The Great E-mancipator

Socitm were presenting last week on Web 2.0, I’m arguing for a Citizen-oriented Service Architecture to be planned across the board (including a metric model), the Invisible Hand gang argue for access to data and central government and its contractors continue to lose public trust by losing their data!

Having completed the splendid book by Jeffrey Roy about E-Government in Canada, a great deal of which covered the above issues, particularly public trust, I’m now onto a book that Mantex promoted.(I’ve subscribed to Roy’s newsletter since it started and its always worth a read, even if only for the ‘pub quiz’ questions that flow through it! 

The book by Merholz et al, Subject to Change, encourages us to use customer experience to shape the product development process. In my simple way I thought this might project an opinion around service delivery to the citizen, and it does.

My developing model has the citizen in their community of needs at the front. They approach the resolution of those needs or services approach them, potentially, via the full range of service channels depending upon the service or the citizen’s needs. This will include appropriate security, it may also include Web 2.0.

Overlapping the service channels but feeding back to the citizen and the service is the performance layer that will capture information from those served and those serving about satisfaction and numbers.

Feeding into the range of service channels are the serices themselves, presented in a citizen-oriented service architecture that may allow ‘invisible hands’ access or third sector users, subject to secuity and legalities but taking and delivering transactions and information as required by the media of the service delivery channels.

The performance layer will tune the service layer or refine citizen expectations at the front end, according to feedback.

Where does Merholz et al fit in? Right at the beginning they state that a persons experience of a service emerges from certain qualities which are:

Motivations

Expectations

Perceptions

Abilities

Flow

Culture

This all means that we need to deliver to expectations and abilities (social inclusion), engaging well with citizens to ensure that the experience is of value! If none of these are fulfilled we want to know why, so we can try and sort it out!

On Friday morning on the 26th September my supervisors Ben and Richard will be presenting the initial research into this realm at Ethicomp 2008 at the University of Mantua. My thanks to them, I hope it is found interesting and no hard questions are asked in my absence. I’m hoping to refine the measure(s) and model at the EiP Conference in November and also at the ESD-Toolkit Customer Insight Working Group in Preston in October.

So, I’m not a lone voice crying in the wilderness, I’ve found a few wildernesses to cry out in!