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