Governments need to ensure their websites work for modern users

I went to the Australian Business Register site (www.abr.gov.au) this afternoon to set up an ABN (Australian Business Number) for a company.

This is a very common step, taken by hundreds, if not thousands, of Australians every week.

However I immediately hit a speed bump.

The site's online ABN registration process threw up an error message (image below) stating:

Browser not supported

The Australian Business Register currently supports the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 5.0 and above
• Netscape 6.0 and above

You should update your browser version before you continue using the Australian Business Register. If you believe your current browser is suitable to use, please continue.

Refer to Technical Information for details on how to configure for your browser for the Australian Business Register.

This was confusing and offputting as I was using Firefox 11.0 - one of the most modern web browsers available.

Fortunately I had Internet Explorer 9 on my system and gave this a try - no error screen appeared.

Now if you read far enough into the error message it does state that 'If you believe your current browser is suitable to use, please continue.' - however I was in a hurry at the time and, like many users, didn't read the error message all the way through.

The error message visible at the Australian Business Register site,
together with the 'About' information window for the web browser in use

Regardless of whether this translates into a user error, I believe that there is an obligation on government agencies to ensure their websites are accessible and usable in modern web browsers without unnecessary and confusing error screens.

Essentially, when I have Firefox 11.0, I don't expect to receive an error stating I need 'Internet Explorer 5.0 and above' or 'Netscape 6.0 and above' - as my web browser is "above" both and, in fact neither of those web browsers have been current for more than 10 years!

For such an important and common business process as registering an ABN the responsible agency needs to take a little more care in its online delivery of services.

Otherwise their online services will damage trust and respect in the government's ability to deliver and cause customers to migrate to what are slower and (for agencies) higher cost channels.

I'll bring this issue to the attention of the responsible agency, the Australian Tax Office, and check back in six months to see if anything has changed.

For all other government agencies out there, please check that your public online systems aren't needlessly damaging your credibility in this way. Please make sure your websites work for modern users!

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Treating bloggers right

Many organisations still haven't cottoned on to the influence of a number of blogs or how to appropriately approach and engage with them - including PR and advertising agencies who should know better.

I was reading an excellent example of this the other week, from The Bloggess, where a PR agency not only approached with an inappropriately targeted form letter, which indicated the agency hadn't even read her blog, but responded to her (relatively) polite reply with an annoyed response.

The situation really escalated, however, when a VP in the PR agency, in an internal email, called her a "F**king bitch" (without the asterisks). This email was accidentally (by the VP) also CCed to The Bloggess.

The Bloggess took a deep breath, and responded politely, however then received a torrent of abuse from the PR agency.

At this point she published the entire exchange on her blog - in a post that has already received 1,240 comments, has been shared on Facebook 8,397 times and via Twitter 5,328 times.

Her comments have also been shared widely and her post read by many of her 164,000 Twitter followers.

The Bloggess's post is a good read - particularly for government agencies and their PR representatives - on how to behave appropriately when engaging bloggers, and the potential fallout when they don't.

I'm also keeping a link handy to 'Here's a picture of Wil Wheaton collating papers' for those PR and advertising agencies who send me form emails asking me to post about their product or brand promotions on my blog (and yes there's been a few in the last six months - all Australian agencies).

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Online is a service option, not just a media channel

As I mentioned at the end of my earlier post about the Googlisation of the US election, we're now entering a phase in the internet's development where it is shifting from being a media channel towards a service channel.

Many organisations in the private sector have already recognised this and I am seeing the beginnings of this understanding in the public sector as well.

When the internet was first popularised by web browsers it was a technical toy, with the first websites for organisations commonly developed by programmers in technology teams and a few IT-savvy marketers.

Within five years the Marketing and Communications team began to take a leading interest, with a ferocious tussle for control of the platform between technologists and communicators taking place in many organisations. This battle is still going on in many organisations, where IT refuses to let go of certain aspects of web that sit more readily in the communications area, such as

• design (including usability),
• navigation (and a correlating interest in information architecture, which is more of a psychological discipline than a technical one), and
• rich media development (which is often hamstrung by technical concerns online, unlike the radio and television experience where technology serves the medium).

While these battles continue, the internet has moved on, with the introductions of organisations whose sole or major service channel is online, including well known organisations such as eBay, Amazon and Second Life (yes it's a service channel!) and hundreds of thousands of lessor known, but still very successful players.

For these organisations online isn't an adjacent to other channels, it is their primary or sole channel, representing the core of their business.

