This post began as a review of how well government websites are doing making their content available to mobile devices. I had looked at this in February last year, and had hoped that over those 12 months we might have seen an improvement. These hopes proved, as you might guess, somewhat optimistic. This exercise did, however, raise an important question: why is the .govt.nz domain so underdeveloped?
Despite the evidence and regular predictions about the central role that mobile devices will play in the future of the web, public sector agencies (most of them anyway) have yet to recognize this and build or adapt their existing sites to accomodate these users.
One obvious reason is that public sector agencies’ investment cycles are a lot longer than twelve months and that we will start to see mobile-friendly sites developed increasingly over then next 36 months. That may be the case, but it points at what I believe is the fundamental problem with the .govt.nz domain space: that the management of government websites is mostly considered to be a technical function.
These are not, however, technical issues. The technology has been developed, is already widely used and understood. It is a question of business managers understanding how they can use these tools to better achieve their outcomes.
One possibility
Let me give you an example. We know that the telephone is New Zealander’s preferred means of interacting with government. We also know that it is the channel that causes the most grief for customers (and hence materially impacts upon the agency’s customer satisfaction ratings).
Yet how many government websites offer real-time interaction via the web, using instant messaging, for example? None that I am aware of (happy to be contradicted, point to examples in the comments).
Think about the advantages. You still have people in the ‘holding pattern,’ waiting to interact with a human being, but staff can see the nature of the query/complaint and make a judgement about moving it up or down in the queue.
You can also track contact drop outs against the logged query/complaint and garner much more data about the effectiveness of the interactions, because it can all be stored and – more importantly, given the volume of data we are talking about, searched.
Now to really add public value, you could have the customer service representative tag the data as it is entered during the exchange, for example applying microformats to describe attributes like location and time, which would effectively create a rich dataset for the agency — and for any enterprising third parties, much like Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock.
The solution
The first couple of aspects of the scenario above are pedestrian in both conception and execution. The notion of introducing semantics to the process has the potential to transform the agency’s interaction with its publics.
As I suggested above, the lack of coordinated and strategic development of the namespace is because what are essentially communications issues are decided by technologists.
A small part of the solution is wresting back control of the way our agencies interact with their publics; the greater challenge is to understand the technology sufficiently to effectively engage with management and the technologists in these discussions. Otherwise we will be doomed to keep arriving just in time for the ribbon cutting…
Photo: Waponi
9 Comments
A few years back Molly H did a great presentation at web visions about the issues of developing in the mobile space (I’ve got the mp3 if your interested?).
In theory if/when mobile devices become the dominant way of accessing government information, web standards like 18.1 Minimum web browsers should come into effect. But the big issue with agencies right now is having adequate test suites for desktop clients (particularly those with IT departments that don’t want things like Windows 98 running IE5 on their networks because it’s ‘unsupported’ my Microsoft), let alone having to do mobile devices.
It isn’t just long investment cycles – I think you’d be surprised at how short the investment cycles are in some govt depts. The big issue is finding the skilled people to do the work when the volume of initiatives coming through the pipeline have stretched the existing resources close to breaking point. We have a tight labour market and having the ‘funding’ approved for an initiative is no guarantee that you will be able to carry it through in the short term, simply because there aren’t the skilled people with time available to do it. Those skilled people that are bogged down with work are also the very people who would be the ones to train new staff, hence without their availability there won’t be any hiring of inexperienced staff – catch-22. I don’t think public sector management have really got their heads around the requirements for building capability in this area as yet.
I’d suggest that setting up a queueing system for directing instant messages to multiple CSRs is not pedestrian. If you’re a small agency that gets only a few hundred calls a day then it might not be an issue, but larger departments…? Remember also that every new channel is an added cost and savings will not be immediate (if ever). Add in the fact that with the major sites for customer interaction we are talking about confidential information and things get more complex.
Having said all that, you’d expect that every major redevelopment of a site from now on would incorporate microformats into its design.
Pete, is it just not having testing suites? I wonder how many vendors recieve a statement of requirement that includes ‘handheld’ stylesheet?
Kerry: I completely agree about the capability issue, but have resigned myself to expect that, in a market this size, that will always be an issue for us to manage. Suggesting that implementing IM would be pedestrian was more a comment about the fact that neither requires any particular imaginative or technological innovation: funding is the primary ingredient (along with the desire to improve).
Thank you both for reading and for your thoughtful comments.
…So true Jason. Something I’ve come up against is the belief that supporting mobile devices is somehow gimmicky and a waste of tax payers money *despite* all evidence & predictions. It’s also not unusual for technologies like im, microformats and rss to be dismissed as geeky indulgences and hardly relevant (let alone useful) for the general public.
