Socitm Blog

It was billed as a case study about channel shift from Eurostar. Shorter than most sessions, it sounded interesting and worth half an hour of my time. I arrived a couple of minutes late and found that it had alreday gone off track and the Eurostar story turned out to be one about Tottenham Hotspur FC.

With a professional interest in website good practice and a personal interest in soccer, I was immediately curious as my team operates away from the Premiership limelight where websites are universally awful. How could this be relevant, though, to the public sector?

Well, Spurs - who would have been my team had I been a Londoner - have a strong vision of being the most IT-enabled club in the land. They presented some impressive statistics. 92% of ticket sales made face-to-face just five years ago had turned into 90% sales online today. They have ambitions to develop a single customer record for all their 20m fans worldwide. The most interesting slides focused on sales of replica shirts. They showed, for example, how clear design and proper user testing added £5k sales in just one month from small percentage increase in converting a few more customer visits into sales.

All council web managers need to apply the same focus to improving their organisation's websites!(some do already of course). Since we presented the detailed case for managing top tasks in Better connected 2010, we know that many are working towards incorporating these principles, but progress is slow and sometimes misguided (eg adding a panel for top tasks in addition to existing navigation structures rather than replacing them). We might, of course, speculate why this might be the case, but that's for another time and another blog perhaps.  

Just as a reminder the critical work lies in

• identifying top tasks systematically from a variety of sources of customer access and also involving those customers
• re-designing home pages and landing pages using evidence from such an exercise
• measuring the success of top tasks, and their speed of completion, through panels of typical users

This will not result in sales of replica shirts, or probably sales of anything. However this methodology will make significant savings in the cost to serve by reducing the cost of avoidable contact as visit failure drives dissatisfied web visitors to using the phone. Our data suggests that large councils can save up to £1m per year just from this. Moreover, if councils can then streamline the back-office operation for the same top tasks, then there will be more savings still.

This really is the only business case, but a powerful one, for investing in your website at the current time. This is the way to win your spurs!

                                                            Martin Greenwood 

You can view the event microsite and presentations at www.bpcw10.co.uk.

There were lots of excellent questions fired at me afterwards - perhaps you'd like to add your comments using the comment facility. And someone tweeted their amazement that a CIO (me presumably) knew about Twitter! Here goes with the speech (its quite long for a blog post):

I have to say that in any walk of life, building perfection is rarely the 'name of the game'.  'Fit for purpose' would be a more justifiable (and affordable) aspiration. However, in the case of public sector websites, pressure is growing for a step change.

We must remember that websites are still relatively new - 10 years ago, a significant proportion of local authorities did not have a web site and those who did it was just an electronic library of information.  Ten years before that few of us had a home PC.

Over time, largely as a result of customer demand, rather than efficiency measures, websites have improved their look and feel and their information content.  But we have yet to make the leap of faith for them becoming the default delivery channel.  I believe that is now happening.

Many of you will remember the Best Value Performance Indicator 157 - putting every transaction on line whatever the business value.  For all the criticism the 'e-Government' programme of 2002-2005, it did at least result in a growing interest in and focus on web transactions.  It feels to me as though we are at a similar turning point, and that's what this conference is about.

So 'perfection' is as much about improving the way in which we design and deliver public services and deliver efficiency at levels not previously thought possible.

Actually it's odd that we have not pushed the efficiency 'button' much harder until now.  The cost of a web transaction is a fraction of face-to-face or even dealing with a telephone call, and yet most public service organisations have preferred to choose web self-service as an additional channel, rather than 'channel shift' and replace traditional service delivery.  That is the 'leap of faith' which must now happen.

The public sector now has little choice but to stop doing things and to get rid of the majority of overheads associated with the traditional means of delivery.  Socitm have been advocating this for the best part of a decade, and the Better Connected service was set up specifically to give the examples of 'the best' and 'the rest' on this journey.

Despite some criticism of Better Connected from some web developers who don't necessarily share the same views, and from some Councils who feel they have been ranked too low, the Better Connected service has created an indisputably wide and deep impact in driving up public service website quality.  And it will continue to do so, even if it challenges us and creates some contentious debate.  To do otherwise would dilute value and influence.
 
What you will see today will be examples of best practice.  Not from the point of view of technologists.  Not from the point of view of policy designers and strategists.  But from the point of view of citizens.  And it is fair to say that we haven't always served their interests well enough web design.

