Public Sector Web Professionals: where's it at?

Interview with me at LocalGovCamp Lincoln by Liz Azyan of LGEO Research.



Post by me about the new group.

Council homepages: what's wrong with 'interesting development'?

There's been a great flurry of interest in local government webbie circles because a few councils have gone down the Google route of deliberately reducing homepage content and pushing search as the way to find what you're looking for, what you want to do, what your task is.

Lancashire's Kevin Rainsbury told the lively thread on the Communities of Practice (CoP) website that:

We're at a relatively early stage in development but felt it was worthwhile launching in its current state as it was able to provide customers with something better than what they had previously. We did a fair bit of customer research which led us down this path. We're also aware that the new site might "ruffle a few feathers" given it's such an unorthodox approach for a local authority. The Socitm Better Connected review will be of particular interest this year!

(I asked, via Socitm, for more information on any research or prior-to-launch testing within development by Lancashire and Westminster but as of the time of writing this hasn't appeared.)

Webbies divided

On the rest of the thread and in blog post comments council webbies were divided on the sites. Some cheered the innovative approach - 'It is good to know Lancashire is one of the councils thinking out of the box' - whilst others found fault (eg failed search results) or questioned the usability. .

Feeding back from experience, one webbie said:

When I’ve carried out user testing I’ve often found that participants are fairly evenly split between ‘expert’ users who like to search for information using a search engine and ‘novice’ users, who are less confident and like to browse and click on links. Some people just happen to feel more comfortable when they have some hints about what to click on. Even better if the links they can click on are relevant to their goals. In comparison to Lancashire’s site, the Westminster site does place popular tasks under the search box.

This experience reflects not just use of council websites but longstanding experience of websites in general: it's also common sense that users would be split between novices and experts (and a mass in between). However one comment made clear that this understanding hasn't got through to all council webbies:

Search is something that has to be pushed at people more. I get tired of reading complaints from the public saying “I tried to find X on your site, but I HAD to use the search” – like the search on a website is some sort of last resort form of torture.

Forcing rather than following users

Another reviewer noted that Westminster's design included navigation options 'below-the-fold' (meaning that users have to scoll down). This, and other comments, stood out for me as part of an unfortunately common mentality in the public sector, that a design is fine simply because the 'option' is provided - somewhere on the page or via a link. But a lot of users simply won't scroll, or see something 'obvious' to you.

For example, Jakob Nielsen’s study on how much users scroll (in Prioritizing Web Usability) revealed that only 23% of visitors scroll on their first visit to a website. This means that 77% of visitors won’t scroll.

So Westminster and Lancashire are actually doing what the commentator above wants them to do - effectively 'pushing search at people more'.

Hearing from an expert

I spoke with web design authority Gerry McGovern about Lancashire and Westminster.

There are 'rules' which come and have evolved from best practice which comes from experts over many years now observing how users actually behave. There are 'heuristics' which are established principles for user interface design (web pages).

I said:

My understanding of feedback from user studies is that 'search is the user's lifeline when navigation fails', and also from what you have written and said that navigation should be improved. Therefore it is a mistake to hide it on a homepage.

[You] need to look at who the homepage specific audience is and that most users actually arrive elsewhere so a homepage focus can be a distraction from addressing user's main needs, such as being able to complete tasks from wherever they arrive and ensuring that search and referral traffic is sending them to their goals. As well, that reliance on search means a lot of working on tweaking and refining results and results presentation.

Gerry replied:

I think it’s an interesting experiment, particularly what Lancashire is doing, but I basically agree with your points. Search and navigation should go together. Often what happens is people search to get roughly in the right direction and then navigate the rest of the way. But many will, as you point out, navigate once they’re presented with good logical links.

I think Westminster has got more of a balance; they have brought the top tasks onto the homepage as well as the big search area.

The fact that the search will have to be tweaked is a good thing. Really managing search is very important so to have a big focus on quality search is great.

You’re also right about the decline in homepage importance. Because a great many are starting at Google it means that they will often end up on a deeper page.

Why does this keep happening?

The apparent absence of user-testing within an iterative design process - what I would describe as standard industry best practice - happens in the case of council website design as a result of, as Carl Haggerty:explained in his blog post about the Lancashire and Westminster developments, "a wide range of influencing factors that will impact on the local webteam to make particular choices."

