Australian government ePetitions compared to international models

Australians might be surprised to learn that the Australian parliament only agreed to formally accept ePetitions in July 2015.

That was five years after it was formally recommended to parliament and follows a trend towards epetitions set by other digitally advanced democratic nations, such as the UK and USA.

In September 2016 the Australian Department of Parliamentary Services launched its epetition site allowing people to create and sign epetitions at aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Petitions/House_of_Representatives_Petitions/Petitions_General - yes that is quite a mouthful.

I've reviewed Australia's site compared to comparative sites released in the US, UK and Canada to form some conclusions on how well we've done.

However, unfortunately for Australians, the model used for Australia doesn't measure up well.

UK - ePetitions

The UK's epetitions site launched in August 2011 at petition.parliament.uk and has been restructured several times over the last five years.

Today it is a sleek, easy to access platform that hides all the technical mechanics the UK parliament requires for petitions behind a usable and simple step-by-step process.

It's very simple to find and sign a petition, with the process for responses explained clearly on each petition's page. 

Sharing tools are embedded to make it simple to encourage others to sign. It's easy to view signatures geographically by electorate (great for parliamentarians and respondents alike).

The data for each petition is immediately available via a standards-compliant data format.

The process for creating new petitions is also simple and seamless.

It uses plain English and employs a range of assistive approaches to ease first-time petitioners through the process. This includes examples of how to write a petition and flagging information that will be required in later steps so the petitioner can pre-prepare.

The site uses text matching to find similar petitions so that a petitioner can choose to sign a pre-existing petition, rather than create a near-identical one - a step that saves effort for both petitioners and for the public servants who need to manage the system.

There's clear warnings when a petitioner reaches irrevocable steps, and the system supports and encourages sharing - to help the petitioner get the petition to audiences who may wish to sign.

All in all it's a solid and well-thought out system with excellent usability - very important when considering that most people rarely petition government and need a helping hand to navigate what can be a complex and seemingly irrational process for those who do not think like bureaucrats or politicians.

USA - WethePeople

The US's epetitions site is similarly five years old - launching in September 2011. Named WethePeople and located at petitions.whitehouse.gov, the site is structured differently, but is just as simple to use, as the UK's version.

While the site doesn't offer the same geographic mapping as the UK site does, it does provide very clear step by step instructions for both signing and creating petitions and is equally clear on the goal number of signatures required for consideration.

The government's responses to epetitions (which must reach 100,000 signatures to get a response) are clearly provided with the petitions themselves, making it easy to understand what was asked and how it was responded to.

The US system requires that people creating a petition must create an account - a small barrier to entry, but one that helps with screening. 

It also makes it easy to track repeat petitioners - a useful thing for a government, if slightly invasive in privacy terms for an individual.

Something I don't like about the site is that after creating an account it sends a confirmation email with a randomly assigned password in plain text. People who don't respond straight away could easily get caught out with identity theft, although the site does force you to change it after you confirm your email.

However when changing your address the site does provide an idea of how strong your password is and makes helpful suggestions on how to improve it (something I think all government sites requiring login should do by default).

Once a petitioner has an account they also get a dashboard to track their petitions, though unfortunately it doesn't also track petitions they have signed or autofill your details when you choose to sign a petition. This may be done for privacy reasons, but there's also huge convenience and utility in these steps.

The process for creating a petition is brilliant - laid out step by step.  

The ability to look at past successful petitions as examples is a nice touch and very helpful for first-time petitioners, and the filtering approach helps guides people to structure their petitions well. 

Later in the process petitioners also get to tag their petitions by topic, providing a useful way of filtering them to the appropriate agency and providing useful statistics for the government on the 'hot topics' for citizens.

The system doesn't have the matching of similar petitions as the UK system does, but nevertheless it's very polished and well executed.

Canada - e-Petitions 

Now the Canadian epetition system is interesting as it debuted in December 2015, less than a year before Australia's system. As such it hasn't had the same amount of time as US and UK sites to refine and restructure based on use. but has the opportunity to learn from their experiences to implement the best of both sites in a Canadian context.

The site is very simply named petitions.parl.gc.ca, similar to the US and UK epetition platforms, but has taken a different approach to either the US or UK sites.

There's no ability to see the latest petitions on the main page, users must use a search tool or click to see all live petitions. This shifts the propensity for people to browse and choose to sign by adding a small 'one click' barrier to the visibility of petitions.

When a user clicks on 'View all petitions', what they see doesn't really provide enough information to decide whether to sign. Another click is needed to view the details of any specific petition. However the screen does help people refine down to a topical area quickly, unlike the US and UK sites and the keywords by petition are useful, if perhaps put ahead of more useful information such as the title and summary of what a petition is asking.

The language, unfortunately, is a touch more bureaucratic than in the US and UK sites, with petitions titled by number and reference. These may be useful to bureaucrats, but have limited meaning for users and could have been hidden from petitioners and respondents.

Petitions provide a numerical breakdown of respondents by provinces, but no map view and no easy way to download the data without screen-scraping.

Responding to a petition is slightly more complex than in the US and UK epetition sites, with it being mandatory to provide an address and phone number as well as the usual name, email address and confirmation that you're really a resident of the country. The response form is also less friendly than the other sites, using now old-fashioned red asterisks to denote mandatory fields.

Creating a petition involves an equally complex sign-up form, where a user must avow they're a Canadian - so I've not looked into the creation process. I do anticipate that it would not quite be as sleek and refined as the US and UK versions.

The responses to petitions, like in the US site, include all petition information and those that have been responded to can be found easily through the top menu of the site. However the responses are provided as PDFs rather than within the page. This adds an extra step to the process of reviewing a response and most are only one page long, so I feel this is a poor approach, adding complexity with no benefit for users.

Australia - e-Petitions

Similar to the Canadian site, Australia's epetition site is quite new, so some rough edges can be expected. 

However I did not expect as many rough edges as I found, given there's some excellent examples above to learn from.

Also as the code for WethePeople is available as opensource, it is it relatively quick and easy to start with all the US's experience and build from there. 

To start with, Australia's epetitions site doesn't have a short web address like petitions.aph.gov.au, it is deeply buried in the site at www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Petitions/House_of_Representatives_Petitions/Petitions_General

Now it could be argued that as Senate, House of Representatives and Committees might all accept petitions but operate differently, it needed to be buried within each of these section of the site. 

However this could have been easily handled through a single multi-choice question in a petitions process, leaving all petitions to live at the same simple petitions.aph.gov.au address - without requiring petitioners to do the hard work of understanding how government operated.

On top of this the petitions process doesn't come up in the first page of search results when looking for 'petitions' - a critical but easily fixable mistake. 

This type of simple oversight dominates the entire Australian epetitions process, with it being pretty clear than the work was done with little reference to international benchmarks or usability testing.

Moving on to the actual processes, there's currently no petitions listed so it's not possible to analyse the process for signing a petition. I would have expected that the APH would have done some work to ensure there were a few petitions at launch, as other governments did. 

Clearly this wasn't the case, with the APH potentially taking more of a 'build it and they will come' approach rather than promoting the availability of the site widely before and during its launch. The impression that leaves me is that the APH didn't really want to create this site and doesn't really welcome petitions - they'd prefer to not hear from citizens or have the hard work of dealing with any resulting work.

Regardless of whether this was the case - the impression, or perception, is the thing - and the lack of any petitions to sign at launch reflects badly on the site.

Moving on to the creation process, the process for doing so is well explained in the first page (image above) - though with far more text than is necessary (as illustrated by the other epetition sites above).

