Reasons to be cheerful

November 11, 2009

The latest Computer Weekly (10 November 2009) pointed me to a review of a presentation at the G2010 conference. Not having an enormous budget and being situated in rural North Yorkshire, I’m loath to spend my limited time and equally limited budget on lengthy rail journeys to conferences “down south” and so frequently miss out. However, on this occasion William Heath has been videorecorded and I actually spent 15 minutes watching the 24 minutes and 39 seconds of it!

Incidentally, Paul Canning was also one of the speakers and I noticed Martin Greenwood of Socitm Insight twiddling his thumbs during William’s presentation.

Whilst the core of William’s presentation was about personalising web services in order to improve data quality and services, he did build a little history of the failure of egovernment and transformational government in the UK. I agree with his conclusion of hubris for the vast waste of money over the last ten years, but focusing on the Internet or social media as so many people at the conference were will not improve services for a large minority of citizens, the digitally excluded.

One of his claims was that the government promise of 100% government services being delivered electronically by 2005 was withdrawn in 2004, something I don’t recall, having had to keep my nose to the grindstone well into 2006! Anybody remember such a recall?

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Citizen Issues

November 8, 2009

Having twelve suppliers on Company table V7, dated 25 October 2009, I thought I was just about covered. The list provides a list of applications and their suppliers who provide solutions to measuring citizen satisfaction or even the UK government National Indicator 14 on ‘avoidable contact’.

I have now, by accident, found another approach in the USA entitled ‘Citizen Issues’, which is incidentally free, unless a municipality wants the ‘premium’ edition. The system is provided by CCD Health Systems, which supplies applications for handling root cause analysis and web-based incident reporting.

I’m not sure that it’s much different from some of the UK examples such as Fixmystreet and CommunityFix , but it was their focus on root cause analysis that brought me to them. I find root cause analysis a potentially useful approach to getting the best out of services when collating feedback.

So, I now have Company table V8.

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Analogues of service

November 5, 2009

The current edition of Government Computing magazine contains an interview with Kevin Carey of ATcare and chair of HumanITy and the RNIB.

The interview is a fascinating insight into what accessibility should be about by someone with a disability and experience of exclusion having become blind in early adulthood. Carey argues for server-based computing, perhaps what we’ll get with the “government cloud” (G-Cloud) of the future, but is currently delivered by the likes of MS Terminal Services and Citrix. Carey also pushes for greater use of SMS, which I can understand but as a delivery agent the progression of this is only stifled by the public’s frequest change of mobile phone numbers and unwillingness to provide them to goovernment agencies – perhaps they’re getting less shy?

My major agreement with Carey is on e-services and e-forms trying to replicate existing paper-based ones – the analogues of the title, and I agree with the need to simplify systems and change legislation to get over some of the current problems.

He’s also right about overloaded home pages and those with fast-moving Java applications – not very nice looking either!

If anybody has trouble getting a copy, since Kable don’t appear to do it electronically, email me and I’ll send a e-copy, if that’s not breaking too many laws?

2 Comments | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, Systems thinking, transformational change | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
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Foreseeing the future

November 3, 2009

Foresee have published their latest analysis of citizen satisfaction with US government web sites. I always pick up on this because of the employment of satisfaction, be it the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) or otherwise.

In case no one has ventured further on their web site when I’ve blogged about these reports before, Foresee publish a whole stream of studies about metrics and qualitative data in relation to business and government, including podcasts by their CEO, Larry Freed.

What it does point out is the increasing satisfaction in the USA of citizens with government web sites, particularly where they offer transactions. Further the reviewers state that “there is a clear relationship bewteen the length of time federal websites have measured satisfaction and their ability to make significant score improvments.”  They then identify the need for long term investment in measurement to show real returns.

If we want to know what the key improvment is, Foresee identify it as improved navigation, so let that be a lesson to you all!

The only sad part is that e-government is shown to have taken over from the other channels, not that there is an ACSI measurement of this other than once a year. This also demonstrates the need to measure all channels in parallel  to assist in improving them all, otherwise we are likely to get serious exclusivity problems.

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Disinfecting the swamp

November 1, 2009

I found a link on my regular en.europa-eu-audience mailing entitled “Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government” but it didn’t take me directly to the source, so first time around I ignored it! Receiving the mail again on Saturday morning, when there was little other news, I trawled a bit further and found it. It’s an article  in The New Republic by Lawrence Lessig, Professor at Harvard Law School and takes a more objective view of the whole business than is generally the case. His view of open data argument is that  “The naked transparency movement marries the power of network technology to the radical decline in the cost of collecting, storing, and distributing data. Its aim is to liberate that data, especially government data, so as to enable the public to process it and understand it better, or at least differently.”

He concludes with “There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it. Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant. But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well.”

I find the article reverberates around some of the reasons e-democracy, e-governance etc never seem to get anywhere in a hurry, which I could believe, if I was completely cynical, is because the powers that be, in representative government, would,  be draining their own money-pits, whilst creating a more uneven society run by propellor-heads and their friends (digital exclusion).

If one gets into full socio-philosophical mode and starts considering agency and the structure of society, it’s all too easy to envisage the good and bad that could occur when clearing the swamp, to use Lessig analogy. I remember years ago when skydiving near Ampuriabrava in Spain that the area was alive with mosquitos that when someone had used DDT to get rid of them, instead it killed off their predators, letting the mosquitos rule in peace. I guess that’s what Lessig is concerned about?

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