July 1, 2009
Whilst away presenting a paper at the European Conference on E-Government ’09 in London, I read a new report from Canada entitled: From Research to Results: A Decade of Results-Based Service Improvement in Canada.
This turned out to be extremely appropriate, since all three papers in the stream my paper was in identified the missing link between academic research and the e-government practitioners. In this excellent, small and readable 46 page guide, what Marson and Heintzman conclude is the key to Canadian success, it is the implementation of “action research focused on obtaining feedback from citizens that can be quickly translated by public managers into service improvment that citizens want and notice, including single windows, electronic gateways and service clusters.” They also list “service improvment methods that focus rigourously on the drivers of citizen satisfaction with government service delivery.”
Their documenting of the last ten years in Canada reinforces what this blog has been saying, that is, the need for web managers, IT managers, customer service managers and service managers to focus upon citizen satisfaction, but not as interpreted by by annual surveys or ad-hoc measurements, but instead by the continued monitoring of service delivery across the multiple channels.
The Canadians employed their academics and practitioners to prove that the customer is always right – but as to how far one takes their advice is down to the politicians and their budget management.
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Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: Canada, ECEG09, IPAC, Marson & Heintzman | 
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Posted by greatemancipator
December 29, 2008
I had started academic research before the Millennium examining the challenges to District Councils in England, this had confirmed my suspicions that a lack of integration, citizen-focus and partnership working were drawbacks, perhaps as a result of the centrally-imposed targets and laterly the Priority Service Outcomes that were to be detailed following 2001.
Even more contradictory was the lack of consideration for the Community Planning aspect of the Modernising Government agenda. I had discussed a joint piece of work with a regional university around examining citizens’ views of service delivery arrangements in parallel with views on meeting the electronic targets being attempted, but unfortunately pressures to meet the targets didn’t leave enough time to carry out the research further.
Following the target deadline I breathed a sigh of relief and was left attempting to embed the learning of the last few years with providing services in the manner wanted by the citizen. At this point I attempted again to consider the research and contacted a university that had a history of work in local government, digital inclusion and electronic voting, De Montfort, with a research proposal, which was accepted! Unfortunately or fortunately I was then seriously ill but the period of rest and recuperation gave me time to focus on reading and the the reading distracted me from the gravity of my situation.
The reading indicated that very little academic work had still been done on e-government and that studies by the likes of Gartner Research had revealed some quite complex systems for measuring electronic service delivery that were probably only fit for national governments. What was also revealed was a long running debate as to whether government was dealing with customers or citizens, with most of the votes in favour of calling the people a government deals with citizens, this included the Government of Canada supporting the move. Another long running piece of work review ended up around assessing customer satisfaction, which along with measuring the gap between expectation and delivery, has seen a great number of papers published but no great conclusions made.
The recent favourite approach in business is to employ customer engagement measurement rather than customer relationship management and this I conclude is a viable approach, which is that by pushing for and collating feedback from all customers, which, in the context of government, I prefer to call citizens, across all channels, we can try to improve issues in end-to-end services by correcting them using the feedback.
We still have a long way to go in channel management and I think citizen engagement management is a move in the right direction, it will also assist in both avoiding digital exclusion issues along with creating quality services, It was also the approach I took when I created the blog http://greatemancipator.com, in order to discuss these issues and promote them amongst practitioners. Academic research tends to be focused on learn-ed conferences, very wordy and expensive journals, so my approach of sticking the outcomes under the nose of anyone interested and asking for their participation seemed a sensible approach.
In the New Year I intend to have another survey along with starting a series of interviews with particularly appropriate individuals. Any volunteers or suggestions?
Season’s greetings and a prosperous new year to everyone!
Leave a Comment » | About me, Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement | Tagged: Canada, e-government, E-government metrics, Gartner, modernising government, research | Permalink
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September 23, 2008
Having wondered in the last blog if I was a lone voice crying in a wilderness, it now appears even less so! Not hot news but current and relevant is the fact that the Government of Victoria, Australia has taken out a two year licence on the Canadian Common Measurements Tool (CMT)! The CMT is a set of survey questions and scales that allow individual agencies to survey their own customers’ satisfaction and identify service delivery improvements for service users. This follows on the Government of South Australia doing the same thing but Victoria is frequently seen as a leader in matters e-government.