Some of the steps on this page, and later pages, are not well communicated, using very subjective and bureaucratic terms - such as "Language (must be moderate)". 

I'm not sure what 'moderate' actually means and I doubt most Australians would be able to guess what a bureaucrat would consider 'moderate language'.

However using more words to explain these types of terms would be a mistake - instead the entire page should be written in plain English, aimed at about the 5th grade level. 

In fact I quickly tested the language on the main page, and it scored at a current grade level of 10.5 - well above what is considered acceptable. The subsequent creation pages score even higher, with terms bandied around that are rarely used outside of Canberra's bureaucracy and would serve to confuse, frustrate or even upset many Australians.

The process for filling in an epetition is OK, clearly stepped out, but with far too many steps (and words) on each page. There's no way to compare your petition with existing petitions - as the UK site does - though as there's no existing petitions to compare with I'm not too concerned about this as yet.

It will become a source of additional work for public servants and frustrations for users down the track however.

There's a lot more questions and information requested than in other epetition processes - with a lot of form fields to complete, which will effectively deter many people from establishing an epetition. Whether this is a good thing, however, depends on whether you're a bureaucrat first or a citizen first (I think it's a poor approach).

Nowhere could I see clarity on the thresholds at which you might get a response to a petition, making the entire process seem like a black box - a digital black box, but a black box nonetheless.

The entire process felt very cold and impersonal, unlike the UK and US experiences - which were warm and inviting.

Given parliament serves citizens, I think it is better to strive to leave users feeling they were important welcomed guests rather than nuisances and intruders into a hostile space.

This lack of warmth was particularly characterised by the final 'thanks for submitting a petition' page - which neither thanked the petitioner, nor gave them a feeling they were important and valued. 

Even the title of the page remained 'Request a new e-petition' rather than thanking the petitioner for their engagement in Australia's democracy.

Given how often politicians and public servants complain that Australians are disengaged from politics and democracy, the way this entire epetition creation process was constructed makes it very clear that the government itself holds a lot of responsibility for pushing people away, rather than welcoming their contribution.

Summary

So given my review of the four epetition processes, from Australia, Canada, the UK and US, I can say that I'd happily and enthusiastically recommend both the US and UK approaches, slightly favouring the UK due to it's maps and sharing tools.

Canada's site is OK for a first attempt. It doesn't appear to have learnt a great deal from the US and UK experiences and asks more than it needs from citizens, but it remains usable and functional if not inviting.

Unfortunately Australia's epetitions site is a very poor effort, and reflects poorly on the government, our public service and Australia's claims of being innovative and digitally progressive.

About the most positive thing I can say about it is that at least we now have the site - so there's a starting point to improve from.

However any competent usability designer would not have built the site in the way it has been built - and it seems more of a 'tick and flick' developed with internal resources on little or no funds (not that it would have cost a great deal to have done a good job).

I'm very disappointed at the APH's efforts - and have created an epetition for people to sign accordingly (though I doubt it will make it through the APH's scrutiny process - which is far more involved than for any other jurisdiction compared).

I truly hope the APH spends more time looking at benchmarks internationally and can convince the government that epetitions are a key interaction tool with citizens, so having them feel invited and effective is critical for supporting a positive view of government.

I'll be looking in on the site from time to time to see how its going - and would happily help the APH improve the site if asked (in fact I reached out last July, but never heard from them).

This isn't just a box that government has to tick, it's a vital avenue for citizens to engage with government and an advanced democracy like Australia should recognise the importance of doing it well.

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Improvement in governance is the goal, innovation and transformation are simply techniques to help it along

Over the last year in Australian government there's been increasing rhetoric around transformation (primarily digital) and innovation.

This has come both from the political level, particularly since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister, and from the administrative level, as the Secretary's Board and an increasing number of senior public servants have internalised these terms within their approach to gain funding and support for their activities.

I'm a big support of innovation within government. Where government seeks to improve internal efficiency and external effectiveness, innovation - as a technique for exploring, testing and trialing new approaches - is a key strategy for achieving improvement.

In my view digital transformation is part of this innovation track, with a particular focus on using digital technologies, and the strategies and tactics they enable, to help improve governance and operations across the public sector.

As such both innovation and digital transformation are important techniques that should form part of the 'toolkit' of every public sector employee.

However, in all this rush to secure innovation rushing and transform service delivery via digital tools, public servants and politicians alike must ensure they focus on the goals they are seeking to achieve, not simply the (shiny new) tools they are using to achieve them.

The goal - as it has been for hundreds of years - is to improve the operations of government and ensure that, within the budgets available, governments deliver the best possible experience and, particularly, outcomes, for their 'owners' - citizens.

Innovation is not the goal, it is a method used to achieve the goal, whatever that might be.

Similarly digital transformation is a technique for shifting services between delivery or processing channels in order to deliver more convenient and effective outcomes for the service recipient, potentially with the secondary goal of a more cost-effective, reduced-error service delivery approach for the provider.

Within all the rhetoric abut innovation and digital transformation we've heard from governments, and with the large amount I expect we'll continue to hear this year, keep in mind the end goal - improving government efficiency and effectiveness.

Innovation and transformations do not, by themselves, improve government. They are simply techniques and can be implemented both well and badly, depending on the people, culture and environment they are employed within.

Indeed in certain cases innovation can make things worse - harder, slower, less reliable - or have unforeseen consequences that end up costing government more, and reducing its effectiveness overall.

So look for the outcomes of innovation and digital transformation.

Does an agency's innovation approach reduce costs, reduce error rates, increase satisfaction or improve outcomes for the services and systems to which it is applied?

Last year we heard the talk about innovation and digital transformation. This year we'll start seeing the first outcomes from some of the most highly funded agencies and offices tasked with these techniques.

This year, 2016, will be the test of whether government agencies in Australia are effectively implementing innovation, shifting their culture and administrative biases to facilitate successful innovation and resulting in real improvements in citizen welfare and government operations.

I hope we hear the successes shouted from the rooftops.

Silence can only mean that this has been a failed experiment, with senior public servants using innovation as a way to buffer declining budgets rather than make measureable improvements in how Australian government operations.

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New data report signals a major shift in data thinking in the senior Australian public service

While successive Australian governments have touted 'evidence-based policy', a significant ongoing challenge within Australia's public service has been generating or accessing the right data at the right time - particularly across agencies - for actually testing policy assumptions and following a more agile policy development process.

I've personally witnessed the challenges within agencies of being able to locate useful and usable data for program design and delivery assessment, and the mechanics for sharing data between agencies, requiring formal agreements and long discovery and lead-times.

One of the more signficant side-effects of the open data revolution has been to highlight to agencies how little they know about the data they already collect and hold, who owns it (agency or external parties) and how hard it can be to share productively between agencies, let alone with the public.

A significant initiative this year was the commissioning of an internal data report by the Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, named the Public Sector Data Management report.

This report was designed to help the Australian Public Service (APS) understand its internal data landscape and recommend steps that could be taken to improve how data is generated, managed, discovered, shared and therefore used in policy and program development and evaluation.

Put simply, if the APS can get its approach on data right, suddenly it would become far clearly to both internal and external stakeholders how effective various government programs were, and clarify policy gaps and opportunities.

This internal report, now released publicly under Creative Commons licensing, offers a glimpse into how effectively data has been used in the APS, and recommends a strong series of measures to strengthen data collection, sharing and use.

If anything speaks to the commitment within the APS to use and share data more effectively, this report does. It's worth not only a read, but a close study.

The Public Sector Data Management report is now available online via the data.gov.au blog at blog.data.gov.au/news-media/blog/public-sector-data-management.