This has led into Web 2.0, the communal empowerment of the web, which has seen the ease of generating and interacting with content skyrocket, lowering the barriers to creativity and demonstrating comprehensively that people want to participate and if the medium is sufficiently simple they will.

This has led to the current online 'mashup', where across the global internet we can see aspects of all generations of the web, technologists clinging to power, communicators using olde worlde 'shout marketing' techniques, sales organisations pumping products through ever easier purchasing funnels and the growing swell of social networks and people power.

Naturally many organisations are confused and bewildered by the complexity and scope of potential online options, most simply do not understand, with top management mired in views shaped by their experience and education.

The tendency for all of us is to fall back on 'safe' classical models, treating the online medium as a 'technology', a media channel add-on, a basic form-filling medium or a time-waster for habitual networkers.

However as billion dollar companies can be built (or destroyed) and the outcomes of political careers changed through the agency of the internet, it is a far more serious enabler than many organisations have realised.

My view is that it is now time to rethink how our organisations regard the online channel, casting aside preconceptions and experiential models and reflecting on the internet's relationship with us, rather than our relationship with the internet.

From my perspective I view online as an engagement channel - combining service delivery, consultation and communication into a single medium, an enabling driver at the core of how organisations interact with their stakeholders, customers, staff and shareholders.

Where customers do not have internet access the online channel still facilitates and support relationships, enabling improvements in internal information sharing, efficiency and interactions between organisations, thereby improving the experience of engaging via phone or face-to-face channels.

Many organisations are not sufficiently mature to have restructured around the internet as a central enabling driver and I see the online channel commonly 'owned' and 'managed' by Communications, IT or, at the intranet level, in HR.

I believe there is now a strong case in the public sector to begin shifting ownership into the service delivery area, using the internet as both an effective, lower-cost service option and as an enabler under telephony and face-to-face channels.

IT and Communications still remain involved, as their expertise is required to develop and shape the systems and messages delivered, but the bulk of measurable business outcomes are in service delivery areas - including interaction and delivery time metrics, customer satisfaction, service consistency and business efficiency.

At my agency, who I see as one of the leaders in thinking around the online channel, if still managing the technology challenges and building an understanding of how to apply the channel to address business goals, we've just made an internal shift reflecting the online channel being a service option.

We've shifted the management of our online channel such that our Service Delivery area owns the service delivery aspect of our online presence, with the delivery on their goals facilitated by my team in the Communications area and the technology team.

We're also beginning the process of increasing the Service Delivery area's involvement and influence over our intranet, which extends its focus on facilitating customer service provision through supporting front-line staff.

I am very positive about these changes, they are enabling us to make some immediate service quality improvements - some by managing customer expectations, some by changing system behaviours.

Over the next several years I expect to see enormous business value delivered for the government as this model becomes firmly embedded, both for customer engagement to improve our customer approach, as a channel for effective service delivery as well as information provision and by enabling staff to provide ever-improving customer service.

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How well does government secure customer information online?

Privacy Awareness week is coming up later this month (as is the Security in Government conference), but as I mentioned to a colleague on Thursday, every week needs to be privacy week at a government agency.

Privacy is a sticky problems for all organisations. No security system is perfect and, to-date, as technology has advanced the threats to guard against have increased.

At some point every organisations needs to make a trade off between the services they offer customers, the channels through which they are offered, the convenience of using secure services and the cost of raising security versus the risk of security breaches versus customer complaints regarding service levels.

The size and nature of government makes effective security imperative. The Government ID leaks report, prepared by Consumerreports.org, highlighted that more than 1 in 5 US privacy breaches are traceable back to the public sector. This reflects the size of government and amount of data it must collect, store and share, as much as it reflects security levels.

The report also commented that,

When a brokerage firm or retailer has a data leak, consumers can take their business elsewhere, as almost one-third of breach victims do, according to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, a research group in Traverse City, Mich. But as customers of the government, consumers don’t have a choice about giving personal data to federal, state, and local officials.

In other words, people must provide information to government, but there is no financial incentive for government to maximise security. The impetus for security in the public sector has to come from political will backed up by appropriate legislation.


So how well does government do in securing customer information?
In the US the 2007 Computer Security report card (PDF) prepared for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in May this year, gave the US government a 'C' for computer security, up from a 'C-' the previous year.

While some departments stood out with 'A' scores, such as the Justice Department, a number scored 'F's, such as the Department of Treasury and the Department of Veteran's Affairs.

In Australia there is no such security ready reckoner. However the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) frequently conducts security audits on various departments and agencies.

