Technology in the Public Sector

Take up of e-enabled services

A couple of interesting and related articles from e-Gov Monitor on the take up, by citizens, of digital channels to access public services.

Interview with Jim Fitzpatrick, Local eGovernment Minister

"The largest challenge facing the eGovernment programme will be take-up of the new and improved channels and services"

http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/1585

Government faces pressure to fund a large-scale marketing campaign for eGovernment Services:

Research from the eCitizen National Project on take up and marketing.

Only around 15 per cent of the public are using eGovernment services, but 46% are willing to use them. Figure that out!

http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/1471

Performance management with Business Scorecard Server

The efficiency agenda within the public sector means we're all looking for ways to improve performance and drive out inefficiency.

Identifying, tracking, analysing and acting on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is essential to a performance management strategy. Business Scorecard Server is a new server from Microsoft built for just such a purpose.

Business Scorecard Server (codenamed Maestro) is currently in Beta and expected to be released in Autumn 2005. The new server builds on the Business Intelligence components of Microsoft Office and SQL Server 2005 and exploits the ease of access and collaboration capabilities of SharePoint. All within a secure and structured technical environment.

If you have departments that are tired of accessing a dozen spreadsheets, databases and reports from LOB applications to get a picture of what goes on day-to-day and/or you have senior stakeholders that want easy access to an overview of the organisation's key metrics, with the ability to drill-down into the detail then you might want give Business Scorecard Server a look.

There's not much information out there on this server currently, but here are some links:

Short article summarising the key features and benefits: http://msdn.microsoft.com/isv/technology/bss/default.aspx

Some commentary and analysis:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/05/10/HNmaestro_1.html

http://sqljunkies.com/Article/3836846B-89D6-41B1-8036-A0337137BEDB.scuk

If you need more depth this presentation from Tech Ed 2005 gives an overview and provides some demos and technical background: http://microsoft.sitestream.com/teched2005/BIN/BIN301.htm (1h 8mins)

More on IPSV

I've learned that the date for completion of migration to IPSV has been floated as  December 2006. This information came direct from a presentation by Sheila Apicella; it means all local authorities and other public bodies using the e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS) should be using IPSV to tag information by then.

The ODPM has agreed that the IPSV is a recognised taxonomy and will meet the requirements of Local e-Government Priority Outcome R3. The current version of e-GMS (v3.0) mandates use of the GCL. But the next edition of it, expected in summer 2005, will instead require the IPSV to be used.

At cScape we''ve been doing some interesting work with search technology and IPSV.

Firstly, at least two companies that I know of offer technology for automating the selection of the correct  IPSV terms for tagging pages. We're looking at integrating these with general metadata management in Microsoft CMS to save content authors time and to improve the consistency of tagging.

Normally I find that automatic classification rarely lives up to expectations, but within a very clearly defined knowledge domain like this one it actually seems to work. We're avoiding the perils of complete automation by using the technology to suggest terms that the content author can either select to tag a page or ignore.

Secondly, IPSV includes non-preferred terms. These are terms that aren't the official terms used by information managers, but might well be in common usage. For example a preferred term might be 'abandoned vehicles', but a non-preferred (real world) term might be 'dumped cars'.

Site visitors will not necessarily search on preferred terms, so all that effort meta-tagging to improve search results might be wasted. However, if pages that are tagged with non-preferred terms are automatically tagged with non-preferred terms the chances of users finding what they are looking for are increased.

We've not completed the proof of concept on these two yet, but I'll post the outcome when we do.

Accenture report - Leadership in Customer Service

I've just read the new report from Accenture - 'Leadership in Customer Service: New Expectations, New Experiences'. The report is an impressive global survey of e-Government, in which Accenture make the case for a new vision of government service delivery.

The report is 108 pages long, so I won't try and cover it in depth here, but here are a few highlights.

I found the country case studies particularly interesting. I always saw the UK as quite advanced in e-Government, but according to Accenture's criteria the UK is merely a 'follower' (as opposed to 'trendsetter' or a 'challenger'). Canada leads the way in overall maturity of service delivery, followed by the United States and Denmark.