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Presentation on digital citizenship, user experience & the emerging role of libraries

The other week I was in Wellington, New Zealand for the international Linked up, Loud and Literate: Libraries enabling digital citizenship conference.

Below is my presentation from the day, including the story of a recent customer experience with an Australian government agency.

For other presentations from the day visit nsla.org.au/digital-citizenship-2015.

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Government digital service designers need to start thinking with their stomachs

Traditionally governments have taken cues from banks and social networks for innovative ways to design online services to make them easier to use.

However it may be time for public servants to think about online service design with their stomachs.

I don't know how many public sector digital design professionals have visited McDonalds lately, but the new 'Create your taste' service provides an interesting approach to digital design.

Using relatively new touchscreens deployed in a number of stores, the interface used for building hamburgers employ a number of innovative navigational and selection approaches to create a usable and enjoyable experience.

I've taken several colleagues in and bought them a meal just to watch how they learn the interface and interact with the menu while designing their perfect meal.

None have needed any support to get started, with the menu providing a simple and intuitive way to progressively select ingredients.

All have found the experience a pleasant one - to the extent where one colleague recently went into a McDonalds seeking a 'create your taste' experience, but left when it didn't have a touchscreen.

Sure the McDonalds experience is just about designing a meal (although designing salad could be considered 'rocket' science), but the lessons around ease of use and delivering both a usable and enjoyable experience are consistent across all kinds of service delivery.

Yes many government services may be complex, but that doesn't justify delivering a complex user experience. It simply means that more work is required to break down the process into easy steps, drop any unnecessary questions and make it clear upfront what people need in order to complete the process in one go.

If government can make online services appealing and remove the need for people to switch channels to complete a process, there's the potential for vast cost savings in face-to-face and phone transactions, plus the potential to reduce error rates.

Of course, the McDonalds example isn't the only one government service designers should be considering.

Dominos has taken a very interesting approach to real-time pizza tracking, from being made, through cooking and delivery to the customer's door. The example, highlighted by The Mandarin, is already being taken on board by the federal Department of Human Services, which hopes to make more Centrelink services just as simple to access and just as clear to their clients.

So if you're designing digital services for government, you may wish to take a long lunch or two to check out some of the digital service design being pioneered across different food establishments.

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No it's a not appropriate to load test on your citizens in production - particularly when it's a critical service

The last week has seen a range of major issues for the Australian Government's new MyTax service.

As reported across both traditional and social media, people using MyTax to file their tax returns have experienced shut-outs, had the process freeze when they were almost complete and had it fail to autofill their pre-saved details.

MyTax is an online version of the eTax software which had been the primary way for people to digitally complete their tax returns for the last fifteen years. eTax improved year on year and had enormous take-up. In all respects it was a major success for the ATO.

This is the first year the Australian Tax Office has deployed the MyTax system and integrated it with MyGov. While the intention was, and is, good - to give Australians a single way to validate themselves with multiple government agencies - the implementation in this case hasn't withstood the real world.

This isn't a unique experience and it isn't limited to government. We've seen it with certain banking services, with retailers (particularly on a certain contrived Australian online shopping day each year), with A-grade games (such as SimCity) and with a range of other online services such as Apple maps.

In fact this issue is relatively rare, in comparison to the private sector, in government, with the last major issue of this type internationally being with healthcare.gov in the US, and the last I recall in Australia being with the MySchools site launch.

This type of issue will happen from time to time. Unforeseen bugs or network issues, denial of service attacks or other environmental issues can bring down even the most robust service, particularly at launch.

In every one of these cases there's a backlash from customers - and in every one of these cases the organisation responsible is judged based on how they manage and recover from the disaster.

In the MyTax case, while the ATO were probably aware of the risks, and may even have learnt some lessons from several of the issues highlighted above, it appears they're still struggling to manage and recover from the situation.

When asked about the siituation the CIO of the ATO, Jane King, wrote, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, that "Capacity planning and testing was completed as part of the rolling out of the new digital design, however due to the complexity of our environment, production is always the real test."

I read this as her saying that while they did conduct testing, they were actually relying on real citizens, at real tax time, to fully evaluate how the MyTax system would perform.

Just as the UTS professor John Leaney, quoted in the SMH article above, says - this type of statement just isn't good enough.

"We're not in the 1950s; we're not even in 1990s, we've learnt a lot and from what we've learnt we apply the techniques for proper capacity modelling," Leaney said. "There should have been much better testing; it's not something you should learn the hard way on a major government system."

The ATO needs to do better at risk planning around situations like this. It needs to test capability properly and not hide behind the 'too many users' defense.

Government agencies need to carefully watch and learn from this experience - and learn the right lessons.

The first lesson is to conduct appropriate capacity testing. Look at the ABS's implementation of eCensus and the level of testing and resilience it put in place the first time eCensus was used in 2006. The ABS gave a great presentation on the topic, which I attended, which highlighted the risk mitigation steps they'd taken - from capacity testing through to multiple redundant systems and real-time monitoring with developers on standby and fallback manual systems in place.

The second lesson is to not release major systems at a time when they are going to come under a huge load. Release a new tax system in February or March, or after tax time in October, giving time to shakeout the production system and address issues before it hits peak load.

The third lesson is to avoid releasing major systems. Instead release smaller, but useful, services and progressively integrate them into a major new service, testing each carefully as they go. This is how Facebook totally replaced its back-end without any disruption to people's use of the service - modularly upgrading aspects of the service until it was completely done.

The final lesson is to plan your recovery before your system fails. Design a failover plan for what happens if the system doesn't work for people, a manual solution if required. The ATO should direct anyone with issues to a hotline where they can complete their tax return over the phone, or via screen sharing, so no-one is left waiting for days or in a position of financial distress due to not receiving a tax return fast.

I feel for the ATO (particularly their ICT team) and don't blame them for the issues they're having with MyTax, however I do hold the agency responsible for how the ATO recovers from this disaster.

They need to stop defending their implementation of MyTax and focus on ways to meet citizen needs - even outside the MyTax system - to ensure that the 'tax returns get through'.

Otherwise this issue could turn into another Apple maps-style disaster, or even worse, as there's no 'competitor' to the ATO that citizens can turn to to complete their tax returns. At least, not yet...

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Digital Disruption - an interview with Marie Johnson

This is the first in a series of interviews I'm doing as part of Delib Australia's media partnership with CeBIT in support of GovInnovate. I'll also be livetweeting and blogging the conference on 25-27 November.

View other posts in this series.

Marie Johnson, Managing Director of
the Centre for Digital Business

A few weeks ago I sat down with MarieJohnson to discuss her presentation at GovInnovate and the thinking behind it.

Marie is currently the Managing Director and Chief Digital Officer of the Centre for Digital Business, and as a passionate technologist and innovator has had career that has spanned Executive rolls in the corporate and public sectors.

She now advises senior public servants and corporate executives on the new capabilities required by business, government and society to meet the challenges and opportunities of the digital age.

Marie says that digital has been truly disruptive to society and is one of the most serious challenges to government administration in a century.

She believes there’s two forms of disruption, unpredictable and predictable.

The unpredictable kind includes real breakthroughs in technology and new and unique emerging business models that no foresight could have predicted.

The predictable kind result from a series of incremental changes over a relatively long time – a ‘long tail’ of disruption based on the evolution of known technologies and business models.

While unpredictable disruption is exactly that – unpredictable and therefore difficult to plan for, the predictable kind gives organisations with the appropriate horizon scanning approaches an opportunity to prepare.

In her view government hasn’t been paying enough attention to predictable forms of disruption, “some innovations have been brewing for awhile and should not be disruptive to government where it has been monitoring and horizon scanning.”