These are tabled in parliament and made available to be publicly scrutinised, so the media and public have access to quite detailed information on government security.

Based on these reports, Australia's government is doing reasonably well. As in the private sector there is no such thing as perfect security, and opportunities for improvement do exist, however there is a cultural and strategic focus on security and agencies do the best they can with the resources available to them.

Personally, considering the level and severity of incidents reported in Australia compared to the UK and US, for example, Australian government seems to have a good track record, albeit not a perfect one.


What can government do better?
Staff
This stems from a conversation I had on Thursday over lunch, where the discussion turned to the different types of security that can be put in pace.

Australian government seems to do quite well in guarding against external risks and protecting our networks and computer servers from attacks.

The weak point in many security systems are the employees. They need access to information about customers to do their jobs, but exposing the data can raise the risk of it being publicly exposed. This can occur in many ways, confidential data being copied only USB sticks or emailed home to be worked on, the well-known lost laptop/DVD situation, where a laptop or DVD containing customer records are accidentally left somewhere or stolen.

While there are strong guidelines to help reduce and address these issues, another approach is to investigate data-level security which prevents given data from being accessed except by authorised users.

Data protection can be accomplished through mechanisms - which reduces the human risk. It is also now quite developed for certain types of data, for example the 256bit security embedded in Adobe documents.

Customers
A second area government can focus on is customer education. There's less value in centrally securing information if customers do not guard their usernames and passwords.

This can be partially managed through systems enforcing more secure passwords and using different techniques to educate customers on how they should protect their own computers against key loggers and other hackers. Another part involves being more transparent to customers on how secure a system is and how diligence on the customer's part improves the system's security.

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No future for paper invoices?

These days the majority of postal mail people in Australia receive is either advertising material or bill. In the future, this may be cut even further to only ads.

In the European Union there's a major project underway to create a whole-of-government standard for all EU government invoicing, that can also be propagated across the private sector, creating savings estimated at EUR65.4 billion per year for businesses.

That's a staggering amount of savings simply for removing those paper bills - not to mention the environmental benefits of saving all of that paper, printing and transportation.

If successful it will mean that the EU government will strongly encourage all of its suppliers to move to e-procurement - at some point mandating the change. This will be propagated out to national, regional and local governments in the EU area.

The impacts of this are likely to be global. Any business with a relationship with EU governments will have to move towards the EU invoicing standards to maintain their billing arrangements. In turn this will influence them towards adopting a standard system across electronic billing for their other government and private customers around the world.

It will be interesting to see how far-reaching the effects will be, whether other governments will mandate other e-procurement invoicing standards - raising new barriers for organisations dealing across national boundaries, or will support the EU approach to potentially create global e-invoicing standards.

More information about the initiative is available at the European Commission website in the e-Invoicing working group site.

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Is government on the internet or part of the internet?

I've been reviewing a very interesting presentation from Paul Ramsay, one of my blog's Canadian readers.

Titled RoboCop, Public Service in the Internet Age, it asks whether government is simply on the internet, or is part of the internet.

It frames this question based on whether government is simply using the intranet to replicate the services it provides via other channels, or using the new medium to go further.

This is a topic I resonate with. For many years I've been telling people that what we see on the internet today is similar to what we first saw in films - stage shows re-enacted on a flat screen.

It took many years for movie makers to learn how to use the medium to go beyond what was possible on a stage, and the types of movies we see today bear little resemblance to our first stumbling efforts in the medium.

The internet is the same. It's not just digital paper, online radio or short videos - it's a mass medium that takes all these elements, twists them 180 degrees and adds on seamless global surfing, collaboration, citizen empowerment and much more.

From what we've managed to do so far at my agency we're simply on the internet - providing electronic versions of print concepts - 'fact sheets', 'newsletters', 'forms', 'media releases' and 'data tables'.

I am hopeful and working hard to ensure that in the next few years we'll break through the perceptual barriers to build understanding across the department of what is really possible with the online channel and how we can support our customers and staff in entirely new ways.

New medium = new rules
New medium = new opportunities
New medium = new challenges

How do you see the internet changing your organisation?

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Make government data freely available

An interesting article was released in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology earlier this year discussing a view that government should focus on providing usable data online rather than full-blown websites.

Titled Government Data and the Invisible Hand , the premise was quite simply explained in the abstract:

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design [web ]sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.

This approach is very much at odds with the current approach both in the US and Australia, where in most cases the respective governments provide both the data and all the interpretation designed to meet the needs of specific audiences.

