The Final Edition?

January 27, 2010

The Government ICT Strategy having been incrementally revealed by both the Government CIO and the Opposition appears in its final form today, 27th January 2010! The full report is available on the CIO section of the Cabinet Office web site along with a video introduction by John Suffolk. The fact that the PDF is numbered ’4′ indicates it’s had a couple of updates since last year!

The report and two subsections are available on that wonderful web site writetoreply for those who want to comment on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis.

To start with a gripe, the document comes up with a new slant on exclusion (page 8) i.e. those who are excluded from traditional methods, such as the young people for whom ‘Frank’ was put in place for. How they are excluded from face-to-face and telephone is news to me, since they are able to use them, it’s just not fashionable when you are of a certain age, unlike those who are physically excluded by disability or lack of ability.

There are also plenty of mentions of ICT being used for service delivery, but this does not appear to be past the back office. At a local level we still have face-to-face and telephone customers and they aren’t converting to the web overnight. We still have to deliver a range of applications to mobile officers, elected members, home workers and those sharing premises with others, in and out of government.

There is also mention of security but the recent heightened security measures in local government, which were probably well needed, have still caused various issues with democracy and service delivery at the grass-roots.

With the recent launch of data.gov.uk I would also have expected some mention of making datasets public, and whilst there is mention of brands of XML, I didn’t spot topics like RDF in there, which is one current topic of conversation when talking open data. If data from local government is to be made public, data and metadata standards will need to be embedded in the developer community and time taken to implement them!

Overall I don’t think it’s vastly different from version 1 and I don’t imagine much different under any government. Central government makes heavy use of ICT, so it’s about time they started procuring, running and using it all with some central control, with the least cost-to-desktop possible. For local government and some government services things may be slightly different but singing from the same hymn sheet might lead to us singing the same song, even if not quite in tune.

As well as ‘data.gov.uk’, I also searched on ‘democracy’, without success, so we are obviously not getting involved in the politics of it all! Similarly for ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Social Media’.

Might we now see a ‘process strategy’ so that we sort them out before sticking greener and wizzier ICT all over the civil service?

Leave a Comment » | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, transformational change | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

Going continental

January 24, 2010

Those colleagues in the UK struggling to implement the EU Services Directive will be please to realise that there are lots more services that are pan-European. A new, 188-page, report from the Rand Corporation entitled “Towards a Digital Europe, Serving Its Citizens” by Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau and R. Weehuizen raises some of the potential e-government issues for the Union and its multiplicity of services.

They have also developed a whole new range of snappy acronyms e.g. PEGS which is Pan European E-government Services for the Citizen, but perhaps it comes out different in Dutch?

The sad thing about ELMS as the European Licensing systems is known is that it came in to the 350+ English councils after they’d some spent years developing their local e-government solutions to licence applications. No doubt, some were still quite basic with a PDF for those seldom used zoo licenses, or an e-form or two for the regular applications and even some sporadic back-office integration. Now, with a centralized solution being offered by BIS, this is now largely being replaced by a new shiny front end that covers all those areas where a licence might be required, and will need to facilitate online payment from anywhere in the EU.

Since licensing is an area that is riddled with legalities, bureaucracy and history, it will turn out to be yet another case of “lipstick on the pig”, with applications dribbling in and being dealt with in the same old way and at great expense.

Another case of “build it and they will come”…lets hope they do and in sufficient numbers to repay the effort!

Leave a Comment » | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

Zettabytes

January 19, 2010

A new report by Roger E Bohn and James E Short of the University of California at San Diego entitled “How much information? 2009 Report on American consumers” is fascinating in many ways.

First piece of information is that a zettabyte is 10 to the power 21 bytes! Second piece that Americans consumed 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words. This apparently corresponds to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes (seven DVD disks) for an average person on an average day! This is being consumed by TV (35%), computer games (55%), the Internet, email and the occasional book!

More importantly the rate of growth of information consumption is 5.4%, not a lot in Moore’s Law terms, with the rate of growth of processors and disks but a lot for the human brain. It’s a good job it’s got a lot of expansion capacity (apparently), although we’ll soon find out.

The question this begs of me is where is government information in all this? We don’t tend to present via the medium of TV or that of computer games. So I was interested to find on page 20 -

“In 2008 email remained the most widely used application, accounting for nearly 35 percent of all hours on the Internet. Studies show that the average user can process 30 to 60 emails an hour, involving a sequence of read, respond, assign, delay or delete actions for each message.However, because email is largely text-based, it accounted for relatively few bytes.

By comparison, Americans spent fewer hours on web browsing (30% of our time on the Internet). Studies show that people cycle quickly through Web sites and doing searches to find content, and they estimate that most users spend only 8-9 seconds looking at most Web pages. Users tend to continue this behavior until they find the page of interest, change their minds, get bored or shift to another task.”