Marie worries that government hasn’t taken all the steps necessary to adequately prepare for known trends,

“Let’s have a look at, say, the government online strategy in 2000. It looked at moving everything online while maintaining face-to-face and hard copy channels.

The strategy in 2013 said exactly the same thing – placing all high volume transactions online, but keeping hard copy transactions as well.

There’s been no progression in strategy over that time, and implementation over the period has focused on channel switching, moving services and forms online with little business transformation.”

Marie says this could be because digital hasn’t been disruptive enough – governments in Australia have been able to stave off transformational change by creating workarounds to existing systems and processes.

However the longer transformational change is delayed, the more expensive it becomes and the more likelihood there is of ageing system failing and creating far greater disruption for governments and society.

This risk grows as governments fragment their service delivery channels, attempting to maintain existing approaches while also seeking to exploit emerging channels to citizens.

She believes there’s a real opportunity at the moment for governments to be transformational in their thinking, not just linear, making interactions with government more intuitive and seamless.

For instance, Marie says, “agencies should be required to declare what they are going to put online, and what they will be taking away.”

Marie used the example of car registration stickers. Now that police have number plate scanners and integrated registration databases, there’s little need for drivers to display a sticker on their windscreen providing details of their car registration.

She says that most drivers’ license authorities in Australia have now abandoned registration stickers, removing a lot of the process and policy that supported the issue, printing and management of the sticker process.

“Another example is in the work I did with Immigration. We took away the need to have a paper visa label in passports to enter Australia.”

Marie says that Australia didn’t require paper visas, but was issuing about two million of them a year due to a range of reasons including a preference by some travellers who wanted to have a paper visa as a tourism souvenir and proof of their visit.

This process involved substantial expense – the design and printing of visas, their storage and distribution, staff time in sticking them in passports and the overhead of having people come to Australian embassies Immigration posts to get them.

She says that after a review process to understand the extent of the cost of paper visas and the corresponding impact in focusing on electronic ones, the decision was made to set a price signal for paper visas.

Marie says that “the government passed legislation requiring a payment to get a paper label – the electronic visa is still required. Now the issuance of paper visas is almost negligible – saving printing, storage space, staff time, processing and more.”

Marie believes there’s many areas in government that could benefit from transformational rather than linear adoption of technology – changing the way systems and processes work, rather than simply replicating them digitally.

She also believes that the notion of citizen-centricity needs more consideration, “there is no citizen-centricity in government as every agency has a different viewpoint and interaction with citizens.”

Instead, she says, we need to have a discussion about what services we can replace or take away, and how we inform citizens about doing so.

“This isn’t about cutting essential services, but removing unnecessary complexity that feeds on itself.”

She sees this issue in how government defines and manages ‘ICT’ projects,

“Look at audits and capability reports over the last 15 years on government “ICT projects” – how they have failed to deliver, have been very expensive and, on occasion, led to policy failure.

We’re still having the same findings today – how can that be? Why hasn’t government improved and learnt from the past?”

In reality, she says, these are not ICT projects, they are focused on policy and service delivery and have simply been defined as ICT as they involve the use of technology to automate and integrate policy and service delivery.

“So when the Audit office looks at them and there’s a capability review, it looks at them primarily from an IT perspective and can overlook the real reasons for project failure or who should be updating and changing their approach.”

Marie says that agency ICT teams in government are under enormous stress, struggling under an increasing load of business as usual work, maintaining existing systems, with limited capital budgets for replacing legacy systems.

She says that many ICT teams are reaching the point where they have little or no capability to able to maintain existing systems, implement new business projects and innovate, “I think this is one of the challenges for the APS.”

She also says that the whole issue around the client/citizen experience has only recently started to be looked at.

“In the recent egovernment strategy, there is no mention of the client experience. Instead it speaks of heavy and light IT users and is very much a production view rather than looking at what that means for the delivery of policy and citizen experience.”

Marie says her question to agencies is, “can that egovernment strategy support the new welfare reforms from the government? My view is that it probably can’t.”

Marie believes government needs to focus more on becoming a platform, as increasing social complexity and advancing technology blurs and removes the lines between traditional portfolios.

“Where we have the connected car, RFID chipped livestock generating data and highly pervasive connected services – what does this mean for government services and government policy?”

“Rather than having each agency doing their thing independently and in a self-sufficient manner, like factories in the early industrial age, government needs to become more of a utility and a platform - actively sharing skills across policy and service delivery areas, rather than persisting as ‘stove-piped’ bureaucracies.”

Marie sees one of the biggest current areas of disruption as being in finance, with emerging mobile peer-to-peer payment models, crypto-currencies and crowd-lending already beginning to disrupt traditional banking and transaction models.

“We have a lot to learn with what is happening in growing markets such as Kenya, where innovative models of payment delivery are changing how financial systems and currencies operate.”

She says that in Kenya, a country with little in the way of infrastructure, phone-based peer-to-peer payments through a network of payment providers, called M-PESA, has become a leading characteristic of their economy.

Marie believes Australian bureaucrats need to look at how nations beyond the anglosphere are addressing modern challenges. She says there’s many areas in our government where public policy innovation could occur through learning from what’s happening in other countries.

In particular Marie says governments need to broaden the scope and range of inputs on policy development.

She discussed a case study from the UK’s Great Ormond Street Childrens’ Hospital (GOSH), which during the 1990s was trying to understand the very high mortality rates for surgery in congenital heart disease.

Doctors identified one high risk area being the patient’s transfer from the operating room to the ICU.

They identified this complex task as being analogous to that of a pit stop in Formula One, and doctors from GOSH visited a pit crew in action in Italy to gain insights into how hospital procedures could be improved.

In a pit stop a lollipop man waves in the car and oversees all the work done to get it back on the track. All the mechanics and technicians have clearly defined roles to perform concurrently, designed so as not to interfere with each other.

The doctors videotaped the handover process in GOSH and sent it to be reviewed by the Formula One team. Out of this analysis came a new handover procedure.

The anesthetist was given the same role as the lollipop man, to step back and look at the big picture, making safety checks.

These changes led to significant reduced errors and reduced mortality rates.

Marie says this type of cross-industry learning is vital for government – looking beyond traditional sources of advice and support, “Agencies can’t keep doing the same things and consulting the same people. We need to confront digital disruption.”

Finally Marie said that government should offer a user experience that is on par with the very best in any other domain.

She believes the reason this doesn’t happen is that there is a massive capability gap in government in what she calls ‘capability architecture’.

Marie says that different parts of government, agencies and groups in agencies do their own jobs well, however there is no one specifically trained, mandated and responsible for ensuring those jobs all align and fit into the larger architecture of a policy or service.

Instead, she says, they end up being connected together by manual workarounds, third parties and individuals accessing the services.

“In other words government is creating wonderfully designed parts, but not flawless systems.”

She sees a place for what she calls a ‘Transformation Commission’, responsible for future scanning and aiding agencies to adopt transformational techniques.

In conclusion Marie believes that that fossilised ICT systems that are not fit for purpose for the future are becoming a critical concern for agencies.

However if government can adopt a transformational approach to policy and service delivery, improve internal and external collaboration, improve its trend detection and reaction, and connect all these disparate threads together, Marie sees a much brighter future ahead.

You’ll be able to hear more from Marie at GovInnovate on 25-27 November.