Via the current approach, data can becomes difficult to extract, or is presented in a way that is not useful. On that basis these websites are difficult to use. They are also expensive to develop and maintain and difficult to keep current.

The approach in practice

I've encountered both approaches in Australian government websites.

In a past role, managing the website for a private sector water and energy utility, one of the consistently most trafficked areas of our website was local weather. This section had only a peripheral involvement with the main focus of the site, however the level of usage made it important to retain.

We did not run this weather service ourselves. Instead we used a raw data feed provided by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) for free. The data was simply customised and represented in an attractive way in our website.

Ours was not the only organisation using this data - a number of other organisations had built businesses though providing weather information - sometimes combined with video, maps, commentary or other feeds. These sites collectively attracted more traffic than the BOM itself.

To my recollection, provided this data was not packaged and directly resold commercially, the BOM had a policy of giving away the data freely.

This approach helped ensure that the public were able to access accurate information, to the public good. It is important to note that BOM data was collected and processed by people and equipment already paid for out of the public purse.


On the other hand, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) provided a great deal of the data I used in my day-to-day role.

This data was preprocessed by the ABS into tables or excel documents. These were often chunks of information that were not much use to my audience.

My team spent many hours manually deconstruct and reconstruct the ABS data into different forms to make it useful for our corporate needs.

The ABS did not provide data as a raw feed. While the ABS did gave away its data for free online - and this was fantastically useful - the overhead that went into its website inevitably made it less timely, therefore reducing its value in a commercial sense.

So, in comparison:

BOM

• Gave its data away for free online (public access to public data)
• No data analysis required (lower cost to the agency, faster to market)
• Referrals from everyone reusing the data (reach)
• Enormous innovation in how the data was 'mashed' with other sources / analysed and presented (lower cost to agency, transference of risk of misinterpretation to private sector)
  

ABS

• Gave its reports away for free online - but not the raw data (public value but less timely)
  
• Provided intensive data processing (quality assurance but higher cost to the agency, slower to market)
• Limited online reuse, therefore fewer referrals (lower reach)
• No innovation in data analysis and presentation (higher analysis/presentation cost to agency, any risk of misinterpretation stays with the agency)

In my view BOM's approach seems to be both lower costs and risks for the agency and delivers greater public benefits, greater data use, innovation and agency reach (referrals).

Bt the way, it's worth pointing out that BOM is the most trafficked government website in Australia. ABS, despite a wider range of statistics, is much further down the list.


Can the data approach be used across other agencies?

I believe it can. Even in my agency we release numbers and resources which could be indexed and provided in a raw data form for reuse.

We also have a website estimator for calculation purposes. There are around a dozen similar estimators that do a similar job - several providing virtually the same result as the official estimator. However those 'fan' estimators cost nothing to the public purse to create or maintain.

So if members of the public are prepared to create these tools, why should the agency?

Granted this last example is a little more tricky than that - the estimation process is time-consuming and maximising accuracy is a key goal.

However there are other government websites and tools which could and would be delivered by private organisations and individuals, if only the government allowed access to the data stream.


Level the playing field

Note that the article does not suggest that government should stop analysing data and presenting this analysis in websites.

What it suggests is to provide the raw data on a level playing field, thereby allowing private and public organisations the same capacity to use it.

The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

This means that government agencies such as the ABS can continue to provide reports for people who choose not to do their own analysis.

However it opens the field to innovation and the use of various data sources to make connections that government, in a siloed form, is not as able to do.

This levelling is critical - if the government wants to see innovation it should not hold back the 'secret sauce'. The data needs to be available in a way that allows private and other public enterprises to use it in an equal way.

Open systems are available today via standards such as XML and RSS - look at how Google syndicates maps and ads or how Facebook allows the creation and dissemination of applications.

In conclusion

Government has a crucial role to play in the collection of data across the country. This is a task well suited to the public sector as it is in the public interest that this be available.

However government doesn't have the systems or culture to be best suited to interpret and combine this data or make it useful for individuals and organisations.

Government should provide interpretations - however it should not hold an artificial monopoly over this.

By allow other organisations to access the raw information innovation in its presentation can occur more rapidly, providing deeper insights for the public good.

Make government data freely available.


Does anyone have other examples of where government collected data has become freely available? I'd love to blog about the successes.

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Breaking rules: Build your intranet outside your firewall

It's an established fact that intranets (or internal networks) grow and live within your organisation's firewall.

Or is it?

New approaches and technology are now challenging the concept that intranets must be stored within your organisation's direct structure.

