Multi-channel engagement – part 3

May 18, 2010

In the time-honoured tradition of the media industry, I’m rolling this topic out a for a further episode!  When one is writing a dissertation you are expected to keep up to speed with the academic literature on the topic, so having quoted papers from 2006 and 2007 in the previous post I’ve now uncovered a more recent one from Sweden following the similar line of inquiry.

From a special edition, vol 2009:2,  of the International Journal of Public Information Systems we have “Public e-Services from the Citizens’ Perspective – Adopting a Market Orientation” by Åsa Wallström, Anne Engström, Esmail Salehi-Sangari and Maria Ek Styvén.

The authors’ approach to better e-government is by employing a marketing one, something that has already been encouraged in the UK by the Cabinet Office. However, they do accept that this approach needs to be tailored for the public sector! Importantly they take a differing approach to segmentation, as on p.127 -

“In education, for example, a distinction can be made among those who ultimately pay for the service (taxpayers), those who are responsible for how the money is used (Ministry of Education and Research), those who decide what services should be supplied (principals and teachers), and those who are the direct users of the educational service (pupils/students) [Stokes and Lomax, 2008]. In such a case, who is the customer? Due to the difficulty in identifying the customer, public organizations must carefully consider to whom the marketing initiative should be addressed, e.g., who should be informed, educated, convinced and how? In education, for example, a distinction can be made among those who ultimately pay for the service (taxpayers), those who are responsible for how the money is used (Ministry of Education and Research), those who decide what services should be supplied (principals and teachers), and those who are the direct users of the educational service (pupils/students). In such a case, who is the customer? Due to the difficulty in identifying the customer, public organizations must carefully consider to whom the marketing initiative should be addressed, e.g., who should be informed, educated, convinced and how?”

Having said this, it is still necessary to be mindful of where we begin the process, which they pick up in their conclusion on p.131 -

“By following a market-oriented approach and placing citizens at the point of departure, public organizations can develop customized e-services. An understanding of citizens’ needs, attitudes, and behaviors is crucial in order to be able to develop, implement, and communicate public e-services that citizens will use.”

Not a million miles from some UK initiatives, such as the Chorley “Circle of Needs”, but again, they do emphasize the necessity of not borrowing wholesale from the private sector!

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Multi-channel engagement – Part 2

May 16, 2010

I reported some research from Belgium in the previous post, “Multi-channel engagement“. This proposed the reasons why we need to review the processes and involve the end users is designing systems, along with essentially why e-government to-date hasn’t been the promised success. Now it’s now time to turn to the Netherlands, and the University of Twente, and their research around why we need to consider all channels.

Fortunately, for those that want to access this batch of  academic papers, the kind authors  have made them publicly available.

In a paper from 2006 – van Deursen, A., van Dijk, J., Ebbers, W., Why E-government Usage Lags Behind: Explaining the Gap between Potential and Actual Usage of Electronic Public Services in the Netherlands – they give benchmarks and the technocentric view of e-government some hammer in their conclusion on page 279, stating that “Generally speaking, a supply orientation dominates European egovernment policy as exemplified by the benchmarks for e-government such as those offered by Accenture and the European Union. These benchmarks reveal a strong preference for the supply of the most advanced and extended electronic public services. The attention for the actual demand and usage of services by European citizens is only secondary, to put it mildly.” This conclusion is something I have frequently observed and agreed with in my own research and on this blog!

In a further paper from van Dijk, this time as Pieterson & van Dijk in 2006, Governmental Service Channel Positioning: History and Strategies for the Future, we are informed on p.53 that “Recent studies have shown that the arrival of the Internet has not led to a decrease in the usage of the telephone and the face-to-face service channel. Data from four different countries (Australia, Switzerland, Canada and the Netherlands) show that citizens keep using the telephone and face-to-face communication more often than the Internet in their service encounters with public organizations.” They then conclude on p.59 that “Recent studies have shown that even an Internet that is used by the majority of the population in particular countries has not mitigated the usage of the telephone and face-to-face service channels. On the contrary, in some cases Internet use has stimulated a (re)turn to call centers and service desks. This has raised doubts as to the effectiveness and efficiency of public electronic services.” In their case this leads to the proposition of “an integrated channel positioning approach”, a different solution from mine, but at at least a strategy considering all channels at the same time!

In a paper from the same pair in 2007, Willem Pieterson & Jan van Dijk “Channel choice determinants; an exploration of the factors that determine the choice of a service channel in citizen initiated contacts“, DG.O 2007: 173-182, the authors conclude that “However, when problems and/or tasks become more complex and ambiguous, the influence of habit declines and people are willing to put more effort in the decision making process. People often indicate to ‘always use the phone or the internet’, but when confronted with vague and/or complex problems, they are suddenly willing to consider going to the front desk or writing a letter.”