More of Marie’s thinking is available through her blog posts, including:

• The Digital Disruption of Government https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140406120640-28199609-the-digital-disruption-of-government?trk=mp-reader-card
• Calling for Digital Disruption - Not Business as Usual https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140505143938-28199609-digital-disruption-not-business-as-usual?trk=mp-reader-card
• Digital Disruption & Welfare Reform https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140812035825-28199609-digital-disruption-welfare-reform?trk=mp-reader-card
• Digital Disruption Seen through 100’s of Audits & Reviews. https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140428161740-28199609-what-do-100-s-of-audits-reviews-inquiries-media-reports-over-the-past-decade-have-in-common?trk=mp-reader-card
• Not Even a Federal Budget Can Stop Digital Disruption https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140521000719-28199609-not-even-a-federal-budget-can-stop-digital-disruption?trk=mp-reader-card

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What should agencies do when online services change their terms of use?

Governments around the world now rely on social media services to reach and engage citizens, disseminate information, to monitor what people are saying and source intelligence to help address crises.

Many businesses also rely on digital channels for revenue and engagement reasons.

So what happens when an online service that an organisation uses updates its terms and conditions in a way that gives them rights that are uncomfortable for an agency or business - such as when a service claims ownership over anything published on its service, or takes an unlimited right to people's personal information?

Organisations can choose to stop using such a service, however it can be difficult to do so.

Firstly the practicalities of removing all the legacy data you've saved on the service - be it posts, presentations or documents - can be tricky. Some services may not even allow you to delete, or keep copies in the background.

Secondly organisations will need to find another place - an acceptable place - to put all the content they removed - noting that they may have to move again if a second service changes its terms.

Thirdly there's the issue of abandoning the organisation's community. Both the people who were already using the service and used it to interact with the organisation and the people who joined the service specifically to interact with the organisation. How does the organisation access them if it's not using the service anymore?

If you think this is just a theoretical exercise, sorry - we've seen this type of issue before, when online services have modified their terms and faced a huge backlash from their users.

And I think we're about to see it again with the release of the new LinkedIn and Slideshare terms.

LinkedIn recently changed the Terms of Use for all of its properties (including SlideShare which they own) to state, in part (bold italics are mine):

2.2. License and warranty for your submissions to LinkedIn 
You still own what you own, but you grant us a license to the content and/or information you provide us. As between you and LinkedIn, you own the content and information you provide LinkedIn under this Agreement, and may request its deletion at any time, unless you have shared information or content with others and they have not deleted it, or it was copied or stored by other users.
Additionally, you grant LinkedIn a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, any information you provide, directly or indirectly to LinkedIn, including, but not limited to, any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques and/or data to the services, you submit to LinkedIn, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.

What does this mean in plain English?

The first bit sounds OK "You still own what you own, but you grant us a license to the content and/or information you provide us." That's pretty standard for an online service. They need a license to publish the material online on my behalf, so no problems there.

However when an oganisation says that I am granting them "a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right", red flags start to fly.

Anything that is irrevocable, global, perpetual and free is potentially likely to cause issues at some point down the track - but the term by its wording removes any ability to retract that right, such as by deleting a file or discontinuing my account.

The next part is even worse - the right LinkedIn and Slideshare is taking (on an irrevocable, worldwide basis) is to not only display my presentations or information, but to "copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialize,  in any way now known or in the future discovered, any information you provide, directly or indirectly to LinkedIn".

In other words, I may own the original work, but LinkedIn can make a derivative work, publish it and then charge people for it and I can't do a thing about it. Suddenly any slides I've put up on Slideshare with useful data becomes a revenue stream for them - and I lost my recourse by publishing it on their service, even if I did so before they changed their terms.

Not only this, but they don't only get the right to take my slides, delete a few and sell the rest, they can also turn them into any any format and monetise them as well. If I told a good story in a slideshow, LinkedIn could publish it as a book, if I published a slide with the design for a cold fusion reactor, LinkedIn could build the reactor and sell it - paying me nothing in return.

Now that's scary - but it even gets worse... "including, but not limited to, any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques and/or data to the services"

So if I publish a presentation about my new start up concept to Slideshare, now LinkedIn can take my concept or technique and use it themselves, royalty-free, in any way they see fit.

And they never have to compensate me, or even tell me that they've done it (per "without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.")


Any organisation with intellectual property or data should carefully consider whether they're prepared to continue to use Slideshare or LinkedIn to publish information about their services, products, potential products or data - because simply by publishing it in one of these platforms, LinkedIn takes ownership.

Even worse, as their new terms came into force when they were published, anything you've already published on these platforms is now theirs.

I'm going to be far more careful about how I use Slideshare and LinkedIn in future - and will be advising the organisations I work with to similarly think carefully before they publish anything on these channels.

Any government agency or business who wants to retain control over their own content - including whether it can be copied, restructured and sold by an online service - should now be very careful about publishing in either LinkedIn or Slideshare.

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A look into the mind of John Miri

Yesterday I had the opportunity to catch up with John Miri, the former Deputy to the State CTO for Texas, following his presentation at Sitecore's Digital Citizen Engagement event in Canberra.

John is also presenting in Melbourne today, and in Perth next week.

The first thing that struck me about John is how different he is from the stereotype of a government IT professional.

Personable, approachable and possibly the only tea drinker left in the US, John was trained in physics but pursued a career in IT after it was pointed out to him that there were more career opportunities in IT than science.

He came late to government, spending a number of years founding and working in early-stage start-ups before making the leap to public service in 2005, as Director of E-Government and Web Services for the State of Texas, reporting directly to the State CTO.

In that role John was responsible for shepherding the TexasOnline.com program (now texas.gov), implementing 829 new online services, and leading to 83 million citizen financial transactions, with more than $5 billion online revenue.

John is now Editor-In-Chief for the Center for Digital Government and principle of Bluewater Technology Services, a technology consulting company.

John believes that government is at an interesting crossroads - still applying governance principles from the 19th and 20th centuries, while trying to rapidly adapt to the 21st.

He talked to me about the vision that the founders of the US had for their nation, a participatory democracy where citizen involvement in governance didn't end with their vote, where citizens were empowered and supported to contribute to civic life.

John says that with today's technologies it is now possible for societies to realise this kind of vision - to reshape governments to be more participatory without losing the strong institutions and traditions that make democracy possible.

We discussed how government institutions are designed to maintain the status quo, the value of bureaucratic processes in maintaining stable, safe and secure societies, however these strengths can also become weaknesses when politicians and public servants stop asking 'what is the goal of government' and focus on repeating the processes in government - resisting change from within or without.

John asked the question 'what is the role of citizens in delivering government services?' saying that governments need to begin considering citizens as stakeholders and engaging them in the same way agencies engage expert panels, companies and lobby groups.

He also commented on how government's tendency to silo problems and attempt to solve them individually is failing - today's problems are complex and multifaceted, crossing traditional ministerial portfolios and requiring complex and collaborative solutions.

John argued that the current structures in government are poorly suited to solving these problems, and our reliance on subject matter experts - rather than problem solving experts - meant that many problems are being seen through specific lenses and perspectives that made them difficult, if not impossible to solve.

He gave the example of US state road taxes on petrol - designed to cover the cost of maintaining roads. As cars have improved their efficiency, travelling far further - and doing more road damage - on the same amount of petrol, the gap between the funds the tax raise and the maintenance cost has been growing.

John asked a group of road policy experts in government about this issue, and their response was that the solution was simple - raise road taxes. His comment to me was that while the experts may think this was simple to do, it wasn't simple to get tax increases through political processes or sell their value to the public - more participatory processes and more innovative solutions were needed for the long-term.

He said that the increasing size of many of the complex problems that face government today mean that the odds are in the favour of those who advocate for more participative government and Government 2.0.

