting titbits to read at ones leisure.
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, Systems thinking, citizen, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: Andrew Stott, GSA, Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter, Kathryn Brasier | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
