The Final Edition?

January 27, 2010

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 8) 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?

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Frontline first

December 7, 2009

Hot off the press from the Cabinet Office comes a pre-budget website. I’ve not absorbed the material but a lot of what has been suggested by all parties seems to have made its way into these plans. At first view it doesn’t appear to be the most accessible website I’ve seen, but I’m sure others can check that. Happy reading!

Visit the website Putting the frontline first or in PDF – putting the frontline first (PDF, 555K)

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User-centred approaches to e-government

October 25, 2009

A new document out from the OECD “Rethinking e-Government Services: User-centred Approaches” (240 pages) demonstrates how long its taken to turn the e-government aircraft carrier around to facing the citizen! Along with the recently published Cabinet Office guidance on Channel Strategy it would appear a new world has dawned upon the apparatchiks.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a subscriber, just take out the 7-day trial subscription and you have access!

The first chapter is entitled “A Paradigm Shift Towards Citizen Centricity” and what is states is that the message from the OECD leaders was that “the focus in public service delivery should be on user needs, demands, and satisfaction – not on the tools and service delivery channels governments have been focusing on since the mid-1990′s.” If we want a date for when the aircraft carrier started turning, this pronouncement was apparently made to the OECD Network of Senior OECD E-Government Officials 6-7 March 2008. My detailed research wants to get to the why’s and wherefore’s of the initial route and then the change twelve years later, but for the moment I’m just celebrating the move!

The chapter also asks whether “a user-centric approach forces governments to rethink whether a transformational” perspective on public service development and delivery is still the right one.” Importantly for the UK we have had the shift from e-government to t-government and presumably this  statement leverages both towards the door?

The fourth chapter is entitled “Monitoring and Evaluation User Take-up” , which lists the UK as having a national measurement framework, which may be a white lie, since what the document ultimately states is that “traditional metrics such as counting website hits and page impressions are not sufficient and often provide a very narrow and simplistic view of user take-up. Monitoring and analysing patterns of use, traffic volumes, user likes and dislikes, user satisfaction and attitudes towards information and data use, seasonal variation, audience breakdown, e-mails and feedback, and the use of search terms are all important elements in understanding how users consume electronic services.”  Unfortunately (for me), it doesn’t pick out the most advantageous metric(s) nor suggest that channel management requires all channels to be similarly measured but the next chapter does state that “countries have moved towards rethinking not just their Internet-based service delivery, but their service delivery in general without regard to delivery channel – to meet the users with services on their terms.” unfortunately, no examples are provided of the latter.

Strangely, I missed any mention of Web 2.0 or Government 2.0. whilst Andrea and others feel it’s still a hot topic?

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World Class

July 26, 2009

Another document recently appearing on the Cabinet Office web site – if only you all had time to read them all – is “Power in People’s Hands: Learning from the World’s Best Public Services“. Its 70 A4 landscape pages may be picking up on the interest Liam Byrne and David Milliband have been demonstrating in Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen’s work, whose latest book “The Idea of Justice” is freshly published.

I don’t know if the Cabinet Office realise how insulting works like theirs can be, since many of their examples of good practice are actually in use in the UK, but people are too busy doing them to shout about it! At least on this occasion they have started calling the government’s customers “citizens” and taking a look at all the good practice from Canada, who probably do better at service delivery since they have insited upon calling the users of government services “citizens” for many years!

Key conclusions of the report – common standards, greater incentives for improvement and promotion of equity!

I didn’t need a study tour to tell me that, just a bit of study!

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London calling! Revisiting NI14…

November 3, 2008

I travelled to an event today (3rd November 2008) hosted near the Tower of London all about National Indicator 14 for some further discussion of it. On the journey I was reviewing the literature about gaps and concluded that life was to short to cope with detailed gap analysis, so I’m hypothesising that citizen engagement feedback can be used to handle them, but hopefully that will all come out at the EiP conference in a week’s time!

Rather than a verbatim report, thought I’d pick up on the highlights or useful points that came out at the conference…

One of the introductions was by Sarah Fogden, reported to be inventor of NI14 and arch-nemesis of John Seddon, originator of the concept of demand failure, which Sarah highlighted by stating that she didn’t mind what the indicator was called but one was needed to satisfy the process-driven people at Whitehall, when I’d always thought they were target-driven and thought that all our problems would be solved if they were lead by process or system! She also tied the words ‘holistic’ and ‘transformation’ together – I wonder what Jan Smuts the South African statesman would think were he still around eighty years on? (Smuts’ definition – “The tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution”.

She did say to focus upon the key priorities of the organisation, use the CRM system to assist; that there is no right way to do it and that the overall figure for NI14 is meaningless…

Tom Wraith of the Audit Commission had little new to say but was still interesting when he stated that NI14 was:

  • the most frequently queried indicator
  • unlike most indicators
  • had far less prescription
  • moved on from BV157
  • a tool for self-improvement
  • AC won’t be directly comparing but they had a duty to make it public
  • what’s included is up to you!
  • The CLG edict that there was a need to ‘justify methodology’ was a little harsher than AC would have desired
  • It would be used as part of the conversation/dialogue with authorities about managing resources
  • Needed to be triangulated with the evidence

He was asked by Tony Hinkley who has been working for ESD-Toolkit on NI14 whether it was their intention to make it compulsory to use the Local Government Service List (LGSL) which I believe he confirmed?