My personal view is that whilst the CMT might be a great instrument for large governments its a little too big for those without the resoiuces to act upon the feedback.
A further reinforcement was reading relatively recent papers such as Understanding Customer Experience by Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager (Harvard Business Review, February 2007), which demonstrates a move from thinking about customer relationship management to customer experience management. Schwager is a founder of Satmetrix Systems that actually produces software to collect customer feedback.
I believe government organizations, despite being in a different market, need to collect the satisfaction data but instead of comparing with competitors, allow for the gap with public expectation and monitor changes and feedback across channles. If expectation levels are managed honestly and the gap identified, management can then be attempted for any major variance. This needs to be done across all public facing channels to ensure adequate resourcing.
Primarily there is a need to be realistic with expectations.
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government | Tagged: Canada, CMT, Harvard Business Review, Meyer, Satmetrix, Schwager, South Australia, Victoria | Permalink
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September 14, 2008
My current interesting read is ‘E-government in Canada’ by Jeffrey Roy published by the University of Ottawa Press in 2006. Its a companion volume to ‘Digital State at the Leading Edge’, edited by Sanford Borins et all, published by the University of Toronto in 2007, which I found really useful. With the Canadian model of government (although federated states) being close to the British one, I find it a much better example of e-government usage for the UK than either the USA or Singapore.
The Canadians claim to examine examples in other countries, including England, before trying anything there but they must implement it so much better, since it seems to be original in many cases!
The bookpoints out two paragraphs from the Government of Ontario’s web site:
“The Government of Ontario is proactively moving towards becoming an e-Government, a government that will be able to meet the challenges of the 21st century. In the e-Government Strategy, we recognize the considerable complexity of transforming the way government operates. The current focus of attention for e-Government in Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, is what we call electronic service delivery, or ESD. ESD enables us to provide government information and services to citizens and to businesses through electronic channels.”
“To make e-Government happen requires a complete re-design of the internal operations of the government and the operating systems of the broader public sector. Our I&IT Strategy guides these efforts. However, much of this re-design work is, and will remain, invisible to the general public. More visible will be another area of e-Government: citizen engagement.”
A side window further emphasises this:
“To strengthen its citizen-centred approach to government, the province has begun to develop a strategy on citizen engagement. One component of this strategy is intended to expand the use of electronic channels, mainly the Internet, to help bring citizens closer to their government. The goal is to ensure citizens have access to a wide range of tools and information that will enable them to participate more fully in the democratic process.”
Not a mention of ‘customer’ or ‘insight’, rock on Canada!
Leave a Comment » | citizen, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: Borins, Canada, Jeffrey Roy, Ottawa, Toronto | Permalink
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July 15, 2008
Juvenal in the Satires referred to the political practice of populism as the people abdicating their duties for ‘bread and circuses’, this compares with the emphasis placed in traditional Roman society upon ‘civis Romanus sum’ or ‘I am a Roman citizen’, by which the privilege of being a member of Roman society was balanced by the acceptance of rights and duties.
What has this to do with e-government? Its back to the current practice of describing citizens as customers! By talking about customer need, satisfaction or whatever I would contend that we are in danger of offering them ‘bread and circuses’, and forgetting to associate it with the privilege of citizenship and all it entails, such as the duties.
This was captured in a Canadian document of 1996, ‘A Strong Foundation – Report of the Task Force on Public service, Values and Ethics’ from a group chaired by John C. Tait QC. Tait’s task force picks up on the tensions between treating citizens as user, customer or client and makes a number of important points such as on page 36:
“In every public service transaction or activity, the true public servant must be alive to issues of equity and fairness to a degree that is rarely required of private sector managers.”
Tait’s report also identifies the conflict between New Public Management (NPM) and public administration but importantly does not state that we mustn’t use the expressions but be actively aware of the tensions they introduce. We can call the citizen a customer but ensure that both the public servant and the citizen are aware of their respective duties and obligations.
