Open data foresight

August 12, 2010

I regularly report on the outcomes from the ACSI E-government Satisfaction Index , but the latest one for Q2 2010 reports a drop in satisfaction following some fairly consistent improvements over the last few quarters, although there have been some declines in particular areas.

Why might this be? Larry Freed of ForeSee and the analysts attribute this to some confusion in navigation and search brought about by the US Open Government Initiative and the need to provide data sets.

Hence the title of the piece. If the US is experiencing navigation issues with the presentation issues of open data now, with the UK only just getting on that bandwagon, we need to think in advance where and how to present that data to the best advantage, without burying it in the web site.

We also need to think about our home and landing pages a lot more anyway. With increasing volumes of information, pressures from services to be where they want to be on the web site and adherence to navigation standards all fight for precedence.  In practice, however, it should be the citizen who decides where the data might be and some understanding of how they will approach it is required.

So, don’t bury your light under a bushel, bury the data that nobody wants.

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Posted by greatemancipator

Gov 2.0 strikes again

August 10, 2010

A new publication by KPMG encourages the use of Web 2.0 technologies as the solution for a range of issues. The report entitled “Dynamic Technologies for Smarter Government” is 32 pages of glossiness.

I’m not sure if the proposals are much to do with Web 2.0, although doing what they suggest would probably more easily create a platform for it than otherwise.

The first step is to make ones processes lean. This is followed by rationalising the applications use and having an enterprise architecture. Thirdly look at the external architecture and solve the security problems. The fourth step is change the organization and look beyond that to other organizations for assistance (along with piloting projects).

Despite being wrapped in gloss and long words the above steps are pretty obvious and topics being handled pretty well at all the local government IT and CIO meetings I’ve been to in the last few years. However, as it stands in local government IT has little power for the cultural and organizational changes suggested, although putting in the infrastructure through national networks and clouds should facilitate this.

Well done KPMG, nothing glaringly silly in this that we aren’t on with already!

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

E-egg on government face?

August 8, 2010

Patrick Wintour reported in The Guardian (2 August 2010) on the “Coalition’s first crowdsourcing attempt fails to alter Whitehall line” and Chris Williams in The Register (3 August 2010) noted that “UK.gov smiles and nods at commentards”. Both these pieces pick up on the fact that nothing is apparently changing at Whitehall despite the coalitions stated aims to crowdsource ideas for savings.

The Guardian writer claims the receipt of 9,500 suggestions online and quotes the director of Involve as saying that “badly designed consultations like this are worse than no consultations at all”. Something I’ve long suggested along with the practice that if one consults, one must then make some changes in deference to the feedback, and do it pretty quickly and in direct response to the concerns. If one is unable to alter matters, it’s then necessary to say why.

In my experience there are various types of “consultation”. There are ones like this where it just asks for ideas and then apparently the questioning body picks the ones that most align with existing policy and praises them and the proposers. There are the other type where the questions are so tightly directed that the respondent can only directly support the policy being proposed to a greater or lesser extent. These are crowdsourcing in a representative democracy.

To ask open questions, gain open answers and change society one needs a truly deliberative democracy but will turkeys vote for Thanksgiving or Christmas, I don’t think so…

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

A lesson in efficiency

August 5, 2010

In the Municipal Journal of 22 July 2010 is a piece by Paul Bradbury of Civica entitled “budgets & efficiency – there is thinking outside of the box”. The piece draws upon public finance body CIPFA‘s survey of finance directors in April. As one can probably intuit the survey was sponsored by Civica.

Surprise, surprise that two of the bullet-pointed ‘strategic responses’ identified both by the survey and Civica were “extending outsourcing as part of a pragmatic service delivery mix, and using managed IT and related business services”, along with “re-engineering entire frontline to back-office processes at the corporate departmental level”.

No argument with the second one but advise doing it BEFORE outsourcing, otherwise you are giving away ALL the profit, however the first one should be a dead duck in the water from experiences of ten years of e-government! Strategically having ones IT managed, if one has a suitable contract in place is one thing, but you can just look back at the cases where it has been brought back in-house, or would have been if the financial penalties hadn’t been so large.

With G-Cloud looming the possibilities for managed IT are formidable, but does this require outsourcing, I don’t think so.

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Posted by greatemancipator

Citizen engagement

August 3, 2010

I’d hate to fall out with William Heath but one of his latest posts about the private sector holding citizen data I found challenging from my situation as an experienced IT worker, government employee and representative on various local government IT bodies, plus a long association with the voluntary sector.

One of the conundrums of government is that is delivers a lot of different services, some of them of critical importance to the well-being of many people. The data it holds is frequently necessary for that service delivery. Every time there is an issue where one arm of government, perhaps the police, is not privy to something held by social services, there is uproar about the lack of data sharing. Every time someone, usually in central government and frequently detached from the person-in-the-street, loses some data there is also uproar.

William’s solution appears to be to give citizens control  of that data. Can anyone in their right mind see a child abuser or someone with mental health issues maintaining their data correctly? I’m not saying the state is any better at holding the data than the private sector, but they do not have the same interests. The private sector has to make a profit. How will it do this but by charging potential users of the data for access to it?

With the approaching G-Cloud and Public Sector Network there is a big debate about who holds what data where. The ‘blue light’ services are emphatic about the need to have data at their finger-tips, they also know from many recent cases that this has to be shared relatively easily and quickly with others, as does child protection data, mental health records and much other data from other sources.

If the concensus answer is not to share data then don’t come out with screams of outrage when children die from neglect, abuse or attack. This is an extreme example of data sharing, but there are a lot more less critcal ones where data sharing is beneficial to the data subject.

Let’s try and view this in the round, rather than constructing some sort of shoddy data edifice that will crumble at the first push!

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

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