I’m interested in how we can help business managers think about users and how users want to interact with them. We definitely need more leadership, education and passion in this area.
I would be surprised to see any significant mobile development anytime soon. We still struggle to get away from agency brochure sites that are extremely difficult to use and which fail to meet GWSR (essentially, the quality measure).
Think about this for a moment: The basic building blocks for the web haven’t changed in 10 years. Sure, browser capability has, and development techniques should have, but there is still a lot of work produced that is simply rubbish. One agency I know of recently revealed that not one of their 74 public sites validated.
Testing is important – agencies need to have confidence that are getting a quality product from vendors and/or internal teams. I’m not talking about UAT or mobile/desktop/browsers suites here – we have web standards and GWSR, both of which are sufficient benchmarks – but we need QA of both technical implementation and UI/Usability concerns. I think QA is a role for the SSC – establish a crack web team tasked with *testing product* and *advising agencies on what to ask for*. Better yet, fill the team with some evangelists like Cj.
Skill is important – I think that a skill shortage is not limited to an agencies internal capacity (just think about the recent project to fall over). Skill shortage also relates to this articles assertion that business/communication decisions are being made in the wrong places – it is often a case of the lunatics running the asylum (to misquote Alan Cooper). Often what is commissioned is based on the poorly executed stuff that we see out there already.
We need some radical leadership in the magnitude of Cunliffe throwing down the gauntlet to the Telcos, and I think a centralized web/consultant team is the place to start.
A very interesting thread.
I would love to see more government departments using the internet and mobile to provide services and get closer to ‘customers’
Unfortunately I think there is a major cultural problem at work here. The internet and tools such as blogging are intensely open and democratic tools that encourage unfettered communication and freedom of expression.
Government bodies and departments, sadly, are anything but. Rightly, in many cases, they must protect individuals privacy and uphold all sorts of laws about treating and communicating with everyone equally and in proscribed ways (that will almost never include the internet or mobile).
But government bodies are also intensely political and about arse covering in the largest way possible. Few will make decisions and take responsibility immediately. There is always someone higher up the chain who needs to approve a decision or comment, ending ultimately in the in-tray of the minister.
Good luck. I hope those cultural barriers can be broken.
cheers
Bernard
Thanks Bernard. Your point about the hierarchical nature of public sector organizations ties together some of the points I would make in response to Cj and Terrence:
While this is true in theory, what happens in practice is that the real decision making happens much further down, either at a technical level or, worse, at an uniformed line management level. Everyone from there up just assumes that the person who is advising them . Alas, as Terrence points out, all too often the level of comprehension is negligible (or outdated) and there is little or no imagination to compensate.
The remedy is not necessarily a crack team of designers & developers that descends on an agency as soon as someone mentions the word ‘website’ in a meeting (though the idea of spandex is quite appealing), but the leadership that both Cj and Terrence are talking about.
This would involve communications people acknowledging that the user experience is central to the web platform and that their agency brand is about this experience not the livery on the site. Owning the channel and the business processes around it is the first step to seeing the well developed public affairs skills that these people have being translated into the sorts of strategies that can enliven the namespace.
At least that is the hope I am holding out…
This is certainly not what I had in mind. More along the lines of capacity building and improving quality through quality assurance. With better quality things like adding handheld CSS do become trivial.
I’m suggesting that given SSC are ultimately responsible for defining GWSR,they should also be responsible for ensuring agencies have the capacity to develop RFPs that ensure GWSR taken into account – in real terms, not as checklists items – and evaluate the products that agencies receive do as they say on the tin. In other words, SSC should engage at a resource, implementation and evaluation level as well as at a policy level.
Along with increasing the quality of public sector sites, other benefits around having this resource in public sector’s hands include: vendor neutrality (trust/transparency etc), public sector capacity and knowledge building, interim relief of skill shortage, cost reduction where it is impractical for an agency to acquire such resource in-house.
Thanks Terrence, I did somewhat misrepresent your views – purely in the interests of (light) comedic relief, of course.
Your proposal is an attractive one, but I don’t think that it is feasible. An organization of this size can’t really expect to take on that volume of work (74 sites from one agency?). We do have a programme of this type of engagement in place, Gateway, for multi-million dollar ICT projects, but most website are well outside that scope.
Perhaps a compromise would be for agencies to club fund the establishment and operation of this unit? This would still achieve the benefits that you list in your final paragraph and might go some way to navigating the governance issues which would otherwise be quite formidable.