For instance in Australian government there is Govdex. This wiki-based extranet system meets secret level Federal government provisions and is free for government users.

It doesn't stretch this system too far to consider it as suitable as an intranet platform for any small government agencies with no intranet budget.

As it is wiki-based it provides basic content management functionality, including a news tool and discussion board - which is more intranet functionality than most smaller agencies can claim now.

For example I've recently worked with another area to implement a secure Govdex wiki space as a micro intranet for a key community within my agency. This will expand into an extranet over time, but it functions now just like any other intranet platform.

Govdex isn't the only option on the horizon.

LinkedIn, a business networking site, is planning to release a series of work-related tools to support collaboration between staff members. These would sit in secure areas of LinkedIn, but on the intranet.

This was discussed in a recent New York Times article, At Social Site, Only the Businesslike Need Apply

One new product, Company Groups, automatically gathers all the employees from a company who use LinkedIn into a single, private Web forum. Employees can pose questions to each other, and share and discuss news articles about their industry.

Soon, LinkedIn plans to add additional features, like a group calendar, and let independent developers contribute their own programs that will allow employees to collaborate on projects.

The idea is to let firms exploit their employees’ social connections, institutional memories and special skills — knowledge that large, geographically dispersed companies often have a difficult time obtaining.

Behind LinkedIn, other start-ups are also entering this space, providing for significant innovation to best address organsational space needs.

This is very interesting news for anyone with a small budget and need for a significant intranet.

Rather than investing in building or buying a content management system, developing social tools or managing intranet hardware and software, simply use openly available software to facilitate it.

So what would it take to make you consider building your intranet outside the firewall?

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Has eGovernment stalled at the half-way point?

Reading up on one of my favourite eGov blogs, In the Eye of the Storm, I found this post from February with some great slides and commentary on how far e-government has gone, but how little has changed in the last few years, e-government 3.0.

Edited 16/06: This article is further reinforced by this article in ITWeek, UK e-government fails to make the grade


Is this the same experience as we have in Australia?

It's now common to get information from government online, it's also common to transact with government online. However, can we interact with government online yet?

As in the UK, in Australia government appears to have been very slow about taking the next step - to actually converse with our customers online.

I'm happy to say that my agency is taking baby steps into interacting on forums, and we've talked about providing web-based text or voice chat to interact with customers, but are still some big steps away from this.

If the name of the game is customer service, and customers want to interact with government online (as AGIMO's latest eGovernment Satisfaction report is telling us) - why are we holding back?

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Usability Rules - OK?

My Agency has just finished a nine-month long independent expert usability review of all of our online properties - website, intranet and secure online transaction service.

Needless to say most of the results matched what we already knew

• our website needs more of a customer-focus and is due for a facelift,
• our intranet needs reorganisation to match how our staff need to access information and tools, and
• our customers cannot tell the difference between our website and our secure transaction service - nor should they need to.

This is probably about the 10th time in the last ten years I've engaged consultants to carry out one type of review or another and, in almost every case, the major findings matched what we already knew.

Naturally there were some surprises - but if the people who manage the properties are already 70-80% right, why is it so important to call in the consultants?

The cynical response, and one I've floated out there from time to time, is that organisations don't trust the experience and expertise of their staff.

This is similar to the principle where for some products you sell more if you raise the price - as people believe if the price is higher so must be the quality.

Staff are a sunk cost, so there's no apparent further investment to justify the quality of an outcome.
This works well for consultants, who can build their credibility and reputation by simply charging more - though they do have to deliver in the end.

However I've never really liked it as a reason - both because I'd like to think that employers recognise the skills of their employees (or wouldn't have hired them), and because it only addresses the issue of trust, not the issue of whether the work needs to be done.

After years of thinking on this topic, involving many research projects and other consultant-led activities, I've come to the conclusion that the real reason for bringing in the external experts is simply that 'we don't know what we don't know'.

It's great to sit back in an organisation and say that a piece of research taught us nothing that we didn't already know - but is that really the case.

Even if you are 80% correct on what your customers wanted (after the fact), the other 20% may be the most vital piece of the puzzle. As we become close to our work and acculturalised to the organisation it becomes impossible to take off those rose-coloured glasses and see our online properties (or other products and services) in the same way as our customers.

Of course I have had other reasons for using independent experts over the years - to train staff, to substitute money for time we didn't have, and to ensure that politically and legally we had something signed to point at "but the consultant said that..."

But my main reason in almost every case has been that most powerful reason of all - I don't know what I don't know, and I'm unable to take off my glasses to find out.

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