Kate Batty from Tameside said that NI14 was not the whole answer but that ESD-Toolkit, Mosaic, customer journey mapping and customer service training were all part. Here words were that the order should be: people, process, then technology! One her snappy phrases was ‘lets stop worrying about measuring apples and pears and measure fruit’, which in NI14′s case was highly appropriate…

A fascinating presentation was made by Tom Benford upon the ‘call reduction strategy’ used at the DVLR. He stated that 60% of their customer wanted to use the ‘phone for service, despite frequently having got the number off the web site! In order to reduce avoidable contact and the number of telephone calls they’d looked at the end-to-end customer experience and the process times. As a result they’d made a number of changes:

  • revised the direct.gov content
  • put their the actual questions being asked on the web
  • made their URL’s friendly
  • put a link from the online directory enquiries to the web site
  • adopted plain English
  • redesigned customer-facing documents especially the highly used ones
  • cross-referenced material with online content
  • moved away from using form numbers
  • agreed customer-meaningful turnaround times for metrics
  • revised telephone book entries – put web site address first but also numbers which may not be their services but which the public think they do

One question revealed that despite not being NI14, the resultant transformation was possibly more effective than NI14

It was also stated that no local authority had included NI14 within their quota of targets for LAA…

NI14 had shifted to being outcome focused

Blackpool had realised that their ‘Customer First’ wasn’t working so they listened to customer demand for six weeks, wrote everything down and from this extracted 4000 demands, 121 of true value under seven  broad themes. With their turnover of residents they found change of address to be the most frequent demand and focused upon that initially. Their motto was “in a perfect world, how would we serve the customer?”

A lesson from Halton to their staff when training was: “to think of it from the customer’s view!”

I hope the Cabinet Office don’t mind me publicising the fact that the presentations should be available on their web site.

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NI14 – the new moneypit for IT suppliers?

July 10, 2008

A very recent promotion by a local government supplier included the following statement:

“In line with the objectives detailed in the NI14 indicator councils will be expected to halve ‘avoidable contact’ with citizens by 2011 and simplify lengthy, complicated processes, whilst reducing costs. It has been identified that face to face interactions with customers cost £9 per enquiry, telephone interactions cost £5 and web interactions just 12p. An average Local Authority that has 180,000 face to face interactions in a year could make a saving of approximately £799,200 if, in line with the objectives set by NI14 this number was halved to 90,000 (based on real figures).”

The supplier concerned hadn’t read the IDeA guidance since it hadn’t been published by that stage and was relying, I presume, on the earlier Cabinet Office information. However my main contention would be that Varney was asking for a 50% reduction in ‘avoidable contact’ by 2011, not for it to more than disappear!Even the IDeA guidance states that the private sector has 40 to 60 % ‘avoidable contact’ currently and only a few pilot authorities have actually started measuring it and attempting to reduce it. According to NWEGG the channel costs are £7.81, £4.00 and 17p respectively, which are slightly cheaper than those quoted, although there are a range of values being currently quoted however other research indicates that these vary greatly by service and an average figure may be meaningless as well as probably varying greatly by authority!

Anyway, I am completely befuddled by the figures in the example! Are we to presume that all the services were face-to-face? Or can we move some to telephone, losing some ‘avoidable contact’ in the process, but since this was a web firm I presume they are all being dealt with by e-forms, saving even more money.

It is thinking (or lack of) like this that does a dis-service to public service and the service to the public…

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Satisfaction – Canadian style!

January 13, 2008

 Discovering two British Cabinet Office documents by chance when all the furore about National Indicator 14 (avoidable contact) was going on, I started to wonder why we weren’t paying further homage to activities in recent years in Canada. The structure over there is slightly different with federal and provincial governments but the Canadians have been at the forefront of e-government, from a customer perspective, for years.

So whilst we have two new documents:

How to measure customer satisfaction: A toolkit for improving the customer experience in public services

Promoting Customer Satisfaction: Guidance on improving the customer experience in Public Services

The Canadians produced:

Client Satisfaction Surveying: Common Measurements Tool

Client Satisfaction Surveying: A Managers Guide

In the late 1990′s and the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service (ICCS), which has taken over the Citizen-Centred Service Network from the Canadian Centre for Management Development  has a library of publications for download or purchase.  All the documents mentioned above are probably best sourced by ‘googling’ for them but in the case of the Canadian ones it is perhaps due to their age, the ICCS having a number of other documents available.

I must admit that Cabinet Office guidance does refer critically  to the Canadian CMT and states that Suffolk Customer Service Direct is using it, however in the model I am suggesting, granularity is kept to a minimum and equates to the CMT Outcome, since I am looking for a straightforward view across all channels. 

C’est la vie?

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