Doing this now is not optional, and in that sense driving for perfection matters:

• Websites which are designed around the interests of individuals and communities.
• Content and electronic services which put the citizen in control.
• Automated and straight forward end-to-end transactions.
• Personalisation of websites, rather than the vanilla 'one size fits all'.

This also accords with the Martha Lane Fox drive to get all Britain on line.  It will not be good enough for Digital Inclusion to be a top priority for public service organisations if our websites are not up to scratch and providing easy access, effective support and useful services as people become more digitally active.

Being able to get the information that you want quickly or to complete a transaction simply is the priority for a citizen who rarely wants to read minutes of committees, detailed policies and long PDF files describing Council successes over the last 12 months, with photos of chief officers and politicians at harmonious gatherings. 

And raw data for developers matters - much can be left to them which traditionally we would have done.

There are, of course,  many good examples as well, and we should learn from these, and the pressure on a payback makes the choice of search engines, web publishing tools, and design aids essential to get right.  But it often does not take lots of money.  Some of the best websites that I have seen, for example, those that win the annual Hantsweb Awards event, are built on a shoestring by amateurs with nothing more than rudimentary knowledge and a great deal of hard work.

Despite the investments, it is actually still rare to find a really good website in the public or private sectors.  Some web design clearly show that people still believe that consumers on average are impressed by 'clever' technology such as 'flash media'- sports and leisure retailers are amongst the worse.  Some designers think web self-service is only about 'avoidable contact costs'.

The 'best' examples are simple, quick, and intuitive to use.  These are I suspect not designed by:

• the head of marketing ("isn't this pretty, you'll remember our logo")
• the web designer ("You won't find another web site using so many features")
• the policy manager ("I'm going to tell you how great we are and all about our history and philosophy")
• the IT department ("our technology is seriously clever and high performing")

The very best are single purpose - eg. Google, 'Nickys Seeds'.  So it's hard for complex public service organisations, but there are some golden rules in my view.

• Really, truly easy end-to-end transactions - "one and done", integrated not bolted on.
• Contact details and simple information - not reports and policy documents.
• Keep the format web based -avoid PDF.
• Up-to-date - spend enough time getting rid of old, out-of-date stuff.
• Customer driven - be a 'mystery shopper', and be surprised
• Don't rely on IT experts or marketing 'experts', use crowd sourcing.

The debate about 'too many web sites' is, in my view, a distraction.  You can't even count them if they are well integrated.  And why would you bother?  The 'too many website' angst is an issue because:

• So many of them are pointless or badly designed.
• They are symptomatic of layers of public sector quangos which get in the way of public administration and service delivery.
• The effect of preservation of unique 'brand' which is driven by self-justification and is confusing, unnecessary and counter to joined up government.

This last point is a growing concern.  Partnership services need a hosted web presence, and an identity but they don't necessarily need to run a completely separate web presence. For example, Hampshire hosts over 1000 websites.  It is the busiest local authority website as a result, moving traffic between services, whether delivered by the County or not.  Yet we have not got it right.  We still debate about new websites paid for (at least in part) by the County, delivered by the County, but yet are told that they must be separate from any County brand.  As a result, their visibility is lower, costs are higher and integration is diluted.

So what does the future hold?

Clearly technology will continue to develop, irrespective of whether the public sector can afford to be at the leading edge.  As Bill Gates said, "if you can imagine something being possible by technology, it will be delivered within five years.  The things you can't imagine will simply take a little longer."

There are some particular trends, which you are quite likely to be factoring into your thinking and your plans:

• Re-purposing content for mobile devices. 
• Providing data and information to fulfil the government's and the public's priority for transparency.
• Integrating transactions into services and related information, rather than a 'bolt-on' catalogue.
• 'Personalisation' with secure authentication to deliver content and information (both 'push' and 'pull') to individuals, under their control.
• Web self-service, with no intervention and complete automation from request to fulfilment, with invisible boundaries between public and private service delivery.

Fears of unfettered of demand will have to be dealt with - choking back public demand through deliberately bad design sometimes (often!) seen in the private sector just won't do.  There must be integration of contact centres, customer service strategy and web development.

As web services delivered through various access channels naturally become the default for delivery, they will also be the measurement of public service quality.

All of this means radical change.  Web services are no longer the domain of IT, 'Marketing' or a few specialists in individual departments.  Web services are a vital channel for all service managers who need to understand intimately the potential of the technology and the risks, benefits and change management implications.

