Post in Research into electronic government channel measurement

Apr 21 09:57 UTC

As the person who was chairing esd toolkit at the time I remember with mixed
feelings the earlier waves of measuring service delivery around e-channels. In
both BVPI 157 and the Priority Outcomes we had government targets which we then
had to work as a local government community to make sense of and develop a way
of measuring and reporting., We had an interesting balancing act between making
these workable and as painless as possible for local government and not being
seen to be doing government's job for it. The active use of 15000 local
government officers debating this in our forums and the participation of
central government in those forums in debate rather than directive helped us do
this (we think) effectively.

We have been working since to try and get sensible and useful metrics and
measurement tools in place around channel shift and unit costing and have tools
that will do this based on the work councils have already invested in toolkit.
As always this is side by side with a series of other information and tools to
help deliver the change we all want to achieve including the MOSAIC profiling
of who potentially uses services and where they live, plus marketing tools from
national work.

We are now working on how this investment can also be used to measure NI14 and
how we can build links to the Data Hub and Local Information Systems but the
double bind is still in  place about needing to support local government
organise itself to meet central government's challenges but not simply doing
what they tell us.