Saturday, October 16, 2004
Public sector ICT development in Canada - the lessons
From a recent article/post by Will Davies (IPPR): The strategy used by the Canadians differs in two important respects. Firstly, it pursues quality of output, not quantity of input. One of the central targets established by D'Auray was that citizen satisfaction should increase by 10 per cent by 2005. To find ways of doing this, focus groups have been heavily used, and the CIO's Office has prioritised getting 'inside the head' of the user. The fact that this produces knock-on benefits, in terms of higher uptake of online services and consequent efficiency savings all round, remains implicit. Michelle D'Auray was speaking about the Canadian public sector IT experience at an IPPR-organised event at the Houses of Parliament last month.
Yes, focus groups were used in the initial trawl, to uncover some ideas, but as D'Auray made clear on the day, subsequent research and design work was somewhat deeper than that, involving users and potential users (including employees) in the design process.
One of the respondents to D'Auray at the IPPR event had the bright idea that all that was needed for UK government websites was more marketing. User research was not in his vocabulary. And then they wonder - he wondered - why we have so many government websites with so few users. Focus groups - so beloved of this administration - will tell you what people tell you, not what they do.
4:20 PM|
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