I appreciated the work that Andrea Di Maio of Gartner did on comparing e-government metrics, which demonstrated their complexity (reported here).
As a proponent of true e-government metrics (rather than targets) I also liked the chart that signfied that 2008 was to be the year when e-government metrics finally made it.
However, this week’s Google gift was the fact that the Gartner gurus are now blogging and have been doing so for a couple of months! The main thing that grabbed my attention was Andrea commenting on the Italian government’s use of emoticons and describing it as an oversimplification. I couldn’t find the link he mentions but I found a working one here
In this instance, I think Andrea has got it right again. Its probably thinking of them as emoticons which does them no justice, they’re a little more than that if properly employed, but he is right that more than a three icon choice is needed to improve services, constructive feedback is needed, if we are to have a parsimonious way of measuring citizen engagement.
This ties in with another gartner-related quote from Maritz, customer experience specialists:
“The technology “fix” of CRM that promised improvements to the customer experience simply didn’t deliver. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in technology solutions, a 2006 survey found only that five percent of respondents strongly agreed that technology has improved service quality. In fact, Gartner claims that more than half of all new customer-related technology initiatives fail.”
Page 5 – “Delight or Defection; the Pivotal Role of People inside the Customer Experience” December 2006
If they fail we need to be prepared that a lack of co-production in the design, development or review is probably to blame. However, GovMetric and others are picking up the feedback using iconography as a starter and my current list of suppliers in the UK market is here (company-table-v3).
The Great E-mancipator 