I’m not sure whether social media is a service channel but it’s certainly one for feedback. A short report from Right Now clarifies this and explains, obviously in order to sell their product, why we should take notice. The little pamphlet is entitled “Customer Service Meets Social Media – Best Practices for Engagement”, and you’ll find it on their web site. Even more appropriate for me is the term “engagement”, since anyone who has looked at my model will realise I promote “Citizen Engagement Management”.

I wonder how many councils even employ “Google alerts” on a daily basis to find out whats being said about them, without delving into the different social media? If you don’t I should get on with it!

However, the Right Now publication does offer some important guidance, such as (p.3): “Another major difference between traditional contact channels and social media is that when you respond, your conversation is often visible to a large audience” and on the same page and perhaps more importantly: “social media accelerates and democratises publication, which means consumers can create content about your organization.” The development of the alternative Birmingham City web site #bccdiy was one example with all the local and national social media debate that followed.

The report also provides a list of eight simple questions entitled “Before you get started”, which can be employed in many ways, and in many media, but check that you are prepared for the venture before you waste too much time and money on it, or before it comes back to bite you on the bum!

The latest report from Larry Freed and Foresee Results (January 26, 2010) continues to use the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to benchmark a vast range of US government and agency web sites. The report continues to press the message that a good web site enhances trust, participation and service-delivery savings, which I don’t doubt.

In Larry’s words the argument is (p.20): “Providing a good experience for website visitors clearly has value, so it’s in an agency’s best interest to see where their weaknesses lie and make improvements in order to keep citizens happy. “

Which means one has to get feedback from the users.

My own argument with Foresee and similar approaches is that whilst this is a great start many of the problems lie in process, in the back office, and resolving the channel issues may not get to the heart of the matter, although it may reveal symptoms.

Larry’s conclusiom on the data is that (p.22): “Although satisfaction with federal government sites remains flat this quarter from last quarter, it remains flat at an all-time high. When looking at satisfaction over the past five years, there is clearly an upward trend. This trend can be expected to continued if federal government agencies embrace Obama’s goals to increase transparency, participation, and collaboration through e-government.”

This applies internationally but let’s not forget that the web is essentially an information and service delivery mechanism, and the excluded are always with us.

Or should that be social networking in the news?

For a start, the January 30th edition of The Economist contains a special report on social networking.  The report is available on-line for download at http://www.economist.com/members/survey_paybarrier.cfm?issue=20100130&surveyCode=NA
 
There was also a piece on the same topic in the New Statesman of 1 February 2010 by Will Straw (Where would we be without the nepotism of the political classes?)

Social media is a useful tool for media-whoring amongst  the Twittering classes but can only benefit street-level political organization when those on the receiving end of it also employ their personal skills amongst the digitally excluded (for whatever reason). As I’ve found, it can also have some use as an academic research tool, within the toolkit of traditional approaches.

I’m not aware of any of the local or national politicians I have a particular interest in using social media, and in most cases what they have to say in the conventional media is pretty trite, so where’s the likely benefit? Well, they could try putting out the sort of stories that might get me to trust them once more, such as describing how they’ve made this world a better place by being in the seat of power they occupy. Am I asking too much?

The Government ICT Strategy having been incrementally revealed by both the Government CIO and the Opposition appears in its final form today, 27th January 2010!  The full report is available on the CIO section of the Cabinet Office web site along with a video introduction by John Suffolk. The fact that the PDF is numbered ‘4′ indicates it’s had a couple of updates since last year!

 The report and two subsections are available on that wonderful web site writetoreply for those who want to comment on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis.

To start with a gripe, the document comes up with a new slant on exclusion (page i.e. those who are excluded from traditional methods, such as the young people for whom ‘Frank’ was put in place for. How they are excluded from face-to-face and telephone is news to me, since they are able to use them, it’s just not fashionable when you are of a certain age, unlike those who are physically excluded by disability or lack of ability.

