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On Wednesday 18 March I attended the Google in Government Symposium, hosted by Hedloc.
I had planned to liveblog the day, as I liveblogged the recent Politics and Technology forum, however due to a lack of available wi-fi (the National Convention Centre still charges $40 for six hours access - which I was not personally willing to pay), I resorted to taking notes on PC, which I've provided below in an edited form.
I also twittered the event as a personal stream-of-consciousness record and thanks to the dozen or so people who asked questions of the presenters through me or discussed the event with me on Twitter.
The record of the Twitter conversation can be found here, or under the hashtag #cggov - note that the records are in reverse chronological order, so go to the last result to start at the start of the day.
The text below is an edited version of my personal notes from the day. It does not represent the views of any other individual or organisation. Any errors or omissions are mine.
Google in Government notes transcript
Google Enterprise Overview
Presenter: Paul Slakey - Director Americas and APAC, Google
Google Enterprise
Google Search Appliance
Google Maps/Earth
Google Apps
Destination Innovation
Presenter: Alan Noble - Engineering Director, Australia & New Zealand, Google
His view of the two major trends for innovation
Google is a big supporter of open standards, Open Social Alliance and Open Handset Alliance
Google is very interested in having governments make public data available online on same basis to all organisations and citizens - and has made submission in this vein in the current consultation process.
Some examples of openness
Two technologies changing the face of the web
Four trends on the web
Destination Search
Presenter: Richard Suhr - Head of Google Enterprise, ANZ & South East Asia, Google
Search challenges for Gov Agencies
New US president has made search front-and-centre
Singaporean government came to Google and said they wanted a better search system across all of their government departments. Google took one search appliance – runs all search for all of government. Operates 4 million pages, 300 different search experiences (in agencies)
Quick stats from Google
Customer (and staff) view
Google's trends...
Technical Overview and Case Studies
ATO website – people can now find information on the website, users gravitating to search as the first path for navigation, rather than menus – huge increase in search.
Presenter: Aaren Tebbutt - Account Manager, HEDLOC
DEEWR
Extras
Destination Geospatial
Presenter: Mickey Kataria - Google maps Product Manager, Google
Mission: 'Organise the world's geographical information and make it universally accessible and useful'
Features
Maps API - Premier version
Maplets
Mobile
Australian Electorate map for Federal election
UK Metropolitan police crime map – http://maps.met.police.uk
User-generated content
Google Earth
Presenter: Brian Atwood - Google Earth Enterprise Product Manager
Examples:
1. All data goes into Google Earth Fusion Software – processes and blends it together
2. Processed data goes to Google Earth Server which allows viewing of data in a 3D or 2D format
Case study - Virtual Alabama
Goals
Implementation
Case study - Energy Australia
Presenter: Lawrence Bolton, Manager Community Liaison and Infrastructure
In his area
Wanted a way to 'see' or 'visualise' data
Google Earth is being rolled out in pilot as the visualisation platform for their GIS data, using layers and rich information.
Case Study - Australian Federal Police
Presenter: James Harris - Team Leader Geospatial services, Information Services Australian Federal Police
Audited systems:
Selected Google Earth via a tender process, and are implementing an internal version so no-one external is aware of when the Federal Police have interest in a location. Initially using 8 terabytes of storage – with multiple globes.
Initial role out in April to testers, full rollout in June.
Looking to roll out maps, live feeds, custom build tools, link into corporate databases in future.
Case Study - NT Land Information Systems
Presenter: Phillip Rudd - Director NT Land Information Systems
Geospatial useful for key questions
Uses Google Earth alongside other tools (complex system - but it works well).
Department was gathering lots of map data, but could not effectively do much with it.
Originally deployed solution in production in 2006.
Emergency Management – 239 registered users
Land Information – open to all users (potentially 9,500 desktops) actual 1,619 logins
'We all think in pictures, not in words'
Uses:
Destination Apps and Security
Presenter: Paul Slakey - Director Americas and APAC, Google
Why are users unhappy?
Stats on current IT management
Forrester report Jan 2009 – should your email live in the cloud?