These changes are arguably as big a step as the original adoption of the Web itself represented.  Lack of resources will both be an inhibitor but also a driver for creativity and change.  The launch of Socitm's Web Professionals' framework is also a significant step designed to support web and digital professionals.  This framework has been developed by practitioners working with Socitm and reflects the skills and expertise inherent in these roles.  By the end of the Summer, Socitm will be inviting web professionals to take up membership and apply for an accredited designation.  I strongly welcome this initiative.

Whatever happens, Socitm will be there, measuring performance and helping promote best practice, as well as encouraging citizen-focus adoption of web technology and design for service transformation and efficiency.

Last week I went to a workshop organised by Consumer Focus following its somewhat critical report on Directgov published at the end of last year.

It was a very good day, with lots of participation from senior people from Directgov and DWP and a range of other interested parties, and some good discussion about making public service websites more consumer-friendly. The day's events have been comprehensively socially reported by David Wilcox and his team.

Right at the end of the day, the issue was raised of the difficulty of hiring experienced professionals to manage significant web projects, certainly not at the public sector pay rates available for these roles.

In part the problem is because public sector HR and its grading and pay structures has not caught up with the multi-skilled, constantly evolving being that is the really effective web manager. Similar frustrations (but coming from the point of view of web professionals, rather than their employers) inspired Socitm to initiate its project to define a web skills framework. The project kicked off in earnest late last year, supported by webbies from across the public sector, and will publish a draft skills framework for consultation shortly.

It suddenly occurred to me, while I was listening to the discussion at the Consumer Focus event, that the web management role had something in common with the role of brand management in an FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) company. When I was at university at the end of the 1970s, landing a job in brand management with Procter & Gamble or Unilever or ICI was the top aspiration for ambitious people who didn't have the connections to land a job in a newspaper or the BBC, and wanted faster rewards than the fast stream of the civil service offered. (Weirdly, the City didn't feature much then, that was reserved for toffs or wide boys).

Anyway, brand management was considered a demanding role that needed really bright, confident people with a huge appetite to learn, because to do it well meant mastering the many different processes that result in a successful product on the supermarket shelf. The brand manager needed to know something about manufacturing processes and production engineering. They needed to understand distribution and channels. They needed to know quite a bit about packaging, and how to combine shelf appeal and branding with efficiency in manufacturing and distribution. They needed to be able to get the best from creative agencies designing branding and creating ad campaigns. And they needed to understand the consumer, commissioning the right research and interpreting the results correctly, and being aware of the risks to sales and reputation of changing anything - or of failing to change. And of course they need to know why they were doing all this in the first place - where their product fitted into the business, and its goals in terms of market share, profit, and return on investment. Oh, and they needed top communication skills, in order to persuade senior management to go along with their plans.

A similar breadth of skill, knowledge and understanding is required of web managers. They need to know more than a bit about the technology that drives the internet and its supporting applications. They need to be able to talk confidently with, and challenge, the coders and application developers designing the 'back end' of web-delivered services. They need to respect and understand the importance of the written word, and how bad writing, naming and headlining can ruin a website's usability. They need to understand how people use websites, and how to manage and interpret user and acceptability testing. They need to know, at least a bit, about branding and visual design. They must be able to commission and interpret research on web usage, whether from statistics or consumer research. They need to understand, and know how to exploit, the interface between the web and social media. And they need top communication skills to work effectively with people from the top to the bottom of the organisation, helping them make the most of this hugely powerful, constantly changing medium.

What's the point of the comparison between brand management and web management and does it have any value? Well, yes, I think it does. If the parallel is true, then it suggests that web management is a significant role with a vital part to play in the organisation's success. The person holding that role needs to be someone of high intelligence and capability who is expected and trusted to deliver on many fronts. Like brand managers, they will be well rewarded and can expect to go to the top.

It seems unlikely, in the short term at least, that the public sector will facilitate a fast track route into web management from university, characterised by the intensive, expensive on and off the job training that the private sector offers for brand managers. More likely, public sector web managers will work their way up, learning by experience from different web roles that demand more of less of the IT, design, research, content management, service delivery, communications and e-marketing skills that are required.

Which makes all the more important the work Socitm is currently doing to define and then promote these wide ranging 'web professional' skills. Watch this space.............

For anyone still wondering about the value of the 'social web' for professional purposes, you should know how helpful its been this week with the launch of Better connected 2010.

