Technology in the Public Sector

MCMS MetaManager

cScape have released a factsheet of their MetaManager for Microsoft Content Management Server. The MetaManager has been rolled out for cScape customers in Local Government, but could be used by any organisation using MCMS that has a need for enhanced metadata management and utilisation. The product is particularly relevant to any public body looking to comply with e-Governement Metadata Standards.

IT impact on productivity: 'substantial and quantifiable'

Technology investment has a substantial and quantifiable impact on business productivity, according to a series of reports from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) and the London School of Economics (LSE).

According to the ONS, manufacturing companies in the UK achieve an extra 2.2 per cent in productivity for each additional 10 per cent of employees using computers. In newer firms, this extra productivity effect rises to 4.4 per cent.

The effect associated with internet use is greater, with productivity rises of 2.9 per cent being achieved for each additional 10 per cent of employees using the Internet. Again, for newer firms the effect is larger.

Interestingly, one piece of research shows that US owned firms in the UK are more successful in exploiting Information Technology (IT) compared to all other firms, and IT accounts for much of their productivity advantage.

The title of the research report - 'It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do I.T.' - sums up pretty well the growing recognition within Government that you can't just throw IT at business problems and expect it to work.

The way IT is deployed within the business is vital to success and it appears that we've a lot to learn from the States about how this is done.

Search log analysis

A useful article on search log analysis from Lou Rosenfeld (known for his popular 'polar bear' O'reilly book on Information Architecture).

The queries that users type into the search box on your intranet or internet site are a valuable source of information - telling you what your users are looking for and what they find hard to locate by browsing.

Among other things, Rosenfeld's article discusses how search log analysis can be used to identify 'best bets' - a real quick win for improving search results (and an in-built feature of the SharePoint search).

If this technique is old news for you there is also an interesting discussion of the 'long tail' of lesser searched terms.

MondoSoft provide an application known as the BehaviourTracker, which analyses search logs for their own search product (MondoSearch). BehaviourTracker also works with products like SharePoint.

A slightly cruder approach for SharePoint owners is to analyse the IIS logs from a SharePoint Portal for page requests for the search page.

Full article: http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000382.html

Driving SharePoint user adoption

'4 Guidelines to drive SharePoint user adoption ' is a useful article from Gary Smith (Winapp Technology) on how to encourage users to adopt a SharePoint portal. I found it on Mark Harrison's ever-useful blog.

Getting users on your side is central to the success of a portal implementation. Nobody wants to end up with a 'SharePoint of the living dead'.

Garry argues that there are at least 2 natural disincentives for the information worker to centralise and share information:

• Indispensable users have developed considerable powerbases and positions of authority in the organization precisely because they have access to information that no-one knows or is able to find.
• It is simply a bother and takes too much time to keep submitting things to a portal, without even mentioning metadata etc. Most users are happier saving documents where ever and whenever they please.

So accordingly, the primary goal for every portal project should be to drive users to adopt SharePoint as the place to complete all their information work. And Gary provides 4 guidelines for achieving this.

1. Assimilate key users first.
2. Duplicate content is the enemy of the portal.
3. Authors don't care about consumers.
4. Productive users = successful portal

The four points are fairly solid and explained in detail in the article that leaves the reader with few questions.

Whether these 4 are the main issues in getting buy in is debatable. My Number 1 would be 'ensure your portal makes users more effective in their roles' – then its very difficult for them not to adopt it, unless they want to get left behind.

Office 12 - six benefits of the new open XML format

The next version of Microsoft Office will use an XML-based file format as the default format for saving Office documents.

The new file format will save pieces of a document, such as Word document or PowerPoint presentation in several XML files, which are then organised into a single ZIP-compressed package file.

Why is this such a good thing? Here are six likely advantages: 

1. Smaller file sizes - the use of the popular ZIP compression technologies to store documents should reduce their size making them easier to store and transport over email, web etc.
2. Better recovery - because of the number of data recovery technologies already targetting the ZIP format, corrupted files should be easier to recover.
3. Easier to check for malware - the new format should be easier to scan for viruses and other security hazards.
4. Better re-use - an open, documented XML schema will be easier to convert to other formats, such as compliant XHTML for access via a web browser.
5. Machine-readable business documents - the new format will make it easier to develop templates that effectively allow users to create XML documents using familiar tools like Word. These documents may be invoices, order forms etc., which can be read by business applications as well as being human-readable.
6. Improved searchability - the open standards will make it easier for search engine vendors to create effective search technologies to help your business manage and retrieve documents.

Office 12 will continue to support the old Office file formats and over time there are likely to be patches to allow earlier versions of Office to work with the new format.

Links:

A viewpoint from CMS Watch

InfoWorld article (includes explanation of file format from MS's senior XML architect Jean Paoli)

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)

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.

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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