Public Strategy

Greetings from a friendly bank

I rang my bank this morning, at their request.  The opening greeting, in full, was:

All our operators are busy.

Please hold.

Do not hang up.

The words do not do justice to the terseness of the tone.  Mack the Knife playing in the background was a curious counterpoint.  Hearing those words eight times before a human being came on the line didn't help.

The human being, when she arrived, was charming.  Then I got to listen to Somethin' Stupid and Do Nothing 'til You Hear From Me (there may be a message in there somewhere) while she delved into the problem of of why my bank card in London was apparently taking cash out of machines in Canada.  Then she was charming all over again.

I was talking to one of our contact centre people recently.  He said that the agents' lives were busier and more stressful than they needed to be, because the first part of so many calls needed time to be spent calming the customer down enough to be able to have a conversation.  Sometimes the customer's stress was a result of their circumstances, but all too often it was about all the things the Government (with a distinctly capital but very amorphous G) had done to them before they even made the call.  Waiting in a call centre queue doesn't come near the top of the list of anybody's favourite experiences, but it doesn't need to be designed to maximise the chances of customers taking out their frustration on the agents.

Two small thoughts come from that.  The first is that getting the small things right can make a big difference.  The second is another reminder that it is not just public services which struggle to maintain customer focus and effective service design.

Update:  The expert sceptics at Light Blue Touchpaper list thirteen things you can do to reduce the risk of card fraud.

Universal service obligations

 David Weinberger muses on the challenge of supporting the online endeavours of elderly relations:

I'm on a mailing list for former employees of a company, and we've been on a track for a day talking about what computer is best for aging parents or grandparents who want to do email and some basic Web browsing. This is from the point of view of the people who are going to be doing support and sysadmin for their relatives.

It's a problem many of us are familiar with.  One of the problems I used to struggle with was a simple - but sometimes unbridgeable one - of language and terminology:  my parents, even after they had become reasonably accomplished at doing the things that they wanted to do, simply lacked any language to communicate what was going on on their screens when something unexpected happened.  Apart from anything else, they had no powers of discrimination, couldn't tell what was important and what was merely incidental to what was going on, so it took much longer than it might otherwise have done to pin down problems.  It's much less of a problem now, partly because of their own greater experience and partly because of the magic of Copilot.

But all that of course is a small part of a much broader problem.  Not every elderly person with a computer has a child able to do system support, and not everybody who could benefit from that support is an elderly person - digital exclusion is a much broader and more pervasive challenge than that.  It's often seen, though, as essentially a demand side problem, about how people can get the economic and social purchasing power, together with the necessary skills and confidence, to become part of the digital world.  Weinberger, interestingly, is positioning it as much more of a supply side problem:  how can devices be equipped and configured to make them more straightforward to use?

The mobile phone industry appears to be further ahead in some ways, although not everybody is happy with the way it is developing.  The downside of that approach is that it succeeds by taking away much of the functionality, which although fine for some purposes, does close down options for others.  There are no obvious and immediate solutions, but anybody in the business of providing services to the whole population needs to find a way round this.  Throwing our hands in the air and assuming that such people will simply use other channels may be an accurate description of how things work today, but can't be an adequate response for the longer term.

Talking telephone numbers

There are 450 million newspapers sold each day across the world.  There are 850 million subscriptions to cable and satellite television.  There are 1.4 billion internet users.  And there are 4 billion mobile phones.

I have have written before about the growing importance of mobile phones, in terms of both their number and of what they can do.  In one sense it's all self-evident:  the omnipresence of mobiles is an unavoidable feature of daily life.  But in many other ways, we have scarcely begun to think through the implications of what a while ago I called “the transition connected devices are making from being big tethered things to being small wandering things”.

I drew the chart from figures collected together by Tomi Ahonen, and have used only a tiny fragment of the data assembled in his post.  He brings the numbers vividly to life, and it's well worth reading the whole thing to get a sense of the sheer momentum involved.  A couple of the snippets which particularly caught my eye were:

The typical top-end smartphone of today, becomes a mid-range phone in only three years. Think of your cool new iPhone or N95 or E90 Communicator, in a few years its a hand-me-down phone used as a toy by young kids… The processing power of a top end smartphone of today, such as a Nokia N96, equals the total computing power of all 50,000 computers on the planet that existed just 40 years ago.

SMS text messaging is by far the most widely used data application on the planet. You can reach 2.5 times more people via SMS text messaging than on any fixed landline telephone! Twice as many people send text messages as own a TV set. Almost twice as many people tap on the phone keypad to send text messages, as sign purchases onto credit cards.