On this basis  we shouldn’t have rushed to make every service application electronic, or if we do, don’t expect the other channels to dry up, since if they have a level of complexity or a trust requirement, the public will telephone or pay a visit anyway. So study your citizens and deliver what is appropriate. To adapt Karl Marx (Critique of the Gotha Programme) – to each according to their ability, to each according to their need…

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Multi-channel engagement

May 13, 2010

Since this blog started I have been positing what I called, for want of a better name, a “citizen engagement exchange”. This is not purely an ICT application but a combination of system and culture. The model or conceptual framework has been on display on the site for some time. In addition, having found little or no argument against the model, I have spent some time augmenting this by examining the wider theories both in an ICT context, along with social and political ones.

Having been writing a dissertation that has nearly 600 references I have recently found further  interesting academic papers, that would support the model and I’d like to encourage a wider readership.

The first one of these is “User-centered E-Government in practice: A comprehensive model for measuring user satisfaction” by Pieter Verdegem and Gino Verleye of the University of Gent, Belgium, published in the Government Information Quarterly, Volume 26, pp 487-497. Unfortunately you’ll require access to the journal as it’s not been freely published as far as I can see. On page 490 there is the key discovery that “A conclusion from the research is that E-Government acceptance should be seen as a dynamic learning process whereby people will stick to their habits of using traditional (offline) public services unless they learn of a better electronic alternative that is offering real added value.” Something we perhaps intuitively but that the geeks won’t hear of?

On page 492 come the next lesson from them that “Many of the respondents also stress the importance of a centralized website (one-stop government) (Wimmer, 2002), in which information and services can be ranked according to different life-events. And, in addition to the online environment, an offline contact point (such as a helpdesk by telephone) seems to be of vital importance.”

We then get to some of the important recommendations on p.495 that “The absence of large-scale take-up of E-Government services could – to some extent – be explained by the fact that too much attention is given to technology as well as the governments’  tendencies to start all too often from existing ways of working (in terms of the services that are being provided).” Along with “Only when E-Government services get the same attention in terms of the quality assessment of their service delivery, will users evaluate online services of equal value as their traditional (offline) equivalents. And this is a prerequisite for stimulating not only the potential interest, but also the actual use of E-Government.”

This is  additional support for my model of a “citizen engagement exchange”, although the above paper has only dealt with the web channel and my model proposes that all channels need to be considered in parallel. This extension is something to be considered in the next blog “Multi-channel engagement – Part 2″.

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Semantic, semantics

May 11, 2010

Another report from Pew that has hit my inbox, courtesy of Rachel Flagg on the W3C egov Interest Group, is a study entitled “The Fate of the Semantic Web“. At 48 pdf’d pages it’s not a strenuous read and Pew have gone to great lengths to make this a challenging report about a concept the workings of which are really so little understood that the then Prime Minister dropped it into a speech without explaining what is expected to result from it, as I reported back in March in “A week in politics“.

However, if you’d like to know more about what might result in the world of the semantic web and whether some of the Internet’s most notable thinkers, all 895 of them,  consider it will happen when and how Tim Berners-Lee seems to think it will, look no further than the Pew Internet site.

One quotation from the report that sums it up for me is from Larry Masinter of Adobe who states “The ‘semantic web’ is a direction for technology development, not a ‘thing’ that can be ‘achieved,’ and whether average internet users notice not a particularly useful question.”

There was a similar problem with e-government, where we had the politicians wanting some of “it”, since “it” was obviously a good thing, and we then spent six or seven years trying to achieve “it”. The semantic web is happening and will continue to happen; what we need to do is make sure we have standards across government to help it happen in the best way for users along with trying to work sympathetically across government(s) to deliver it, in a manner that will benefit the citizens and the nations.

Everything is possible, it just helps to have some comprehension of standardization, or even standards, amongst those delivering it to produce a worthwhile outcome.

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E-election mania

May 9, 2010

Now that all the frenzy has started to dissipate (I hope), it’s time to look back and consider the role of the Internet and social media, if there ever was one in reality. PublicTechnology.net were pretty quick off the mark saying that it hadn’t happened as expected largely because the electorate weren’t ready for it.

Personally I enjoyed a few moments on YouTube where idle cynics had made light of different politicians capacity to speak the truth by dubbing words and songs onto their videos. I’m sure many more people did this and suspect that it still had an influence. Perhaps where the difference with the US is, is that we don’t have the ability to actually broadcast this type of stuff on the TV, perhaps the result might have been different if we did?

Jon Snow in the Times seems to agree with me about the media driving the politicians and not the other way around, if we are to try and compare with the USA. One newly elected MP, Elizabeth Truss, writing in the Guardian  doesn’t fully agree and can see an opening for the Internet in politics.

Perhaps this is where the difference with the US comes in. The national media were driving it as a race for the presidency, which the local media followed to some extent. However in the UK we are supposed to be electing a local representative, who may then have an influence in creating a Prime Minister.

Who knows? With the large batch of new MP’s perhaps there will be some big changes in elections and channel usage? I even heard calls for e-voting as a result of the problems at some polling stations. I just pray they come up with something more fool-proof than the postal voting system, which can be a nightmare to manage!

Now, if we all had biometric ID cards…

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