Better connected's publication on 1 March each year is anticipated with some trepidation. By web mangers of course, who judge their own performance, and are judged by their bosses, on how their council did. By CMS and other suppliers who look to the results for opportunities to promote the success of 'their' councils. And not least by the Better connected team, who put the report out and wait for the feedback (to put it politely) from web managers and others who think we got it wrong. This year someone even observed that we'd been overgenerous in our scoring of their site - a first I think.

Before the social web came along, there were limited opportunities for us to explain how Better connected was done - the evaluation process, the scoring system, how eventual judgements were arrived at, and QA of the results. The assessment criteria were, of course, published in detail in our publication Better connected: aiming high and every edition of the report described the process at some length. But not everyone with a view took the trouble to read all this and I think there was quite a lot of misunderstanding and scepticism about how scoring was done.

Then along came the social web. Last year we established the Web Improvement and usage community, for web managers and other interested parties, on the IDeA Communities of Practice platform. The opportunity to have an ongoing dialogue, much of it initiated by Better connected users, has been a huge help in de-mystifying Better connected and demonstrating the quality, thoroughness and objectivity of the assessment process.

During the summer, the existence of the web community enabled us to consult widely on changes we were proposing to the Better connected assessment and ranking system. In the old days we might have held a consultation meeting, knowing that participation would necessarily be limited to those with the budget and time to travel, and probably to one person maximum per council. With the CoP in place, everyone can make a contribution and see that shared instantly with everyone else. And with lots of CoP participants in touch with networks reaching well outside our own, the information and discussion published there gets broadcast much further and faster than we'd be able to do just on our own.

But the really, really, big benefit from the social web has become clear this last week, with the ability its given us to respond to people's questions and issues (and ok, some grumbles) about the assessments their council got in Better connected 2010.

We've always had questions on publication. Better connected involves 12 reviewers, 433 councils, a 120-question main survey, and numerous additional surveys, some carried out by third parties. Multiplying all those factors makes for a lot of potential issues and errors, just at a clerical level, even before anything involving reviewer judgement comes into play.

In the past, questions came in by email, and were answered privately. Sometimes there would be - generally pretty unhelpful - spillover into the media. Often there were disgruntlements that the Better connected team never even heard about. This year, thanks to the social web, we had the means to listen in to, and respond to, queries and issues raised in public from the word go.

Discussion of Better connected in Twitter started as soon as the report went out, at 8am on Monday morning. Most people using Twitter quickly adopted the hashtag #bc10 which meant most comment could be easily found in one place. By following Twitter (mainly) and some other blogs/forums, we were able to pick up on the discussion and respond immediately.

Obviously you can't respond to something complicated in the 140 characters Twitter offers, but we were able to use Twitter to signal to the local gov web community that we were on the case, actively following their issues, and would be publishing responses asap in the Web Improvement and usage community - which many belong to anyway. And of course, this information got around through Twitterers' networks, bringing a whole bunch of other people ('what's this #bc10 thing?') in to the discussion along the way.

As each query came up, some in Twitter, some in the web community, and some direct, we were able to respond right away (and be seen to be doing so). That provided the breathing space for us to investigate each issue, provide explanation and/or justification and in a few cases, agreement that an error had been made and what we would be doing to put it right. Every question asked, and our answer to it, meant we could explain more about the assessment process and the many complexities involved in judging whether a particular website had been useful/usable in dealing with a particular issue. Its still ongoing as I write.

The process has been fast and transparent and has brought lots of useful information, discussion and points of view into general circulation. It has also generated some good ideas about future of Better connected and how this major annual exercise can be further developed to bring even greater value to the growing numbers interested in development of public sector websites. I also think its further raised the profile, and I hope, reputation of Better connected, although that is for others to judge.

And thanks to the social web, that's really easy to do: its all out there for you to see for yourselves. Just take a look in the Web community and if you feel so moved, get involved. You might also want to look at the many blogs and press comments around Better connected (a Google News search on 'Socitm' for the last week ie since 1 March, will turn up many, and there are several links our newsfeed on the Socitm home page today).

One other, related, web 2.0ish thing: this year we decided to publish Better connected's headline results as open data, ie easily re-usable by web developers. We did it really because Socitm is backing the campaign for local open data, and we wanted to walk the talk. So we really didn't know what - if anything - would happen next.

What did happen was that Stuart Harrison at Lichfield DC mashed up the data and almost instantly we had a map of where all the different star-rated councils appear in the UK . You might like to take a look..........