Importantly, from my view, a key aspect of this includes establishing the “intent” for employing social media, along with employing “benchmarks”, and doing both of these at the outset. I repeatedly see social media being taken up by government because it’s trendy and wanting to be seen to be using the latest fad to communicate with the public. However, in these days of austerity we need to be clear what we can expect from an outlay of staff time to get involved in learning, testing and running such frequent experiments.

Let us not make the error of e-government but have a reasoned and measured business case before any expenditure.

The question of citizen identity verification in the UK will remain a difficult one now that the national ID card scheme has been binned, however for some services being able to confirm the ID of an applicant is very important and the passport takes on an alternative use. According to one recent Socitm report more than 70% of the UK population have a passport – I’m not sure whether this is a UK passport, but it is some kind of identity paper. It has been proposed that a start could be made in employing them as the ID card. In fact, with the introduction of the new, even more secure UK passport in October, this becomes a more likely possibility.

Is this moral, justifiable and what about the other 30%?

Interestingly a related matter is picked up on in the NO2ID Supporters’ Newsletter No. 156 26 August 2010, where the relationship between the identity card and the transformational government strategy is picked up.

What is e-democracy? I kept falling over this as an assumption that e-government would lead, necessarily, to increased democratic involvement and interest, which I think is a false assumption. Is e-democracy about e-voting? Or, is it about greater public involvement in political or government decision-making? Is it about politicians and bureaucrats keeping the citizenry informed about what is going on? Is is about politicians and bureaucrats getting feedback from the citizens before they make decisions (rather than after!)?

I suspect that if one asks any politician or bureaucrat what e-democracy is, one will get some very varied answers. I am also concerned that in a representative democracy, to expect the turkeys to vote for Christmas or Thanksgiving, is asking a lot. Although we don’t always think a lot about our politicians, I’m pretty sure they have more brain than the average turkey and would like to live through a few celebrations before calling it a day.

To employ a related analogy, we are currently running around like headless chickens without any idea of what we expect e-democracy to deliver. If we define it, we can at least have something to work towards…(and I’ve read a lot of papers and books and there appears to be no academic agreement, so how do we get something the politicians and citizens might support?)

One recent innovation that will help is the Participedia, the brainchild of Archon Fung, Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at Harvard who has appeared on this weblog in the past. I found out all about the development in Communique, the newsletter of the Ash Centre for Democratic Governance & Innovation Spring 2010 Volume 6. Having originally considered a wiki as the alternative to this weblog, I’m pleased to see the technology being used in such manner.

Although not directly associated with government service, I am sure the effect will apply equally. If employees are witnessed being rude to each other, the customer generalizes this negative view across the organization.

Where does this apply to e-government? The back-office culture, along with that of those developing the services needs to be citizen-focused, and if we’re not “happy bunnies” it’ll reflect in the delivery of services. Organizational culture is everything.

Remember your fellow workers!

The report entitled “RR 679 Literature review to inform the future digitisation of Jobcentre Plus service delivery” by Grahame Whitfield, Kim Perren, David Stuart and Michael Norris is an excellent piece of work towards applying e-government to the range of government service users, over and above those it focuses on. The conclusions include examining digital exclusion due to availability, cost and competence to which the researchers conclude “the evidence strongly suggests that public services should embrace the notion that they cannot – indeed should not – try to do everything themselves. Making data available to external organisations could result in the production of a wide range of innovative applications, services and resources that would be unlikely to be developed in-house. These could augment any provision Jobcentre Plus makes itself.”

The researchers also advise  that “a key means of ensuring successful delivery is for public services to have a clear understanding of how their online and digital communications link with other means of contact (telephone follow-up, letter, face-to-face meeting) and of how these linkages are explained and managed.”

Importantly the report acknowledges that “if government services prioritize digital channels as a mode of engaging in dialogue with users about their services, the voices of the digitally excluded may not be heard.” The report also raises public concerns about data security but accepts that this requires government involvement.

In respect to my own research this document accepts that “the international evidence in respect of e-Government and ‘leading edge’ organisations strongly suggests that if online public services are to be successful, this kind of cultural shift – to having a detailed and ongoing understanding of the needs and preference of customers at the heart of the way in which services are planned and delivered – is essential.” It also encourages the access to data by external stakeholders and developers (as mentioned above), which contrasts the contrasts around security – a solution to which is required.

One final conclusion is the need for government to accept the need for service development to be in a “perpetual beta” state, in other words one of continual development. This reflects my own proposal for employing user feedback to improve and develop the end-to-end service.

Again, some ten years or more on from when e-government started, this report is better late than never! Implementation will be another matter.