With government’s concern over active citizenship I purport that it is time to focus on the expectations of citizenship and that this can be used to encourage feedback on services and assistance in improving or developing them.
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, customer satisfaction, e-government | Tagged: Canada, citizenship, Juvenal, NPM, Tait | Permalink
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June 21, 2008
The latest copy of PINpoint, the magazine from the CIPFA Performance Improvement Network, Issue 5, June 2008, includes an interesting compilation from the blogs that are normally in the Network’s mailings but one I must have originally skirted over caught my eye. In theory it should be here but the links didn’t work for me: http://www.cipfanetworks.net/pin/blogs or ww.cipfanetworks.net/pin/blogs/brendan/default.asp?postID=164
Brendan McCarron had picked up on the fact that the Cabinet Office’s Customer Service Excellence (CSE) Standard launched on 10 March 2008 was a re-working (nice, politically correct phrase) of the Treasury Board of Canada’s ‘defunct’ Service Improvment Initiative that had been run by the ICCS, which was based on work done in the City of Victoria that had similarities to the approach of SERVQUAL developed by Parasurama, Zeitelman and Berry but with the descriptions changed to protect them from litigation or payment! I don’t know about the City of Victoria link but there was a guide published by the State – Woodhouse, S.A. et al., 1993. Listening to Customers: An Introduction. Victoria B.C. Service Quality B.C. Secretariat, Government of British Columbia. – which sounds appropriate. The Canadians have also been pretty good at giving credit to Parauraman et al as can be found from the references to the Client Satisfaction Surveying: Common Measurements Tool:
http://www.ccmd-ccg.gc.ca/research/publications/html/tool/tool_10_e.html
As it happens the SERVQUAL work is some I have read so that I know that one of the original papers was actually -
SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality.
Parasuraman, A.; Zeithaml, Valarie A.; Berry, Leonard L. Journal of Retailing. 1988 Spr Vol 64(1) 12-40
The abstract can be found at http://psycnet.apa.org/?fa=main.doiLanding&uid=1989-10632-001
I wonder if Brendan was trying to catch out plagiarists?
Dan Champion had a go at the CSE web site in accessibility terms shortly after the lauch, so much for customer excellence -
Incidentally the ICCS ‘How to’ guide is available at:
http://www.iccs-isac.org/eng/pubs/TBS_How_To_Guide.pdf
My continuing gripe is taking obsolescent (1988 ) American theory and dressing it up to make it look new and then serving it up twenty years later on, particularly when some of it is no longer correct or appropriate.
I’m not saying my proposal about using customer dissatisfaction to assist in driving process improvments is entirely original and here’s another take upon it:
http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c050627a.asp
But it is a novel development of a parsimonious solution to managing the modern multiple service channels in government, something that SERVQUAL wasn’t – its just a little too complicated!
1 Comment | Metrics, customer satisfaction, e-government, transformational change | Tagged: Canada, ICCS, Customer Service Excellence, blether, Service Improvment Initiative, CIPFA, SERVQUAL | Permalink
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June 14, 2008
Researching further following my interest in seeing ‘Systems Thinking’, ‘Balanced Scorecard’ and customer satisfaction all join up I found that the view that scorecard and systems thinking are different paradigms isn’t universal. One example was in an online article called Performance Measurement and the Balanced Scorecard by Dr. Kenneth M. Macur, CPA and Marcia Daszko.
As a former student of Deming I imagine Dazko knows the subject and hence don’t feel too far off the mark. This has also been supported by finding another blogger with a view on web metrics, a topic that is attracting developing interest in the UK. Clive’s blog is here.
Mary Tetlow supported my argument about Canada being a better model on the IDeA community discussion around the place survey, others like Australia as an e-government model, so lets stop importing ideas from the USA and look at other former colonies, with similar political structures.
Leave a Comment » | customer satisfaction, e-government, transformational change | Tagged: Australia, Canada, Daszko, IDeA, Tetlow | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