As traditional approaches to problem solving fail, due to agency silos, expert bias and limited community involvement, governments will be forced to look towards more innovative solutions - involving citizens and reshaping bureaucratic processes.

John also said that digital was an opportunity for governments to do more than simply replicate their business processes online. Rather than mimicing or tweaking paper-based workflows and forms for online use, agencies should use the opportunity to reinvent their business processes.

This involves questioning every assumption - what information is needed, when and how is it needed, how should it be stored, actioned and how should citizens be informed and engaged throughout the entire process.

John says that agencies that simply replicate existing processes online are unlikely to realise the full benefits in cost-savings, accurate completion and citizen satisfaction - an automated mess is still a mess.

He says there are no shortage of example of how technology has transformed business processes and the situation is no different in government. If agencies and politicians can focus on the goals and outcomes they are working towards, rather than bury themselves in repeating the same processes they've used for decades.

John also suggested that a reinvention approach allows room for innovations in how government services are delivered. For example as train timetables become digitalised, why should trains runs at the same time every day?

Would it be possible to adjust train schedules on a flexible basis, managing it like an electricity grid, based on the number of travellers and communicated via electronic messaging boards.

He also asked whether child protection services could be radically reinvented to provide 24/7 access to case workers for children in need. Could a single contact phone number, SMS and email address be used to route case workers to where they are needed most, using GPS and mobile devices to ensure they had the information they needed at all times to maximise their efficiency and protect more children from harm.

In conclusion John was of the view that egovernment, Government 2.0 and the rise of digital citizens who wish greater participation in the democratic process, should not be seen as a threat to traditional democratic institutions - we're not trying to add a third house of parliament.

Instead he said that these movements and emerging technologies should be embraced as a way to realise the original intent and goals of government - to represent, serve and involve citizens. 

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Free introduction to codesign event with TACSI in Canberra on Monday 29 April - register now, limited spots

I've managed to organise with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), for two of their leading codesign practitioners to provide a presentation on codesign (a highly collaborative approach to community engagement) in Canberra from 6pm on Monday 29 April 2013.

TACSI, which was seed funded by the South Australian Government, has led a number of successful service and policy codesign projects with the South Australian and Victorian governments, and has some deep insights into how and where to use codesign to support community engagement, service and policy development and government communications.

The event is being held in Acton at Entry 29, Canberra's newest co-working space, and is free to attend (with drinks provided), however there's limited places for attendees.

If you want more information, or to RSVP, go to: http://codesignatgov20canberra.eventbrite.com/

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But we're the experts! Why the 'internal expert' democratic governance model is gradually failing and what can be done about it.

Most public sector agencies are designed as centres of expertise on policy and service delivery.

By gathering, or training, experts in a given topical area and marshalling and directing this expertise to resolve specific issues and goals, agencies have been designed to design and deliver effective and sound policy and service delivery solutions to governments for communities.

Sure these powerhouses of expertise consult a little on the fringes. They access academia and business to provide 'fringe' expertise that they cannot attract into their agencies and engage with NGOs, community groups and individual citizens to check that service delivery solutions meet the 'on-the-ground' needs of specific communities.

This is necessary for fine-tuning any policy or service solutions to meet specific needs, where cost-effective to do so.

However the main game, the real policy powerhouse, are the government agencies themselves, who take on the roles of researcher, think tank, gatekeeper, designer and deliverer through their central pool of expertise.

This is a longstanding - even 'traditional' approach to governance. It was designed and adopted in an era where geography, communication and education limited the extent and access to expertise in a nation or community. Where, often, many people were disempowered politically and economically through limited access to information and knowledge.

Consider Australia at Federation in 1901. 

The new Commonwealth Government, in addressing national issues, had to serve a population of 3.7 million people (smaller than Victoria's population today), with an average age of 22 years old, dispersed over 7.7 million square kilometres.

There was no telephone, radio, television or internet, however the overland telegraph, which gave Australia high-speed communication with the world, was 30 years old, having been completed in 1872 and extended to Perth in 1877. While most communication travelled at the speed of a fast horse, train or ship, it was possible to share information across Australia the speed of light, though at the rate of only a few messages at once. This telegraphic networked served as Australia's communication backbone for almost another fifty years, until telephones became popular after World War II from 1945.

In 1901 Australia had one of the highest literacy rates in the world (80%) with school compulsory to 13 years old, though attendance was not enforced, many remote communities didn't have access to schools and Indigenous Australians were excluded. Literacy meant basic reading and writing, with the ability to add and subtract - the books issued to 13yr olds today would have been far beyond the ability of the majority of students in 1901.

The majority of Australia's 22,000 teachers hadn't attended a teacher's college, generally serving an apprenticeship as 'pupil teachers' and few 'technical colleges' existed to teach advanced students.

In 1901 there were only 2,600 students at Australia's four universities (0.1% of our population) and CSIRO wasn't even an idea (formed 1926). There wasn't a record of how many Australians had received a university education until the 1911 Commonwealth census, which reported 2,400 students at university and 21,000 'scholars' (with their level of education undefined).

In this environment, expertise was rare and treasured. Governments employed the cream of Australia's graduates and were almost the sole source of expertise and thinking on policy issues that the new nation had to address.

The 'government as centre of expertise' model made sense, in fact it was the only viable way to develop a system capable of administering the world's smallest continent and one of the largest, and most sparsely populated, nations.

Jump forward a hundred and ten years, and Australia is one of the most connected nations on the planet, with 98% of our 22 million citizens having instant access to the world through the internet and virtually every Australian having access to telephones, radio and television.

Education is compulsory to 15 or 17, with the majority of teachers tertiary educated and school attendance strictly enforced - including for Indigenous Austalians. We have about 41 universities, ten times as many as in 1901, as well as over 150 other tertiary institutions, with over 21% of Australians having received tertiary education.

As a result, the 'government agency as expert' model is failing.

Across our population there's far more expertise outside of government than within. Governments struggle to attract and retain talent in a global market, hamstringing themselves by restricting employment to Australian citizens, while the commercial sector internationally will happily take Australia's best trained minds and put them to use elsewhere in the world.

Despite this, government's basic model has barely changed. Agencies are structured and act as 'centres of expertise' on policy and service delivery topics.

True, there's a little more interaction with academia, with business and even with citizens. However agencies remain structured as 'centres of expertise' for policy design and service delivery, designed to serve communities with limited communication or education - limited capability to do for themselves.

This model may remain effective in certain parts of the world, in nations where literacy is low, geography remains a barrier and communication infrastructure is weak - like Papua New Guinea, regions in the Amazon and some other remote areas and developing nations.

However in developed nations, with high literacy, substantial tertiary education, where geography is no limit to communication and access to media and internet are almost universal, does the approach retain the same merit?

A 'centre of expertise' approach also has many downside risks which are necessary features of the system, providing the separation and public trust required by governments to operate in this way.

For example, when government agencies structure themselves as the experts, they need to maintain a level of mystique and authority to justify public trust that they are providing the best advice and solutions. 

Just like a religion has special rituals, and restaurants rarely let you see how their kitchens operate in order to preserve the trust of their worshippers and customers, government agencies conceal their day-to-day operations from scrutiny to maintain a mystique of expertise and create a clear separation between the 'agency business' of government and the external workings of society. 

This often involves keeping policy development processes hidden behind a wall of secrecy, bureaucratic language and bizarre semi-ritualistic procedures. 

This is also why, despite FOI and other approaches, governments largely remain secretive about their processes for designing policy. They can be messy, which may reduce trust and call into question the expertise of the agency or government.