Part of the conceptual problem here is calling these things phones in the first place.  Of course that's part of what they are, but putting the stress on what is being carried forward from the previous technology makes it easy to underestimate the discontinuity they represent.  As Seth Godin has just observed in describing the transition from the telegraph to the telephone,

If the telephone guys had set out to make something that did what the telegraph does, but better, they probably would have failed. Instead, they solved a different problem, in such an overwhelmingly useful way that they eliminated the feature set of the competition.

That leaves two big problems for service designers and providers:

• how do you design services which take account of the new possibilities and the preferences of a new generation of customers?
• how do you manage a continuum which runs from people who only ever even turn on a mobile phone if there is an emergency to those Ahonen describes texting every few minutes of every waking hour of every day?

Or, putting those two questions together in a different way, how do we sustain the current delivery model for those who still need it while building the capability of doing things very differently?

Readerly texts and writerly texts

The Power of Information Taskforce has published its report.  Or rather it has published a beta version of its report, in a format which not only allows but strongly encourages comments to be made on the draft over the next couple of weeks before it is is formally submitted to Cabinet Office ministers.

That's a fairly radical approach, and one which is worth a bit of reflection in its own right.  As a way of encouraging engagement it is clearly working:  the comments are building up, questioning everything from the punctuation to the fundamental principles.  More interestingly still, some of the comments are starting to build on one another, creating an engagement which is different in structure to conventional consultation responses as well as in medium.  All of that is made to work through a very finely crafted wordpress theme which makes the process painless and transparent.

All in all, this is a splendid and positive step forward, illustrating how a little bit of imagination coupled with a little bit of ingenuity can create new possibilities.  But there is always room to be better still, and I have a doubt, a reflection, and a couple of niggles.

When they say 'innovate' they really mean it

At the weekend,  Directgov launched a new innovation site

to inform the greater developer community about available resources, to provide a platform to connect with one another, and to showcase new ideas with the aim of supporting and encouraging innovation.

It's tastefully purple and green (have they been spending too much time in jobcentres?) with not a trace of orange, supporting some strong messages that this is not a production site.

Having launched on Saturday, they detected a problem on Monday - getting reliable information about whether schools are opening or not when there's been a bit of snow.  Now it's Tuesday, so they have launched the solution : a new site called School Closures.

That's a pretty impressive time to market by anybody's standards.  Not surprisingly, it's more a demonstrator than an usable service, but that makes it no less interesting.  What it's got is a database of schools and provision to tag any school with a note.  What's missing is any information on school closures.

That's not a criticism, because in some ways the really interesting bit of this is the mash up of the thing government happens to have anyway - the schools database - with information which nobody has on any systematic basis - whether any particular school is open or not - and which can best be provided and shared locally.  That makes it a bootstrapping problem:  getting enough people to put stuff in to make it useful enough to be worth going there to get stuff out.  Crowd-sourcing school opening arrangements could provide some temptingly powerful ways for bored teenagers to give themselves a long weekend.  So this may turn out not to be a very useful approach, at least as an end user service  - most of us are only interested in one or two schools and are probably familiar with where to find them online.  But as a status widget on the school's home page, easily triggered remotely rather than by whoever does site maintenance having to turn up to school to hand knit a new page, it could have a great future.

All of that's a bit beside the point.  It doesn't matter in the slightest that this is not (yet) a robust and customer-focused service.  What matters is beginning to break the cycle of long slow planning and development.

As for the innovation site itself, there are a couple of obvious ways in which it could almost instantaneously be improved:  the site is clearly built on wordpress, but wordpress with all the interesting bits turned off.   The voice of innovation is a fairly portentous 'we' without the slightest indication who 'we' might be.  The combination of blog format and approach with a depersonalised royal we jars a bit.  UPDATE:  names have suddenly appeared on the posts, so this point is already redundant.

Much more importantly, there is no way of talking back:  the post introducing the school closures site asks

Would it meet the need? Try it out for yourself.

Well I have tried it for myself, and I would be happy to give an answer to the question.  But no comments, no (visible) trackbacking, no way of joining the conversation.  UDATE:  Simon Dickson helpfully points out in his comment below that I have missed the comments, so half a retraction is due - but I did try looking without success.

And in a further oddity, the back end of the school closure site seems to run off a domain name from Tonga, with a whois service providing no useful information whatsoever about who is actually behind it.  Even on a limited and experimental scale, that seems an odd way of doing things.

But, but, but...  This is day 3.  I am already looking forward to what they will do next week.

Top guns go blogging

The US Air Force may seem an unlikely source for good guidance on blogging - but they have come up with something thoughtful, well organised and on one piece of paper, which are attributes not to be sneezed at.

Found from Global Nerdy (who also offers a PDF version) via Jeremiah Owyang.