Channel choice

April 17, 2012

A recent paper in the Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) by Christopher C. Reddick & Michael Turner is appropriate to the UK debate. The paper is entitled ” Channel choice and public service delivery in Canada: Comparing e-government to traditional service delivery” and it looks at some of the excellent work done in recording citizen satisfaction and other metrics in a range of Canadian jurisdictions. I’m a little confused by the definition of e-government since they state on page 9 “Through a survey of citizens across Canada there was evidence that e-government has really taken hold as the dominant contact channel, with 55% of Canadian residents surveyed used the Web or email to contact government for a service or information, which rivals the phone at 51%”, which is confusing with the inclusion of email, which is little better than quick ‘white mail’. However, it then goes on to state that “the data indicates that citizens actually received the most satisfaction by receiving a service or information in a government office”, which is probably the same in the UK.

Interestingly, it then goes on to state “There appears to be a digital divide in access to e-government in Canada and it is centered on age and gender, but its cause may not be attributable to simply differences in access. The digital divide can be mitigated if there is greater citizen satisfaction with e-government”, which I can’t disagree with, although the divide in gender terms is nominally marginal in the UK.  A further conclusion is that “governments should realize that citizens use many contact channels, and often several in a single interaction or transaction with government, with some of them being better suited for certain tasks than others. However, governments should realize that citizens receive less satisfaction with the phone [and that] they must find better ways to integrate contact channels as one method to move e-government forward, ensuring that the information received through use of different channels is consistent and service responses are of equivalent quality. Then, where citizens have multiple choices to contact government, they can use the channel that best suits their needs”.

Once all the channels are being measured for satisfaction and re-tuned as a result, there will be, as stated, ”a positive view of all contact channels [which] leads to a positive overall view of public services, so governments will need to continue focusing on service channel improvement to improve overall views of public service – the very model I have been promoting for some years. However, as a warning to some of those pre-occupied with benchmarking services the report concludes “collecting aggregate survey data is limited because of its inability to discern nuances in the data which can better be teased out with more direct methods of observing citizen behavior”, so be warned!

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Comment on this post

April 15, 2012

A paper recently published in the International Journal of Managing Information Technology (IJMIT) February 2012, Volume 4, No 1 by Xuequn Wang of Washington State University, USA and Yanjun Yu of Southern University at New Orleans, USA proposes that there are a number of different types of participants in online communities.

The participants are analysed by contribution or otherwise and accordingly labelled – Outsider, Non-interested knower, Trouble maker, Lurker, Non-contributing Participants, Partial-contributing Participant, Contributor. Whilst this is of particular interest to me having used online communities as research tools and being inherently aware of differing behaviours, this may be highly appropriate in the realm of e-participation.

My constant criticism of e-participation is that it doesn’t take into account this varying behaviour that doesn’t replicate anything in the real world. People behave differently and unpredictably when dealing with machines. The authors of the paper takes a view on this stating on page 10 that “Before online communities even encourage individuals to actively participate, these individuals need to know the online communities. Therefore one interesting question can be “What initiatives can help online communities be known by more individuals”.” I suggest this is a lesser issue and that anything can be promoted by raising awareness in a range of other communities, what needs to be done is to design and manage the resource to encourage open and honest participation, which has to be done before the community is established, then it can be promoted.

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Top management team

April 10, 2012

In the wake of the Socitm Better Connected 2012 review and reports, a further report has been published aimed at the management of UK local authorities. Better Connected 2012: a briefing for the top management team picks up on some of the results of the annual study along with opinions of those involved. It’s only 16 page so the £50 price tag is a little steep, unless you are a subscriber. The author(s) promote what they describe as eight ‘simple, clear points which can act as guiding principles’, unfortunately number eight is ‘we want public services that are more transparent’, which isn’t at all clear to me – is that the policies, data or management that needs to be ‘transparent’? The other seven are equally ‘simple’.

The service picked on and discussed around mystery shopping is that of public libraries. Possibly one of the more difficult to manage in these turbulent times with high asset value, regular revenue costs and an unpredictable market. If the library service concerned has an old software application, they’re highly unlikely to get a new shiny, all-singing one in the current climate – instead they are likely being compressed and expected to do more with less. Ultimately it may be said that going online with the latest applications, and encouraging self-service will cut a few librarian posts, but it’s a fine line in the costings.