There are also plenty of mentions of ICT being used for service delivery, but this does not appear to be past the back office. At a local level we still have face-to-face and telephone customers and they aren’t converting to the web overnight. We still have to deliver a range of applications to mobile officers, elected members, home workers and those sharing premises with others, in and out of government.

There is also mention of security but the recent heightened security measures in local government, which were probably well needed, have still caused various issues with democracy and service delivery at the grass-roots.

With the recent launch of data.gov.uk I would also have expected some mention of making datasets public, and whilst there is mention of brands of XML, I didn’t spot topics like RDF in there, which is one current topic of conversation when talking open data. If data from local government is to be made public, data and metadata standards will need to be embedded in the developer community and time taken to implement them!

Overall I don’t think it’s vastly different from version 1 and I don’t imagine much different under any government. Central government makes heavy use of ICT, so it’s about time they started procuring, running and using it all with some central control, with the least cost-to-desktop possible. For local government and some government services things may be slightly different but singing from the same hymn sheet might lead to us singing the same song, even if not quite in tune.

As well as ‘data.gov.uk’, I also searched on ‘democracy’, without success, so we are obviously not getting involved in the politics of it all! Similarly for ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Social Media’.

Might we now see a ‘process strategy’ so that we sort them out before sticking greener and wizzier ICT all over the civil service?

Those colleagues in the UK struggling to implement the EU Services Directive will be please to realise that there are lots more services that are pan-European. A new, 188-page, report from the Rand Corporation entitled “Towards a Digital Europe, Serving Its Citizens” by Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau and R. Weehuizen raises some of the potential e-government issues for the Union and its multiplicity of services.

They have also developed a whole new range of snappy acronyms e.g. PEGS which is Pan European E-government Services for the Citizen, but perhaps it comes out different in Dutch?

The sad thing about ELMS as the European Licensing systems is known is that it came in to the 350+ English councils after they’d some spent years developing their local e-government solutions to licence applications. No doubt, some were still quite basic with a PDF for those seldom used zoo licenses, or an e-form or two for the regular applications and even some sporadic back-office integration. Now, with a centralized solution being offered by BIS, this is now largely being replaced by a new shiny front end that covers all those areas where a licence might be required, and will need to facilitate online payment from anywhere in the EU.

Since licensing is an area that is riddled with legalities, bureaucracy and history, it will turn out to be yet another case of “lipstick on the pig”, with applications dribbling in and being dealt with in the same old way and at great expense.

Another case of “build it and they will come”…lets hope they do and in sufficient numbers to repay the effort!

A new report by Roger E Bohn and James E Short of the University of California at San Diego entitled “How much information? 2009 Report on American consumers” is fascinating in many ways.

First piece of information is that a zettabyte is 10 to the power 21 bytes!  Second piece that Americans consumed 3.6 zettabytes  and 10,845 trillion words. This apparently corresponds to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes (seven DVD disks) for an average person on an average day! This is being consumed by TV (35%), computer games (55%), the Internet, email and the occasional book!

More importantly the rate of growth of information consumption is 5.4%, not a lot in Moore’s Law terms, with the rate of growth of processors and disks but a lot for the human brain. It’s a good job it’s got a lot of expansion capacity (apparently), although we’ll soon find out.

The question this begs of me is where is government information in all this? We don’t tend to present via the medium of TV or that of computer games. So I was interested to find on page 20 -

“In 2008 email remained the most widely used application, accounting for nearly 35 percent of all hours on the Internet. Studies show that the average user can process 30 to 60 emails an hour, involving a sequence of read, respond, assign, delay or delete actions for each message.However, because email is largely text-based, it accounted for relatively few bytes.

By comparison, Americans spent fewer hours on web browsing (30% of our time on the Internet). Studies show that people cycle quickly through Web sites and doing searches to find content, and they estimate that most users spend only 8-9 seconds looking at most Web pages. Users tend to continue this behavior until they find the page of interest, change their minds, get bored or shift to another task.”

