June 17, 2009
My academic colleagues in the Local Governance Research Unit at De Montfort (along with those from Southampton University) have been busy producing a report entitled “Empowering local communities to influence local decision making – A systematic review of the evidence” for the DCLG.
At 216 pages its another hefty read but one key finding on page 80 is that:
“The links between e-participation and community empowerment are surprisingly weak. Despite a growing interest in electronic forms of participation and, indeed, electronic democracy, the ways in which the wide range of devices actually empower individuals or communities, and the extent to which they have a direct influence on decision making, is often ignored. Although there is a large literature on the topic of e-participation and e-democracy, the actual evidence base on which to understand this topic is quite limited.”
Which I would also argue extends to much of the material on anything with an “e-” in fron to it, hence the reason for my own research and also the reason why I challenge much of the current hype about Web 2.0 and social media. Have a play by all means but don’t expect the other 98% of the population to buy into it!
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Systems thinking, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: DCLG, De Montfort, Empowering local communities, Southampton | 
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Posted by greatemancipator
July 9, 2008
The long awaited guidance to the National Performance Indicator 14 (avoidable contact) has been released onto the Improvement & Development Agency’s web site (64 page PDF).
Depending upon how you view these things it was a good day or bad one, since it also coincided with the new White Paper from the DCLG (157 pages {PDF, 1809 Kb), which also has things to say about civic engagement, making information available and other matters.
Importantly for this research, the first document states on page 13 that ‘we are exploiting and approach that will help us to…design services that reflect the needs of customers not arbitrary targets or performance measures.’ Which rather amuses me when we are actually talking about an indicator apparently designed to measure ‘failure demand’ but rebranded for Ministerial purposes to avoid the word ‘failure’ and also John Seddon’s interest in the concept! Especially when ‘failure demand’ is not considered something to be measured but to be ‘designed out’ of processes…
Unfortunately, whilst the ultimate aim is laudable, we are likely to be creating an entire industry of NI14 measurers in the process. The company rol which produces GovMetric gets a good mention in the guidance since they’re developing their package to support NI14, which may be an easy way of getting both dissatisfaction data and NI14, at a cost, but if you do it manually there is still a significant outlay in obtaining statistically significant data.
‘Que sera, sera’ as Doris Day sang or ‘O que sera’ as they apparently say in Portugal – whatever will be, will be!
Leave a Comment » | NI14, customer satisfaction, e-government | Tagged: DCLG, Doris Day, White Paper | Permalink
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June 5, 2008
Yesterday I was at an ESD-Toolkit TLC meeting (Electronic Service Delivery Toolkit Toolkit Learning Community) apart from the healthy debate over NI14 (thank you Bob and others), there was also some chance to discuss customer satisfaction and insight. Tony Hinkley dropped a name that I was unto unaware of – Robert Johnston of Warwick Business School – so I will now spend the next month reading his uncollected works – shed loads of stuff on satisfaction, complaints, service excellence etc, so I will try and summarise some on here – but there is a lot of it! Many thanks Tony (and Bob for writing it all).
The other big news this week was the launch by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) of the eGovernment Interest Group. There is also a forum there. Lots of potential to debate the Web 2.0 and the future!
Leave a Comment » | NI14, customer satisfaction, e-government | Tagged: customer, DCLG, ESD-Toolkit, NI14, W3C | Permalink
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March 20, 2008
Hot on the entrails of the NWEGG report mentioned in an earlier post is the latest from the DCLG (or duckleg, to its friends) entiteled ‘Delivering Efficiency: Understanding the Cost of Local Government’.
The interesting connection is the diagram on page 40 which has central to it a ‘circle of need’, which points to ‘customer satisfaction’ as an outcome.
Hence understanding the citizen’s needs (or their own presentation of themselves, as it were in Cornford & Richter’s paper) should assist us to deliver the services that make them satisfied.
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, NI14, customer satisfaction | Tagged: Cornford, DCLG, NWEGG, Richter | Permalink
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