Smarter public services

February 25, 2010

Imagine my surprise at opening the latest New Statesman, 22 February 2010, and finding an advertisement for ‘Big Blue’ i.e. IBM, entitled “Smarter public services for a smarter planet.” I can’t imagine why IBM are targeting left-of-centre politicians, perhaps a rare breed in the 21st century?

Included on the advertisement  from IBM is a link to a website where there is a PDF of a report entitled “IBM’s response to “Digital Britain – Online Public Services are a proxy for Digital Britain” dated March 2009, promoting amongst other things, the South West One partnership that has suffered a few problems to date, as reported by Computer Weekly and others. Having been involved in a complex public- private partnership myself they have my sympathy, but isn’t it too early to crow?

In general, however, the eight-page report is pretty sensible including the statement – “Apply the 80/20 rule: build for 80% of the customer circumstances and ignore the minority of exceptions that create disproportionate complexity and cost. Target services and educate customers to minimise the likelihood of exceptions occurring. Handle exceptions through appropriate existing off-line channels.”

It appears we are starting to learn and that electronic channels aren’t the answer for everything and will have to retain the others for those who will not or cannot use them, or for the inappropriate services.

The topic of e-government and partnerships was one covered by my academic acquaintance Paul Henman in his 2004 paper: Henman, P. (2004). “E-government and the Electronic Transformation of Modes of Rule: The Case of Partnerships.” Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 2(2): 19-24. where he concludes that “Partnerships require a lot of organisational, relationship and technical work to establish and maintain. They require that all partners continue to extract mutual benefits from the partnership and maintain levels of trust. As such partnerships constantly need to be made and re-made.” So remember as well, it’s not all down to ICT!

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Low usage of e-services

February 23, 2010

One only has to look briefly through my previous posts such as “Benchmarking the nations” and “yardsticking” to find some criticism of benchmarks and their validity. Purely by chance, I discover in the Korea Times of the 19th February 2010, an article entitled “E-Government Web Sites Underutilized” by their staff reporter Do Je-hae.

Whilst Korea manages to rank very highly in the UN reports and other international benchmarks this doesn’t mean much to the citizens back home if they find the applications hard to use, as this commentator frequently points out. If the UN reviewers are operating in an ivory tower detached from actually using a particular application or process, they might think its splendid, but it appears the Koreans themselves are less impressed!

Despite having one of the best Internet connected populations in the world, at around 85%, only 30% of documents such as birth or residential certificates are processed online. The is not much different from the maximum recently peaked in Canada, which may be a lesson in where e-government is going.

The online processes are described as cumbersome to use. There is also great amount of duplication across departments, along with some mismanagement resulting in citizen confusion.

The problems described are probably replicated across e-government world-wide and as such need to be considered by all those implementing service delivery applications for the citizen.

It looks like there is to be a ministerial e-government summit in Seoul in October, so it might be a good opportunity for the Koreans to get their act together before it happens, and really show the world how it should be done?

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Transparency

February 21, 2010

Larry Freed strikes again! Foresee have published his latest analysis, in this case a special piece of work entitled “The Inaugral ForeSee Results’ E-Government Transparency Index.”

The report, nearly a year in the making, studied more than 36, 000 US citizens in the fourth quarter of 2009. Freed proposes that it provides evidence that online transparency is a key driver for online satisfaction, which in turn drives trust in government and onto future participation and collaboration.

Freed had started out by stating that (p.2) “there aren’t any measures in place to assess citizens’ current perceptions of federal transparency, collaboration opportunities, and their trust in governmnet, much less any clear direction on how to improve those things.” He’s then extended the ACSI question set to handle this and as a result believes the study provides evidence that citizens perceiving a federal website to be highly transparent are also more likely to participate, return in future, recommend it, use it as a primary source and trust government in general!

Another area highlighted on page 5 is that different elements are key on the different web sites, which can only be discovered by research them individually. For some, it’s transparency, for others it’s the navigation, whilst search and other elements may have a part to play depending upon the site.

As usual, more grist to the e-government-thinking mill. Thank you Larry for your hard work.

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New horizons

February 17, 2010

In my Internet wanderings, I  fell over a recent speech by the Rt Hon Jim Knight MP entitled “Future of Government in the Digital Space“, apparently given at the DotGov Live conference in London on 20 January 2010. In some ways I thought I’d fallen through a black hole since, despite talk of Twitter and Fix My Street in the eleventh paragraph he clearly states:

“The Prime Minister recently asked me to be the Ministerial lead for Government on meeting the target to get virtually all public services online by March 2014, following the publication last month of the Smarter Government White Paper.”

Now, as part of the introduction to my dissertation I have carefully prepared a timeline for e-government and I clearly remember writing that in the year 2000 the then Prime Minister set the target date, in line with the European Commission’s Lisbon agenda, for electronic service delivery as 2005 but unlike the other countries committed us to every possible transaction!

I also remember the celebrations and congratulations in Whitehall in 2005, or maybe early 2006, when the target was stated to have been reached and the unit responsible disbanded!

Now a key lesson I thought we had learned following the first ten years of e-government is the UK was that electronic service delivery is more than sticking a web front end on every service. To borrow an expression from my acquaintance Dan Champion, when he talks about the difficulty of true web accessibility – “it’s not a binary state.” In other words, it’s not black and white. The same can be applied to electronic service delivery (ESD). It is only truly ESD or e-government when the citizen completes the transaction end-to-end without humans fudging about in the middle.

If the web transaction creates an email that arrives on someone’s desk that involves rekeying data into an existing “old world” application, it’s a fudge. It may be a reasonable fudge if that particular transaction only occurs once in a blue moon and the cost of automation makes it not worthwhile, but in that case it’s not end-to-end ESD, its grey and not a nought or one!

As things currently stand there are a lot of grey transactions, which must remain until we restructure government and processes. To talk about getting virtually all public services online by March 2014, when I’ve no idea what he means by “virtually” or “public services”, especially after the billions spent in the run-up to 2006, is a strange statement. I thought Jim Knight was around in those years.

Most importantly someone’s forgotten that e-government may involve binary but of itself it isn’t, it’s a grey amorphous blob that needs resourcing end-to-end, and that includes rationality amongst the law-makers, to make it easier!

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Passive democracy

February 14, 2010

The latest publication from the Hansard Society is by Andy Williamson, director of the Hansard Society eDemocracy Programme. The research study is entitled “Digital Citizens and Democratic Participation – An analysis of how citizens participate online and connect with MPs and Parliament.“

This 21-page report compares national data for those who use the Internet, with what he labels the ‘digital leaders’, or the early adopters of social media who also declare an interest in politics.

Unsurprisingly, the conclusion is that people want to use the new media to engage with their politicians, not for one-way traffic . However, I imagine this was always the case before the Internet, but that town hall and Whitehall were even more physically and emotionally detached from those they represented and, as with shopping and information, it’s all been brought truly home, or potentially so.

I hope our representatives pay heed to the recommendations on page 16, and that these are also paid attention to nearer home at town hall level. They could also do with being observed by all our representatives, everywhere, since there now being rather a lot of unelected representatives in organizations that manage services for us.

Whilst one can email one’s MP one frequently gets a letter back, as happens with some service organizations. This is also one of the recommendations – that digital interactions are made two-way.

I still have concerns that representative democracy is intended to be one way and that we need to change the system to get two-way communications. I am also concerned that whilst it will be the younger and more educated minority that employ their skills to chivvy politicians, those without those skills and abilities will be excluded doubly so.

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