I was also intrigued by the 'telephone paradox', a term coined to describe the finding that, although the telephone is the most popular channel for accessing government services, it is consistently ranked by citizens as the least easy channel to use.

The 'telephone paradox' suggests that useability isn't the major issue when it comes to moving people from the telephone to channels like the web. However, we should seek to replicate some of the benefits that people see in using the phone in the way that we deliver services online.

Obviously it's hard to replicate, in a web interface, the responsiveness of talking to a human being over the telephone. But others perceived benefits of using the phone - such as dealing with an identifiable, named  individual - could be replicated through good CRM.

According to the report Canada has also been experimenting with combining web and phone with call-back features on line - thus combining web and phone. I've tried this with websites n the commercial sector with some success; an instant response from a customer service advisor gives a great impression and combined with a good website provides a powerful customer service tool.

e-Government part of a broader customer service agenda

Yesterday the Society of Public Information Networks (SPIN) held a conference centred around the subject of Local Authority websites.

I co-delivered a speech with Lindsay Ould (London Borough of Lewisham) on how to ensure that user need and business objectives are at the core of your site design and customer experience. 

The conference was entitled 'Useful, usable, used' and was attended by around 100 people from local government, community sector and other public services. The audience was mainly made up IT Managers, Corporate and Customer Services Policy Officers,e-Government Development Officers; and website practitioners.

A number of interesting themes emerged from the day:

• A few speakers argued, convincingly, that you can achieve a good customer experience without big investments in technology.
• In particular the need for a Content Management System was questioned by website managers that had performed well in the SOCITM Better Connected Survey. 'You can have a content management system without content management technology' was one comment.
• The need for e-Government to become part of a broader customer service agenda was also a strong theme, argued for by me and a number of other speakers.

I was encouraged by the strong emphasis on good content and service delivery, rather than the technology that enables it. I also liked the practical edge to many of the speakers comments - for example, the obvious, but important, insight that if you are going to improve access to a service by making it available online you'd better have the staff to cope with the increased uptake!

I hope that some of these laudibly pragmatic attitudes don't turn into a further lowering of horizons of what can be achieved in e-Government.

Other highlights were Stella Dextre Clarke and Sheila Apicella presenting on the newly released Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV, pronounced ips-vee) - a merger of the GCL, LGCL and Seemless vocabularies.

You can implement it instead of LGCL and GCL right now. Take a look at IPSV here.

I'll post a link to the presentations when they appear online.

Minister of Communities and Local Government to take on responsibility for e-Government

In the wake of the recent elections it's been reported that a  Minister for Communities and Local Government will be appointed of Cabinet rank.

"The Minister of Communities and Local Government, David Miliband, will be taking a close look at e-Government and the way that ODPM is involved (alongside Cabinet Office e-Government Unit and HM-Treasury / OGC especially).

This strengthening of the Ministerial team also aims to allow ODPM to play a wider role on cross departmental issues. With IEG 4, IEG 4.5 and some hefty projects needing implementation, hopefully things can start moving swiftly now that the election campaign is over.

Miliband will also be a central figure in shaping the future strategies for intermediaries delivering e-Government services."

Public Technology

News and comment on IT in the UK Public Sector

I'm a technology consultant based in London. Having worked around the UK Public Sector and E-Government for a couple of years I felt there was enough going around this area to warrant a blog that attempts to pull together the business and technology threads in this sector.

It's worth declaring a few biases from the start:

• I work mostly with Microsoft technologies and I'll be mostly tracking developments in this area. I'm not an M$ drone, but you'll not get much enlightenment from me if you want to know about the latest developments in Java or LAMP.
• I'm mostly into Portal Technologies; website, intranets, search and integration - that kind of thing.
• I'm a bit of a metadata geek - I'm seriously enthusiatsic about the idea of the semantic web and anything I can do in the here-and-now to help it along, I will. So E-GMS, E-GIF all that stuff that's my cup of tea.

So I suppose that if you've read this inaugural post you are either thinking 'this man is seriously boring' or 'OK I'll check this later and see if he posts anything interesting'.

Either way, my task over the next few months is to make this  a must-read for the (admitedly) niche audience that it is aimed at. If you happen to share some of the above interests, maybe you'll follow this blog and post your views.

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