Scots wae hae

June 15, 2010

Less of a Robert Burns rant than a tribute to our colleagues in Scotland who have developed a united front on citizen satisfaction. OK, they still insist on calling those that public services deal with “customers”, but at least they’re focused in on their satisfaction, as I’ve reported before on satisfaction in June 2008 and later in November 2008.

On the 9th June the Improvement Service with Customer Focus Scotland and the Local Authorities Research & Intelligence Association launched the  Customer Service Measurement Tool at COSLA in Edinburgh. The event was reported on in The Scotsman newspaper the following day.

I can’t say much more since the Community of Practice at IDeA is restricted to Scottish public bodies, which is fair enough, but it apparently will help to:

  • Measure customer satisfaction in a consistent, robust and comparable way
  • Target resources where improvements are needed
  • Support intelligent benchmarking
  • Provide robust and credible evidence to scrutiny bodies
  • Save time and money on developing your own survey solution

    • This is done using:

    • Full questionnaire: 22 scaled questions & 1 open-ended question
    • Abbreviated questionnaire: 12 scaled questions & 3 open-ended questions
    • Delivery; Timeliness; Information; Professionalism; Staff Attitude; Satisfaction

    A bit over complex for my tastes but all the same -

    Well done Scotland.

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

    Opening the vaults

    June 13, 2010

    The coalition government, so far, would appear to have as much understanding as to how local government works as their predecessors. A little investigation at the coal face of information management, i.e. the ICT departments, wouldn’t have gone amiss before the latest scheme to cause havoc was proposed.

    Whilst I am a great fan of transparency and open data I am slightly nervous by the new demands from Whitehall in that regard:

    “Local government spending transparency

    •New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011.

    •New local government contracts and tender documents for expenditure over £500 to be published in full from January 2011.”

    Publishing every new expenditure and contract over £500 virtually means every pair of laptops, every server and many other relatively day-day-purchases have to appear on the web site. As well as the additional bureaucracy of following this through, it is likely to mean further ‘phone calls from the hoards of sales people who disturb my waking hours as to why they didn’t get the sale, or whether they can be added to the list of suppliers!

    In Yorkshire and the Humber there is an online tendering system that works extremely well, however standing orders normally permit my local authority to go for three prices under £50, 000 and pick the most suitable, with member authorisation.  Tendering is only required over that amount. I know a lot of other councils are far more flexible, but in my case I’ll probably now spend most of my time doing procurement to satisfy this requirement.

    As to how we’ll extract the data to publish, I’ve no idea. If all 380 councils in the country were on the same finance or procurement application, a single tweak could spit it all out. But we’re not! So a range of suppliers will screw every council for the adaptation, which in our case is of an obsolete system we are awaiting the opportunity to upgrade.

    As usual, Whitehall hasn’t thought this through and tarred everyone with the same brush because a few central departments haven’t been doing their procurement properly.

    1 Comment | e-government | Tagged: | Permalink
    Posted by greatemancipator

    UN-decided

    June 10, 2010

    An interesting item is picked up on Asia Pacific Futuregov by Robin Hicks. He reports an interview with Haiyan Qian, Director of the Division for Public Administration and Development Management at the United Nation’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), and one of those behind the UN’s survey criticised in other posts.  Qian has stated that the criteria for judging e-government performance are under review, to allow for advances in technology and governance.

    He records that Qian revealed one of the new criteria policymakers needed to consider to perform well in the 2012 UN E-Government Survey as being open data.  She also said. “However, some criteria will remain the same. The digital divide has been a key yardstick for the UN survey from day one. We still need to remind countries not to forget long-standing issues that can get overlooked in the hurry to roll out new services.”

    Another topic, which is how citizens engage with government is merited is also being updated and Qian is reported as stating “We want to see governments engaging citizens actively, not passively. Gathering citizen feedback is not enough. Citizens need to be drawn into decision-making and monitoring to help governments boost transparency and accountability, and reduce corruption.” I look forward to the new coalition bringing this one in.

    I also look to the new government tackling another ongoing issue  that of the use of ICT to help vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. Qian is particularly concerned with women saying in the report that “We want to look at how women can benefit from ICT and government e-services“, and “According to recent research, women do not always benefit from ICT. The reverse can be true. For instance, the internet has facilitated a rise in female trafficking.”

    Another group of excluded citizens being picked up is the vision impaired, although any investigations  need to be aware of the wide range of people with disabilities that e-government can fail.

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

    Researching digital government

    June 8, 2010

    Since the UK elections things seem to have gone quiet in terms of detail about e-government and e-participation, although there is plenty of “big talk” going on about consultation and making government information more freely available. However, a number of bloggers including John Suffolk, haven’t stirred from the election purdah, so I thought I’d take a different direction this time and promote a tool for researchers internationally.

    Just in case anybody out there is research e-government and hasn’t come across the contribution made by Jochen Scholl through the Digital Government Society of North America of a brilliant list of peer-reviewed references, here it is.

    The Digital Government Society makes available to members and non-members version 6.5 (May 20, 2010) of the E-Government Master Library in EndNote TM (Version X2) XML format or a Package Version in ZIP format.

    Version 6.5 of the e-Gov EndNote reference library now contains 3,690 references of predominantly English language, peer-reviewed work. The number of qualifying references in the library has increased by 171, or 4.9 % over version 6.0 (January 2010).

    My own thesis contained nearly 600 references when I finished the literature review bu then I fell over this more recently! It’s an excellent resource for serious researchers.

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

    The paradigm trap

    June 6, 2010

    In my research I’ve been critical of the influence of New Public Management (NPM) on government, and on e-government.  Another recent paper I’ve discovered that supports my view and also strongly criticizes the producer-customer paradigm that NPM enforced upon government, is by Hazman Shah Abdullah & Maniam Kailianan, Universiti Teknologi, Mara, Malaysia.

    The paper, “From Customer Satisfaction to Citizen Satisfaction: Rethinking Local Government Service Delivery in Malaysia” from Asian Social Sciences, Vol 4, No. 11, Nov 2008, is essentially asking that rather than the producer-customer paradigm, government employs a government-citizen paradigm, which is more appropriate.

    As the paper states on page 89 “The Government-Citizen Paradigm encapsulates the essence of the Producer-Customer Paradigm but offers more opportunities and scope for the improvement process. It focuses on the services as well as the policies, on the instrumental values as well as social and political values and it serves the customer but also highlights their role as citizens.”

    Matters in Malaysia are obviously little different from the western world when the authors highlight that:

    “There is increasing evidence that the new generation raised in an economically munificent environment with limited participation in civic and political affairs especially at the local level, is all too happy with and, at times, consumed with modern technology and self, and is disconnected with the government (Putnam, 2000). If this trend continues, local government will be deprived of its representative quality. Without continuous and massive citizen engagement with government, administrative state is likely to rise to the fore. Salaried professional officers will become, by default, policy makers removing policy from the realm of politics to administrative experts.”

    This is something the last government tried (unsuccessfully, in my view) to resolve and which the latest administration claims to want to deal with. An additional observation in the paper, page 90, is that “Collective and sustainable satisfaction should be given greater premium than immediate and individual satisfaction. The market-based model promotes a contrarian view and value system.”

    Whilst it’s sad to realize that the tentacles of NPM embraced the world, it’s good to see that solutions are being sought in every nook and cranny to engaging the populace in their governance.

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

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