I heartily agree with the statement on the eighth page that ”council leaders and managers must accept that the main purpose of the website is to deliver services”, but currently policy dictates that it isn’t necessarily the council that is delivering services now, and the private and third sectors have their own opinions as to what their route is once they’ve taken on services and it isn’t necessarily transparency of ease of customer contact. Similarly, the twelfth page argues for lots of user testing, which I totally agree with but third-party application interfaces aren’t easily or affordably tweaked once they are in place.

Unfortunately for all the good intentions the authors are too far detached from the reality of delivering services in the current climate and whilst there is much good advice the attitude is likely to pi** off more council web managers than it will educate.

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Data dividend

March 11, 2012

A somewhat initial hasty read of the new Demos report ‘Data Dividend‘ brought to mind a presentation made at Ethicomp 2011 by Professor Eden Medina. Her presentation was on ‘the Geopolotics of Ethical Computing’, her most recent work being around Project Cybersyn involving Stafford Beer and the Chilean government between 1971 and 1973 in furthering the economic goals of President Allende – this whole concept of sociotechnical engineering, in my opinion, being somewhat close to the underlying heart of the Demos paper. In the Demos case the engineering being taken out of the hands of the public sector with them being ‘risk averse’.

One of the praiseworthy projects called upon in the Demos document is the London Data Store, which I believe is essentially what has been similarly done but generally badly by the rash of Local Information Systems that were generated under the previous government, all rather different and all probably generating data in rather different formats. However, the report appears to think it happened only in London.

Coming in at 110 pages with a substantial and varied list of references, the content has probably been put about in different forms and places quite a bit over the last dozen years, so a comparison to the Allende government of forty years ago may be a useful remider that history doesn’t repeat itself but we repeat history and, more often than not, the mistakes of history.

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CONsultation

February 28, 2012

In November I mentioned ‘Tell Us How’ as the latest attempt at ‘crowdsourcing’ by central government to save money in public services by asking those who help to deliver them. The project has apparently completed its first phase and it appears there are 266 ideas up there. How many people have been involved is difficult to say but it would appear that it’s a few hundred – with more than 8000 people employed in central government IT alone, the representation factor is pretty low. Whilst a few of the more rational ideas may offer some savings, overall they tend to represent confirmed prejudices.

In a similar mode I reported the recently launched ‘GeniUS York’ project in Ninging Up York. So far it would appear to have achieved nominal public attention, whilst the key ideas on there are foisted upon it from a higher authority, which was one of my concerns. Along with some other members of a Forum who felt their proposals were being sidelined or dropped, I raised the matter publicly. The following is the question as phrased by a Council Officer and the response from the person leading the project:

Forum members questioned the transparency of the decision-making process that went on to decide the 4 major challenges. How and who decided the final 4 challenges in the end?

“The four challenges were chosen based on a number of factors which aim to develop the culture change required to implement the Open Innovation Process within the city. In order to implement an organisation-wide change in the council, challenges had to span many departments and involve specialists in a number of areas and through developing an innovation team based on competencies not job titles, we aim to embed the process in council working for the future. These pilot challenges had to fit the NESTA parameters of solving ‘medium to long term issues’, to be ‘scalable to other areas’, to ‘open up the conversations with diverse groups’ both within and outwith the council, and to ‘demonstrate in practice the process we are trying to implement’ through using 4 pilot case studies to work with. They were chosen after conversations with NESTA, Visit York, council members, SCY and were refined and developed and commented on at a senior management meeting last October. This last meeting is on the platform as a video for all to see (and comment on, although I don’t think anyone has). NESTA approved our challenges in December and gave us the go ahead (and the funding) to continue the pilot using these 4 as a starting point.”

[...]

“No ideas which have been posted on the platform have been ignored, but in order to manage such a colossal change, we can’t post a stack of challenges up there willy-nilly without the capacity to implement the ideas born from them, within a reasonable time frame with a reasonable amount of resource backing. The council has committed to implement solutions from all of the challenges and in order to do this effectively we need to manage our resource well, and stagger the challenges on the platform accordingly.”

 What effectively we have now is the exercise focusing on four ’challenges’ that were decided by the University, the Council and NESTA back in December 2011 before all this went live. The initial Ning site had these as a part of a video, but when asking for challenges it was never made clear that they were already decided - ‘fait accompli’.

What the response does indicate is that public consultation, even online is a massive exercise, even when aided electronically and should not be undertaken lightly. It also, for me, indicates that if you have specific challenges spit them out in large letters and don’t pretend you really are asking open questions…

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