This may be part of the answer to the point raised by Vicky regarding the Socitm CAIS report, using the Internet is vastly different from ringing up and asking someone knowledgeable to do the work for you, when you only have 9 seconds of attention span. I suspect we need to do a lot more in terms of usability studies before trying to push e-government down everyone’s throats.

The United Nations issue a benchmark report on e-government sporadically and a new one is in the offing, although I’ve seen some countries declaring how well they’ve done already, including Vietnam.

Prior to this years report some academic work was done to reconsider the metrics used in the EU by Alexander Schellong at Harvard, which may or may not have affected the methodology employed by the UN. Interesting though the report is, it still fails to point to the value the citizen might or might not place on e-government, e-governance or the actual government services involved. However he does state that for EU nations “Since Lisbon, benchmarking activities are a cornerstone of the EU’s “open method of coordination”", which explains something of the fixation they have with it and the report now admits that the time for a change has come, since for the study “the most common critique being that the benchmark’s only focus is in on the supply side of eGovernment.”

The report further states “unfortunately, the development of a relevant and universally accepted benchmark for eGovernment will continue to be a challenge around the globe. Many aspects of eGovernment, especially transformation or its impact are difficult to capture.” This is where I believe that (dis)satisfaction comes in, since it picks up on those outcomes from service delivery that is affected by transformation and the delivery itself.

However, as it currently stands, it looks like old-time benchmarking for the EU, with no feedback from the citizen. Although the proposal stands to involve them in setting some new benchmarks at some time in the future…

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On another matter Professor Ann Macintosh of Leeds University is giving a lecture entitled “The Internet, Web 2.0 and ‘having your say’” at the University of York on 17 February 2010 at 6:15 in Room P/L001, Physics. The Great E-mancipator’s author may be lurking in the audience if he can get away from work!

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The Socitm Customer Access Improvement Service has published its latest (December 2009) report, which is Issue 3. It has received a great detail of reportage for its emphasis on poorly performing council web sites. I’m not sure that quite so much can be read from the cumulative data, and a bit like National Indicator 14 “avoidable contact”  believe these analyses need to take place at a more granular level and thing some of the assumptions are very subjective!

I also have a concern that a document from Socitm is making statements like the one on page 3 “The country cannot afford the current scale of the public sector.” This is a broad brush attack on all government, so includes local authorities and health trusts. This is not a decision for an IT managers organization, it’s one for the electorate since some countries, as we know, have a much higher scale of expenditure. What really matters is the quality being delivered for that expenditure, if its too high a quality or too low, the public have to decide. If too much is being spent they have to decide what services are no longer required, or whether services they can do without are being delivered. Ultimately this is the value of applications such as that used by GovMetric or the others named on my list (see below) – they give the public an opportunity to comment on the value of services delivered.

According to the report there are now 56 councils providing GovMetric data but of these only one is acknowledged to be recording data across the three major channels in one directorate or service only, which is not ideally what we should be achieving if we are to understand channel shift or manage channels at all.

Big things continue to be made about South Tyneside’s apparent channel shift around waste management, which they achieved by developing their web site as a result of feedback through the service, I would argue that all channels need to be improved and this is an end-to-end reform of services, since channels are only the presentation layer. We have a lot more experience with the face-to-face and telephone channels and have obviously some experience at delivering them, but the web is the new kid on the block, it can’t at the moment be interactive in the sense of the Turing machine.

I believe getting feedback from citizens is the way forward but I have doubts about making too much of it from the higher level generalizations that Socitm makes and I must say that the one promoted by Socitm is not the only solution – have a look at the list – Company table V8.

UPDATE - I’ve been asked by Alex Chapman of GovMetric to update on a few possible inaccuracies between my reading of the Socitm CAIS report and the state of play with GovMetric, which I am posting below -

• “There are currently 59 authorities signed up to GovMetric with a further 9 housing associations; so, there are just under 70 users in total
• More importantly, almost all of these are using GovMetric in a multi-channel approach measuring customer feedback and performance across at least 3 channels (F2F, phone and web) and across typically 8 services
• An increasing number are also linking this feedback data to E&D and customer segmentation groups as well to increase their insight about what customers needs are, their experiences and their channel preferences.