As a result, if you're not a policy expert, in most countries it is unlikely that ordinary citizens have much knowledge of how an agency has developed a given policy, who was involved (formally or informally) or why certain decisions were reached. These activities are done behind closed doors - in the confessional, behind the kitchen wall, backstage - with all their inherent messiness, testing of 'dangerous' ideas and economic modelling of who wins and who loses with any specific decision treated as confidential and secret knowledge.

This leads to a second issue and a rationalisation. As the public isn't aware of how a specific policy or service was developed, generally seeing only the final 'packaged' solution, agencies can reasonably and logically argue that the majority of the public have little to add to the policy process. 

'Expert' policy officers can argue that; the public doesn't have sufficient context, doesn't have all the facts, doesn't understand the consequences of decisions or the trade-offs that had to be made.

And of course this is true. Because the public were not part of the process, they did not go on the same journey that the public sector 'experts' went on to reach a particular policy conclusion.

The public is told 'trust us, we're the experts', and again this is indeed true. Only the policy insiders had the opportunity to become the experts, all others were kept outside the process and therefore can never fully understand the outcome. 

Success in implementing policies and services relies on the public trusting agencies and governments to be the experts. To trust them to do their jobs as the 'experts' who 'know better' than the community. However the 'secret agency business' of policy and service design can feed on itself. Government may attempt to keep more and more from their citizens as, from their perspective, the more they reveal the less the public trust agencies. 

This is a tenuous approach to trust in modern society, where scrutiny is intense and every individual has a public voice.

If the agency policy experts, in their rush to meet a government timetable, overlooked one factor, or misunderstood community needs, a policy can quickly unravel and, like an emperor with no clothes, the public can rapidly lose faith and trust in government to deliver appropriate solutions.

In this situation it is rare that an expertise-based agency or government will be willing to publicly admit that they misunderstood the issue, convenes the people affected and expertise in the community and discusses it until they have a workable solution. It does happen, but it is the exception not the rule.

Instead, the first reaction to external scrutiny is often to protect their position and justify why the public should trust them. They may draw the wagons round, either seeking to bluff their way through ('you don't understand why we made these decisions, but trust us'), 'hide' the failure under a barrel (it was a draft, here's the real policy), or to tell the public that the agency will fix the issue ('trust us this second time'). 

In some extreme examples, governments may even cross lines to protect their perceived trust and reputation - concealing information or discrediting external expertise in order to justify the expertise inside their walls and try to regain public trust.

There are other risks as well to the government as expert model. Policy experts, who have worked in the field a long time, may not accept the expertise of 'outsiders' who appear to be interloping on their territory ' who are they to tell us what we should do'. Agency experts may become out-of-date due to not working in a field practically for a long time, they may hire the wrong experts, or simply not hire experts at all and attempt to create them. 

In all these cases, agencies have a strong structural need to preserve public trust and their integrity - which may often exhibit itself as 'protecting' their internal experts from external scrutiny, or otherwise attempting to prevent any loss of reputation through being exposed as providing less than good advice.

These risks mean that the government as expert model is under increasing pressure.

A more educated and informed citizenry, with high levels of access to publication tools means that every public agency mistake and misstep can be identified, scrutinised, analysed and shared widely.

Each policy failure and example of a government agency protecting itself at the expense of the community. Each allegation of corruption, fraud or negligent practice - whether at local, state or national level - contributes to a reduction in trust and respect that affects most, if not all, of government. 

Of course this government as expert model hasn't completely failed. There are areas that the community isn't interested in, where the government is indeed the expert or where it would be dangerous to release information into the public eye - where we do have to trust the governments we elect to act in our best interests without the ability to scrutinise their decisions. These areas are shrinking, but some are likely to always remain.

However the model started fraying around the edges some time ago and we see it represented today in the increasing lack of respect or trust in government. 

Citizens don't compartmentalise these failures in ways that governments hope they will, often seeing them as systemic failures rather than individual issues.

As a result citizens trust governments less, have less faith that governments can develop appropriate policies and services and turn even more scrutiny onto agencies - even when unwarranted.

The failures of the government as expert model are only likely to grow and extend, with greater scrutiny and greater pressure on agencies to perform. This, unfortunately, is likely to lead to more errors, not less, as governments seek to make faster decisions with fewer internal resources, less experts, less time.

So how does this failing model get resolved? What are the alternatives approach that governments can adopt to remain effective, relevant and functional in a society with high literacy, education, access to information and almost universal capability to publicly analyse government performance?

In my view the main solution is for governments, except in specific secure topics, to turn themselves inside out - changing their approach from being policy and service deliver 'centres of expertise' to being policy and service delivery 'convenors and implementors'.

Rather than seeking to hire experts and design policy and services internally, agencies need to hire people who can convene expertise within communities and from stakeholders, marshalling it to design policy and codesign service and focus on supporting this process with their expertise in structuring these approaches to fit the realities of government and implementing the necessary solutions.

This approach involves an entirely transparent design process (for both policies and services), making it possible to inform and engage the community at every step.

Within this approach, government agencies gain the trust of the community through managing the process and outcomes, not through being the expert holding the wisdom. The community doesn't need to trust a black box process, it comes on the journey alongside the agency, developing a deeper and richer trust and support for the outcomes. As a result, the energy of the community is aligned to support the agency in making the policy succeed, rather than being disengaged, or actively opposing the policy and leading to failure.

Government becomes an active participant and enabler of the community, reducing the cost of communicating information and influencing citizen ideas as citizens are influenced through their participation or observation of the proces.

This approach does require substantial education - both within government and within the community - to ensure that all participants are aware and actively engaged in their new roles. It can't, and shouldn't, be introduced into all agencies overnight and there are some policy requirements where security should take precedence and processes cannot be as fully revealed.

However the approach could be introduced relatively easily (and some governments around the world have done this already). For instance, a government could select three to five issues and put together taskforces responsible for taking a collaborative approach to deliver specific policy or service solutions. 

These taskforces provide a 'public secretariat' for managing community and stakeholder involvement, acting as facilitators, not operators, to marshal community engagement in the design process.

This could even be done at arms length from a government, with taskforces drawing on expertise from outside public sector culture to avoid accidental imposition of elements of a central command and control model, provided they include core skills from the public sector necessary to ensure the policies or services developed can be effectively and practically implemented by government.

This process would test the public policy design model, capturing learnings and experiences - not from a single process run once, but from an parallel process, with multiple taskforces running at the same time to test the real-world impact in a reduced timeframe. Learnings from the taskforces would be aggregated and used to build a more complete understanding of how to adopt the approach more widely within agencies.

Provided governments committed to the outcomes of these processes, and selected issues of interest to the community, this approach would provide solid evidence for the effectiveness (or otherwise) of a facilitation/implementation, rather than an internal expertise, approach to governance.

Alongside this moderated approach to public policy development, a complementary citizen-led policy engagement approach could be introduced using an ePetition or ePolicy methodology.

Mirroring the approach taken in other jurisdictions, where the community is given a method to propose, develop and have debated in parliament, citizen policy and legislation, this would provide another route for citizens to engage with and understand the complexity of policy development and build an alternative route for high-attention issues for which governments are not prepared to take immediate action.

This approach has been adopted in several forms overseas, such as the ePetition approaches in the US and UK, where any petition with sufficient votes receives the attention of the government and, in the case of the UK, is debated in Parliament.

A more rigorous model is used in Latvia, where citizens are supported to design actual legislation online and, if they can marshall sufficient support, their bills go to parliament, they get to speak on them and the parliament votes them up or down.

This last model is beginning to be introduced in Scandinavian countries and Switzerland has long had a similar process, pre-dating the internet, which allows greater participation by citizens in decisions.

