I had to laugh today when Tim sent me the press release for Accenture’s latest report on e-government. It’s called “2007 Leadership in Customer Service: Delivering on the Promise.”
It’s ironic isn’t it. After all, my own DotP didn’t quite DotP, or at least not as intended. It didn’t even make it to its 4th birthday. And yet here we are again with the A folks using the same term (google says there are 324,000 instances of this phrase so plainly there are a lot of promises being made/broken). Apparently they’ve made it to ten or it might be eight reports, both numbers seem to come up. But it’s still unclear what the P is and whether it’s being taken or given.
The good news is that the UK has leapt into the top 10, 8 places behind Singapore. The report observes, however, that
Just under half (49 per cent) of UK public quizzed in the Leadership in Customer Service: Delivering on the Promise report said the standard of government services has remained the same – or become worse – over the last three years.
The report suggests governments are being challenged by newer technologies – such as email and SMS – replacing traditional communication channels, and are struggling as they shift their focus from offering front-end services to making sure they are adequately supported by back-end services.
The report states: “The time has come to create the infrastructure that closes the loop between expectation and experience.”
The recommendations for next steps are hardly earth-shattering
1. Build an actionable citizen-centric service vision
2. Build the enabling infrastructure to make the citizen-centric vision operational
3. Build the high-performing workforce that can drive the vision through to fulfillment
I like the triple use of build. Not buy. Build.
The sub-bullets under (2) are:
– Define the processes and workflows needed to reach the vision…
– …And don’t wait to get started putting them in place.
– Take advantage of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and shared services as flexible solutions to disparities in government infrastructures
It all feels so early 2000s.
Don\’t take this as a criticism, but the content management system was never going to fly, this was obvious on the shop floor, from anyone who interfaced with the supplier. God couldn\’t have pulled it off, because it violated one of my laws of software development.\”You can\’t beat the market; people like what they like. In general you can only make people know you do it faster, cheaper and better.\”At that time, every microsoft dev in the world wanted to use .Net as it was new, and for the VB6 crowd, absolutely revolutionary. No IT bod, except the old and stupid, are every going to be happy using non mainstream technology, because it\’s career death.I\’ve worked with them since, and they outsourced a load of development to India.Without sounding cliched, some of my good friends are Indian, but there\’s no chance at all of keeping control of a project when it\’s that far away. It\’s not intelligence that\’s the problem, the higher qualified Indians are cleverer than us, but the fact that if someone from a distant land was throwing money at me, I\’d take as much as I could. I\’m working at the moment where half the development is 11 hours away, and despite the fact that we all speak english, it\’s difficult.As to the front and backend dilemma, I spend half my time on a job answering questions like \”We could do it via Wap/SMS/telephone/Email/Magic etc.\” with the phrase, \”Whoa boy, let\’s just get it working with internet explorer first.\”Plus ca change, c\’est le meme chose, n\’est ce pas?I.