However, when one looks at the data revealed in the tabes and considers the questions that were asked, the results become clearer. Despite this being in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, there are far from a complete number of responses, thus skewing the graphical representation. There is also a great deal of difference in the make-up of the numbers between councils. For example, Barnsley spend £399, whilst Blackpool claim £ 140,820 – how do we account for the difference? It has to be the questions, which I believe were -

“1. For each financial year 2007-08 and 2008-09, and as per the definition given in the above paragraph, a description of each website service arranged by your Council.
2. For each year 2007-08 and 2008-09, and for each individual item listed in question 1, the cost to your Council of each website service. Please also include a total expenditure figure on website services for each financial year.
3.  For each year 2007-08 and 2008-09, and for each individual website and/or web page included in question 1, the number of hits received for the websites and/or web pages.
4. Describe and give dates for the research you have conducted or guidelines you have followed that led you to believe that the website services outlined above were necessary.
5. Describe how your Council appoints external website support agencies or contractors, the selection process and the key criterion on which you make appointments.

The said definition is as follows - ”External website services” includes, but is not limited to, services such as website design and website development. “External website services” refers to projects or ongoing contracts outsourced to third-party agencies or contractors.

As one of those on the end of such FoI requests, this does nothing but display the lack of value of FoI requests! They have become the tools of undergraduate and commercial researchers with limited skills and foresight, along with a small number of academic researchers prepared to pressurize overburdened senior council staff with additional tasks.

The questions are frequently vague, the answers resulting are thus variable and dependent upon the ease of access to the original information. The requests themselves are often ungrammatical, full of misspellings and typos and requiring a deal of thought to ascertain the intentions of the “researcher” and provide the requested “information”.

How does one truly measure the cost of a website? The cost of the Content Management System licence? The salary of any web manager or the IT staff supporting the hardware - what if support is externalized or responsibility for content spread throughout the authority? Does the cost include any metatagging resource, the speech facilities, applications delivering data to it such as planning, mapping or benefits systems? An exercise such as this is comparing apples and oranges and ending up with a load of bananas!

It becomes even more complex if one considers the goings-on with e-government for the past ten years. If councils were expected to make 100% of their services available electronically, how do they do this without maintaining a web site in the face of continual legislative and procedural changes from central government?

It becomes further complicated if one wants council web sites to be consistent nationally to plug into central government. Each one must comply with the LGSL, LGNL etc and that means 700+ services, so no out-of-the-box solutions.

I’ve held some responsibility for council web sites for over ten years now. It’s not like putting up the sh**e somecommercial companies can get away with…councils are expected to comply with disability discrimination legislation and be accessible to the majority of their potential users. We are now asked to provide data on-line and core services online, whilst continuing, largely, to maintain face-to-face and telephone services.

I’ve mentioned before the need for a universal, accessible CMS with all the necessary plug-ins, at a reasonable cost, that can be hosted, maintained and supported by the minimum of staff. I don’t believe it yet exists – one can look at Drupal and other open source solutions but they require support that may not be available  internally to the council, and so then add to the costs.

OK, there’s the odd silly mistake when developing council web services, but out of how many hundreds of web sites in the UK? In the words of the old phrase “you are damned if you do and you are damned if you don’t”.

(Any opinions expressed in this piece or any other on this website are purely those of the author and can bear no reflection upon his employers)

Looking back upon my own experiences, the accessibility of a website is frequently determined by the content management system (CMS), which this approach accepts. Regular checking, including benchmarking, can demonstrate where the issues are – which is again in the approach. It is also possible to use automated accessibility checkers and highlight issues on an online forum, again, both part of the approach they document. However, part of the difficulty remains in getting the CMS developer to maintain accessibility within their own application as it is developed, gremlins frequently creep in between major re-writes creating a whole range of issues that, being detached from the end-user , they can never seem to see the reasons for fixing.

Further to their proposals, whilst automated accessibility checkers demonstrate the allegiance of the coding to guidelines, this is a machine view and ultimately it is the end-user who identifies the real level of accessibility. My own parsimonious model of collecting (dis)satisfaction data from the user of government services and employing this to improve services is really the only way to test accessibility, not ignoring the value of maintaining continuous checks on web site data. Some of the issues may not be with the website itself but with the processes that underpin it, making the electronic delivery cumbersome or challenging for a user with a disability.

A nice idea but if any UK authorities are not employing these little aids already, I’d be very surprised. What they need to do is employ the feedback one across all channels and utilise the data.

Dan Jellinek reproduced a paper from there in issue 317 of the E-Government Bulletin entitled “The Future of Citizenship: Loudest Shout or Best Argument?”. In these instances I always have to remind myself that we live in a representative democracy, which isn’t really built for anyone outside the anointed host to have an affect upon decision-making. The person in the street gave away their opportunity to make an impact when they voted. They may be able to shout at their elected representatives, send them emails, write letters, deliver petitions and perform many other tasks; but in the end it’s the a combination of the full-time officials and the politicians that come up with the goods.

This opinion isn’t overruled by statements in the piece in the E-Government Bulletin which includes phrases such as “the limited role assigned to citizens in the political process”, “the views of citizens remain largely invisible” and “the Internet is a potential space for the creation of a more deliberative democracy”. In my own view the Town Hall is a potential space for the creation of a more deliberative democracy and once the changes are agreed there, the Internet as it is for everything else, can be used to facilitate them…

Or am I being too negative?

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.

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!