So, in summary, the 'internal expert' model designed for use in nations with limited literacy and education and poor communication, is failing to serve the needs of highly educated and connected nations, such as Australia, leading to increasing citizen concern and plummeting trust in governments.

To address this, governments need to adapt their approaches to suit the new realities - environments where there are more experts outside of government than inside and where citizens can universally scrutinise governments and publish facts, analysis and opinions which serve to increasingly force governments into difficult and untenable positions.

The key changes governments need to make is to turn themselves 'inside out' - exposing their policy and service delivery design and development processes to public scrutiny and engagement and becoming facilitators and implementors of public policy, rather than the expert creators of it.

While some areas of governance need to remain 'black boxes', many can be opened up to public participation, building trust with communities by bringing citizens on the journey with agencies to reach the most practical and appropriate solutions.

This will rebuild trust in governance and allow governments to improve their productivity and performance by tapping a greater range of expertise and building an easier path to implementation, where citizens support agencies, rather than oppose them.

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Are organisations failing in their use of social media and apps as customer service channels?

Guy Cranswick of IBRS has brought my attention to a media release about a new report from Fifth Quadrant, a leading Australian customer experience strategy and research consultancy, on social media and smartphone app customer service enquiries.

The report looked at how many Australian consumers had used these channels for customer service enquiries and why they'd used, or not used, them.

The figures are quite dim reading...

The study (of 520 participants) indicated that only 16% of Australian consumers have ever used social media for a customer service enquiry and less than one in 10 Australians had used this channel for customer service in the last three months. Gen Y ran 'hotter', with 29% having ever used social media for a customer service enquiry.

Why didn't people use social media for these enquiries? The survey broke down the reasons as follows (multiple reasons allowed):

• 32% said it isn't personal, 
• 30% said they did not know that they could,
• 30% said they were concerned with security issues,
• 22% said they thought it would take longer than a phone call, and
• 20% said they did not think it would be a good experience. 

The research also looked at smartphone apps and their use in customer enquiries. Here the figures were even lower. Only 15% of Australian consumers had ever used a smartphone application for a customer enquiry (20% amongst Gen Y), and only 8% of consumers had used this channel in the last three months.

The reasons for not using apps were similar to social media:

• 41% said they did not know they could,
• 21% said they thought it would take longer than a phone call,
• 16% said they thought it would make the process slower to talk to a customer service representative,
• 15% said they did not think it would be a good experience, and 
• 13% said that they did not think it would be easy to use.

My immediate reaction was to say that, well, social media and smartphone apps are still very young and immature, both effectively five or less years old as mass communication and engagement channels. It takes time for organisations and customers to adopt their use for customer service.

However, other research suggests that this may not exactly be the case.

Fifth Quadrant’s 2012 Customer Service Industry Market Report (with 120 business participants) found that 69% of Australian based organisations had implemented social media and 23% had implemented smartphone apps for customer service. This is a small sample, but still statistically significant.

In other words, while 69% of organisations will accept customer service enquiries via social media, only 16% of Australians have used this approach and while 23% accept these enquiries via smartphone apps, only 15% of Australians have used these channels.

So if organisations are offering these channels, why do so few Australians use them?

More of Fifth Quadrant's research offers a clue...

How many times should a customer have to contact an organisation to resolve a customer service issue?

Fifth Quadrant reports that the level of 'first contact resolution' (where a customer only needs to contact an organisation once to have their query resolved) is much lower for social media or smartphone app than for phone contacts.

• Phone: 78% of queries handled in one contact
• Social media: 59%
• Smartphone app: 51%

In other words, 41% of people attempting to use social media and 49% of those using smartphone apps will have to contact the organisation multiple times (often resorting to phone) to resolve their query.

This significantly increases the cost of the interaction to the organisation and the customer and reduces customer satisfaction.

So what's the issue? Poor organisational implementation of social media and app channels.

Fifth Quadrant's Director, Dr Wallace said,

“There is no question that social media and mobile channels will be important in the next few years as the percentage of consumers who use these channels for customer service doubles year on year. Rather, it is a question of how effectively organisations address the supporting business processes and skill levels of social media customer service representatives.

The challenge for Australian business is that they typically do not consider Multi-channel Customer Experience as a strategy, hence these new channels lack integration, they do not have accurate revenue and cost models and there is poor data analytics. This has resulted in a sub-optimal channel deployment and as the research shows, ultimately, a sub-optimal customer experience.”

So let's go back to the reasons again...

• There was an awareness issue (social media: 30%; apps: 41%).
  Organisations need to integrate information about the ability to engage them through social media and apps in their promotion, packaging and engagement.
• There was a speed/perceived speed issue (social media: 22% (take longer); apps: 21% (take longer) and 16% (slower)).
  Organisations need to integrate these channels with their other customer contact points, building the protocols and processes to make it faster and easier to engage online than by phone.
• There was an experience/usability issue (social media: 30% (not personal), 20% (experience); apps: 15% (experience) and 13% (easy to use)).
  Organisations need to codesign their channels with customers, putting extensive work into the upfront experiential design to make them an easy to use service with a great user experience. The investment in design is more than offset by the long-term cost savings in moving people from high-cost phone to low cost online service channels.
• There was a security issue (social media 30%).
  Organisations need to take the same actions as ecommerce companies did to reduce this to a minimum, providing context, clear security measures and escalation and rectification mechanisms that assure users that they won't be disadvantaged by any security problems.

Overall, organisations need to run these channels as part of their customer service framework, not remotely via communication, marketing or IT teams.

Want to learn more about the research and report?

See Dr Wallace's blog, Your call.

And here are some of the key findings from Fifth Quadrant’s 2012 Customer Service Industry Market Report (n=120):

Social Media:

1. In Australia, the predominant share of the 22 million daily customer interactions handled by contact centres is still handled by live agents (52%). Despite industry increasing the implementation of social media as a customer service channel, Share of Contact Handling by Social Media channels is 0.2%
2. Amongst organisations that offer social media as a channel for customer service, 67% report that the marketing department is responsible for managing it.
3. 63% of organisations in the study have only had social media as a channel for customer service implemented for 1 to 2 years.
4. Amongst organisations that currently have social media as a customer service channel only 29% reported their contact centre has the ability to escalate a social media query through to a customer support application that links through to an agent.
5. Past three months usage of social media as a customer service channel has doubled in the past 12 months (4% 2011; 8% 2012).
6. The proportion of consumers who believe they will be using social media more often in the future has also nearly doubled from 4% in 2011 to 7% in 2012. 
7. When asked whether they had received a response from an organisation via a Social Media network to comments they had made through Social Media, only 7% of consumers reported that they had. About 5% of consumers claim to have received essential information posted via a Social Media network. 14% of consumers report they have received information from an organisation via social media about new products and services. 

Smartphone Apps:

1. Amongst organisations that offer smartphone apps as a channel for customer service 50% report that the marketing department is responsible for managing it, with a further 33% reporting that IT is responsible.
2. 50% have only had smartphone apps as a channel for customer service implemented for one to two years, with 33% reporting smartphone app has been available for less than 12 months. 
3. Amongst organisations that do not currently offer smartphone app as a channel for customer service, 25% report they have no plans to. 
4. Further to the existing 8% of consumers who have used a smartphone app for customer service, a further 33% of consumers report that they are likely to use a smartphone app for a customer service enquiry in the next 12 months. 
5. Amongst Gen Y consumers, 29% report that they will be using smartphone apps for customer service issues more often in the next 1-2 years. This is significantly higher compared to Baby Boomer (8%) and Silent (4%) generations.

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