Thursday, March 19, 2009
The Google in Government Symposium - notes from the day | Tweet |
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
What form should a government blog take? | Tweet |
There's an excellent and very active discussion over at Adriel Hampton's blog regarding, Templating a Government 2.0 Blog.
The discussion ranges beyond the pure technical and moderation challenges of establishing a blog (which are very easy to overcome) and into the mindset of government.
In fact my view of the discussion is that setting up and running a blog is easy - changing government's approach to support blogging is the tough part.
Fortunately there are now many excellent examples of well-established government blogs so it is clearly possible to change government mindsets.
As a side issue, per Phillip Sheldrake's post at Marcoms professionals, Continuous engagement... the death of market research, it is important to differentiate between a blog and market research, or as is very clearly stated in a post over at Online Consultation, Market research is not community engagement.
Blogs are designed to continually engage and live for a sustained period of time. Market research generally takes place periodically, occurring over shorter periods.
So you're establishing a 'blog' simply to ask questions for a limited period, you should clearly consider its goals and whether you're simply using a blog-like format for market research, or are actually created an ongoing dialogue with your audience - a blog.
The difference in goals may influence your approach in order to maximise the effectiveness of the medium, and avoid audience confusion when audience expectations may not be met.
Monday, March 16, 2009
What does the future look like? | Tweet |
Microsoft have developed a Future Visions series to provide some insight into where technology is headed, and how it will help people.
If you are looking to anticipate the needs of your customers, rather than simply play catch-up, the series provides some very thought provoking ideas.
Here is the montage video, exploring different concepts in brief. Below I've placed links to the full videos on each topic.
And in case you think this technology is still a long way off, read this article from the Inquisitor, If You Want the Future, Look to the Hackers. It talks about companies placing working brainjacks into people's heads, and how to create a Minority Report-style interface using your Nintendo Wii.
The others videos in the Microsoft Future Vision series are:
Is your department tribalising? | Tweet |
The Tribalisation of Business is holding its second annual survey on social media use within organisations.
If you run communities or leverage social media as part of your business you can participate in the 2009 survey here.
Sponsored by Deloittes, Beeline labs and the Society for New Communications Research, the 2008 survey had some very interesting findings around the management and cost of online communities.
For example the 2008 survey had the following major takeaways,
#1: Communities are about Delivering Game-Changing Results
- Communities can increase revenue per customer dramatically, i.e., 50%
- Communities will increase product introduction success ratios
- Communities amplify everything you do- increasing effectiveness and decreasing costs
- Communities should be an important part of the CMO’s toolset (but for many large companies - there is an under-investment and scale problem)
- Companies should evolve the role of the CMO into Chief Community Officer (but that will require drastic changes in attitude and approach to marketing)
- If done properly, communities will transform the way marketing works (reduced costs, improved effectiveness, new opportunities)
- Mismatch between community goals and associated investments
- Major gaps between Community Goals and what is being measured
- Communities have yet to combine with major talent initiatives
- Communities will transform most business processes
- The “build it and they will come” fallacy
- The “let’s keep it small so it doesn’t move the needle” phenomenon
- The “not invented here” syndrome
- Marketing, Research, Sales and/or PR departments ran the organisation's online community in 60% of cases. IT ran the community only 6% of the time and Customer Service only 2% of the time,
- most communities (71%) were managed by one or fewer full-time staff, with another 13% managed by 2-5 staff,
- the annual operating budget for 58% of communities was under US$50,000 and between US$50,000 and $200,000 for another 24% of communities,
- the majority of organisations (85%) learnt about online community through participating in online communities or reading blogs - attending conferences was used for learning by 53% of organisations and the media by 51% of organisations, Consultants and agencies were only used by 28% of organisations and Analysts by 26%,
- the biggest obstacle to success (51%) was getting people to engage, the second biggest was having enough time to manage the community at 44% and attracting people to the community was third at 35%.
So my takeaways?
- Online communities are about community, not technology - don't give IT control,
- there's not a large investment to start,
- you should participate online to learn about online communities - don't rely on consultants and agencies to build your internal understanding,
- you have to work the community - don't rely on the community building itself,
- tap into existing communities where possible, it's faster, cheaper, easier and more effective than re-inventing the wheel.
It's the people who are not reading blogs who need the education!