This may be part of the answer to the point raised by Vicky regarding the Socitm CAIS report, using the Internet is vastly different from ringing up and asking someone knowledgeable to do the work for you, when you only have 9 seconds of attention span. I suspect we need to do a lot more in terms of usability studies before trying to push e-government down everyone’s throats.

Leave a Comment » | citizen, e-government, transformational change | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

Benchmarking the nations

January 17, 2010

The United Nations issue a benchmark report on e-government sporadically and a new one is in the offing, although I’ve seen some countries declaring how well they’ve done already, including Vietnam.

Prior to this years report some academic work was done to reconsider the metrics used in the EU by Alexander Schellong at Harvard, which may or may not have affected the methodology employed by the UN. Interesting though the report is, it still fails to point to the value the citizen might or might not place on e-government, e-governance or the actual government services involved. However he does state that for EU nations “Since Lisbon, benchmarking activities are a cornerstone of the EU’s “open method of coordination”", which explains something of the fixation they have with it and the report now admits that the time for a change has come, since for the study “the most common critique being that the benchmark’s only focus is in on the supply side of eGovernment.”

The report further states “unfortunately, the development of a relevant and universally accepted benchmark for eGovernment will continue to be a challenge around the globe. Many aspects of eGovernment, especially transformation or its impact are difficult to capture.” This is where I believe that (dis)satisfaction comes in, since it picks up on those outcomes from service delivery that is affected by transformation and the delivery itself.

However, as it currently stands, it looks like old-time benchmarking for the EU, with no feedback from the citizen. Although the proposal stands to involve them in setting some new benchmarks at some time in the future…

*******************************************************************

On another matter Professor Ann Macintosh of Leeds University is giving a lecture entitled “The Internet, Web 2.0 and ‘having your say’” at the University of York on 17 February 2010 at 6:15 in Room P/L001, Physics. The Great E-mancipator’s author may be lurking in the audience if he can get away from work!

*******************************************************************

Leave a Comment » | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, Metrics, transformational change | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

Improving service

January 12, 2010

The Socitm Customer Access Improvement Service has published its latest (December 2009) report, which is Issue 3. It has received a great detail of reportage for its emphasis on poorly performing council web sites. I’m not sure that quite so much can be read from the cumulative data, and a bit like National Indicator 14 “avoidable contact”  believe these analyses need to take place at a more granular level and thing some of the assumptions are very subjective!

I also have a concern that a document from Socitm is making statements like the one on page 3 “The country cannot afford the current scale of the public sector.” This is a broad brush attack on all government, so includes local authorities and health trusts. This is not a decision for an IT managers organization, it’s one for the electorate since some countries, as we know, have a much higher scale of expenditure. What really matters is the quality being delivered for that expenditure, if its too high a quality or too low, the public have to decide. If too much is being spent they have to decide what services are no longer required, or whether services they can do without are being delivered. Ultimately this is the value of applications such as that used by GovMetric or the others named on my list (see below) – they give the public an opportunity to comment on the value of services delivered.

According to the report there are now 56 councils providing GovMetric data but of these only one is acknowledged to be recording data across the three major channels in one directorate or service only, which is not ideally what we should be achieving if we are to understand channel shift or manage channels at all.

Big things continue to be made about South Tyneside’s apparent channel shift around waste management, which they achieved by developing their web site as a result of feedback through the service, I would argue that all channels need to be improved and this is an end-to-end reform of services, since channels are only the presentation layer. We have a lot more experience with the face-to-face and telephone channels and have obviously some experience at delivering them, but the web is the new kid on the block, it can’t at the moment be interactive in the sense of the Turing machine.

I believe getting feedback from citizens is the way forward but I have doubts about making too much of it from the higher level generalizations that Socitm makes and I must say that the one promoted by Socitm is not the only solution – have a look at the list – Company table V8.

UPDATE - I’ve been asked by Alex Chapman of GovMetric to update on a few possible inaccuracies between my reading of the Socitm CAIS report and the state of play with GovMetric, which I am posting below -

  • “There are currently 59 authorities signed up to GovMetric with a further 9 housing associations; so, there are just under 70 users in total
  • More importantly, almost all of these are using GovMetric in a multi-channel approach measuring customer feedback and performance across at least 3 channels (F2F, phone and web) and across typically 8 services
  • An increasing number are also linking this feedback data to E&D and customer segmentation groups as well to increase their insight about what customers needs are, their experiences and their channel preferences.

 

I agree with you whole heartedly that, “if we are to understand channel shift or manage channels at all”, we do need to go beyond one service or even one channel; this is not the case with GovMetric, neither in concept nor in practice.  From a GovMetric perspective, customer feedback is not the only thing that matters, but being able to understand service demand by service, by channel, as well.”

1 Comment | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, Metrics, NI 14, NI14, Systems thinking, transformational change | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

« Previous Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.