I agree with you whole heartedly that, “if we are to understand channel shift or manage channels at all”, we do need to go beyond one service or even one channel; this is not the case with GovMetric, neither in concept nor in practice.  From a GovMetric perspective, customer feedback is not the only thing that matters, but being able to understand service demand by service, by channel, as well.”

How can legislation create local government shared services? The proposal for legislation to enforce them is presented in a new report from Deloitte entitled “Stop, start, save – Shared service delivery in local government.” The report does admit that there are a lot of questions, it also admits sharing could initially focus around administrative systems like payroll and financial administration. However, overall, I don’t think there’s anything new in its twelve pages that I haven’t fallen over in the last ten years.

But what are the stumbling blocks in IT terms? I can add a few issues that Deloitte haven’t reported, that I don’t think can be resolved by legislation, only by concerted action by local authorities and government.

Even where common IT systems are employed, many software suppliers are obviously unwilling to lose revenue and hence don’t encourage sharing or don’t design their systems to permit easy sharing, unless of course, it is through some sort of additional shared services layer, that brings in greater revenue.

From my own experience of shared services there are a few minor points –

How are they delivered electronically so that citizens can still find them where they expect them to be? This may include branding or local data sharing issues. In other words, is the data split or can it be easily?

What about the politicians? Do they understand the implications and if so are they supportive?

What about the staff who behave like politicians? Do they really understand or just don’t want ‘change’? If they don’t want to change, what are you going to do?

The way forward is surely to align back office processes and align back office IT applications (it’s a lot easier if staff are used to seeing the same screens along with processing in the same way). It’s a big market out there and suppliers won’t like giving up to a competitor, so expect a fight.

Which of several applications to use? Surely go for the best in price and offering, but pull any three council’s out of a hat and they’ll all run a different application and won’t want to change. So there is a need to assess which really is the best application in the longer term (say five or ten years) for the three authorities. Which supplier will work best to get all three on the same quality platform for minimal costs in short and long term? The users need to be involved closely in this decision, they’re the ones that use it! This may even involve citizens, if there’s a web interface. But make sure that this is really researched. Imagine what happens if one authority uses Microsoft 200x and the other 200y, even if they run the same back office application, there’s yet another big cost and training budget to account for.

Instead, I suggest – start thinking ahead, stop buying different suppliers and start saving on procurement, support, training; in other words – get ready to start sharing.

This was all summed up my acquaintance Paul Henman in 2004 – E-government and the Electronic Transformation of Modes of Rule: The Case of Partnerships, The Journal on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics,  pp 19-24, where he concluded that: 

“the advent of the Internet has precipitated a growth in governing through partnerships. Materially, the Internet has made it technically more feasible to conduct extensive partnerships. But, arguably the Internet’s main contribution towards governing through partnerships is symbolic. It has been in helping to imagine what networked governing might look like, and thus contributed to the formation of rationalities of network governance.”

In other words, the IT only helps you think you can do partnerships, the real effort is on and from people and systems!

A recent presentation from America’s Pew Internet entitled “Network Learners” demonstrates why we have to be imaginative when it comes to employing the new media and not just treat it like  newspapers, TV or the media we’ve been used to since people learned to communicate.

What is most interesting is the development of the digital natives themselves. They have developed, as one would expect, within the technology they’ve grown up with. So, as I’ve always argued, trying to focus on generation X, Y, Z or whatever it is, from a government approach, is an impossible task, since the goal posts are far from stationary.

So what do governments do in the circumstances? I don’t have a specific answer, but I believe that if we are to jump on every passing development, we’ll waste further money on top of that which already been wasted on poorly planned e-government. That’s not to say we don’t experiment with them, if we have time, or watch out that they don’t become more than a fad but I suspect there are a lot more to come before we get an answer!