Friday, March 13, 2009
Less online hurdles = more egovernment customers | Tweet |
The complexity of screens and the registration and sign-in processes for some Australian egovernment (online) services disturbs me.
In the commercial world I lived by a simple rule of thumb, on average each hurdle I erected between a customer and their goal reduced the overall number of customers who reached their goal by 30%.
To visually demonstate,
| Hurdles 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | Customers 1,000,000 700,000 490,000 343,000 240,100 168,070 117,649 82,354 57,648 40,354 28,248 | Percentage using 100% 70% 49% 34% 24% 17% 12% 8% 6% 4% 3% |
This mean that if I started with one million customers and had ten hurdles, only 28,248 of them (3%) would be willing and able to jump all of them to use the service.
If I cut this to six hurdles, this would increase usage to 117,649 customers (12%) - or four times as many - a 400% increase in usage!
If I could cut it to only three hurdles, that would raise the number of customers able to use the service to 490,000 customers (49%) or another three times as many - 300% increase from the six hurdles figure or a massive 1,700% increase from ten hurdles.
In other words, removing hurdles can dramatically increase usage. While in reality it is never as linear as this, remove the right hurdles and the number of customers using an online service will soar.
When engaging customers online we already have built-in hurdles people have to meet to use and interact with our egovernment services:
- Access to a computer
- An internet connection
- Comfort with using the above
- Mandatory registration processes (even for simple transactions)
- No sales pitch for services - explaining by video/animation and audio how a service works and what benefits it provides customers
- Difficult-to-find services and registration/sign-on links
- Overly complex registration/sign-on processes
- Unnecessary information collection - to the extent of asking customers information they are unlikely to have access to
- Badly written service, security and privacy information
- Poorly constructed workflows with unnecessary or out-of-order steps and no clarity on where the customer is in the process (how many steps remain)
- Error messages in bureaucratic or tech-speak that dead-end the customer (no way forward)
- A lack of appropriate acknowledgement when steps or transactions are correctly completed
- Forcing customers to switch channels in the middle of a process without warning or when tasks could be completed entirely online
- A requirement for complex and non-intuitive password and usernames
- Difficult password and username retrieval processes (if a service is used less than weekly, most customers will forget their password at some point)
- A lack of tutorials, contextual help or step-ups to live online interactions with customer service officers (such as Avatar-based agent interactions, or actual staff interactions via text chat, voice chat or video chat)
- Services that require the use of plug-ins, older web browsers or are not friendly towards mobile devices
Most of these can be adopted by government without compromising security or privacy and all lead to greater usage and satisfaction with online services.
Some of these 'hurdle-repellents' include:
- Upfront video demonstrating what the service does (the benefit) and how it works (ease of use)
- Larger and more prominent registration/sign-on) buttons, with less clutter on pages to distract customers
- Use of plain english in all instructions and error messages, generally in informal language
- Extra large form fields (12pt or larger) for easier reading
- Simpler workflows with less steps and clear progression bars explaining the next step
- Customer-defined usernames and passwords (or use of email address as username), with visual aids to maximise security (such as password strength indicators)
- Secret questions (some user-defined) to provide a second line of support for customers who forget their passwords
- Clear and simple 'forgotten password' processes which do not require customers to switch channels (to call)
- Contextual help integrated into every screen
- Video or text and graphics tutorials for each workflow - clearly accessible within the workflow and before a user authenticates (double as sales tools)
- Live online help, potentially with co-browsing (where the customer service officer can see what the customer is seeing)
There are other commonly used approaches to reducing the hurdles for your customers when using egovernment services. Try out some commercial sites and you'll quickly gather more ideas.
So why reduce the hurdles for customers - potentially at a cost to the government?
The benefits for the government agency include faster outcomes, lower cost transactions and greater customer satisfaction. There's a side benefit of more timely and accurate reporting as online transactions can be easier to capture and report on than those over a counter or phone.
The benefits for customers include less stress when transacting (therefore more likelihood they will keep using the same approach) and faster outcomes.
The downside? Government will need to invest more in our online infrastructure to make it easier and faster for customers.
I reckon that trade-off is well worth it.
So what is your agency doing to remove online transaction hurdles for customers?
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