He identified those factors as:

• political pressure
• resources
• role of communications in website
• role of ICT in website
• role of customer services in website
• location of webteam in organisation
• external influences such as Socitm Better Connected, Gerry McGovernp plus many, many others
• which conferences members of the webteam have attended (web, social media etc)
• and yes last but not least our customers needs – all the above shouldn’t matter but they do.

I don't think it's chance that Carl happens to put customers as the last bullet point but I think council webbies are scoring an own goal in their desire for website improvement if they don't prioritise customer feedback, especially through user testing.

For example, and this is one I have cited before. When I conducted guerilla testing for a new design it became immediately obvious that the main link through to online services was simply not being seen by users. All of them were missing it, it might as well not have been there. This was because of a common, known usability issue but one on which I'd found myself over-ruled as I wasn't 'the decider'.

Because I had gone and done some cheap'n'easy testing and got a unanimous result I was able to get that design redone - because what would the counter-argument be? 'I know better than the users'?

The customers are the biggest weapon in a council webbies armory against those factors that Carl cites but how often are they used?

Is design consistency a bad thing?

Carl asks:

Why are we all taking a separate view, if we all have the same goals in mind, why haven’t we all developed identical looking sites with just a logo or some colour change as the main difference?

Shouldn’t we all agree to a consistent approach, purpose and some principles for local government websites (including the homepage) that we can at sign up to?

I wonder about this too.




Many governments, such as in Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore, have adopted common look'n'feel policies, which dictate design boundaries. Others, such as the American government and various Australian states, have provided for some years now both policy and guidance as aides for government webbies.

The UK doesn't have any of this.

The new COI usability guidance isn't meant for local government sites - and doesn't mention guerrilla testing. Socitm's Better Connected has radically improved from being a lengthy tick-box list to honing its message but still has some way to go.

Exercises such as my friend Dave Briggs' 'crowd-sourced' What makes for a decent Council website? have serious problems in my opinion with introducing bias, their usability and not necessarily being customer-led. I also remain unconvinced by Idea's developing 'Knowledge Hub', for similar reasons.

To answer Carl's question - "why are we all taking a separate view, if we all have the same goals in mind?" - I would look at:

• how webbies are being and have been led (hello DCLG)
• what resources they have (why they are so disparate or non-existent, why so many 'best practice' experiments keep getting funded and keep failing) and 
• why, a decade into very well-funded national egov/transformation policy, council webbies still remain all over the place on the basics of designing successful, customer-driven websites

You have to ask these sort of hard questions (and others, such as I'm not at all sure if "we all have the same goals in mind") to truly answer Carl's.

Simply put: I would question, with I think good cause, a rush for 'innovation' whilst some extremely basic yet to me obviously un/der-recognised problems still exist.

~~~~~~

Addendum: Following a Twitter exchange with local gov web manager Julian Scarlett, a point occured to me with both common look'n'feel and better information provision and general support for local government web development.

'Interesting development' requires resources and - with a few exceptional exceptions - this is not found in smaller population districts. This is another reason why there is such a huge disparity with the quality of local government websites.

Web stats for egov: a starter

After I posted in March about Issues with Better Connected's webstats use, Better Connected (BC) author, Socitm, kindly invited me to present at an event in London in May (a presentation partly repeated at #googlelocalgov). Following a conversation with BC's Martin Greenwood I've been invited to contribute more to their development of BC's web stats use section and how council's are judged on the subject in the annual report.

(Better Connected is the annual review and report on UK local government websites).

The Central Office of Information (COI) published guidance on web stats earlier this year.

The following are some initial notes and so I would welcome comment and input on them. There are issues with how the BC review team is practically able to judge councils on their stats use but first I think we need some idea of what best practice is on how they should be using them.

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The use of web stats for web development is best tied to goals, and through defining those key goals and associated metrics at all levels of a council: business, web team, other teams (such as comms), and then individual services.

Unfortunately internal politics often means that reporting (upwards) usually takes priority. So how a council better allocates stats resources (mainly time) is entirely consistent with BC's prime task of improving council websites.

Business/ marketing

• Customer–driven, which usually means tied to online service delivery through processes but could be information-delivery as well as process.

• Linked to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — unclear (to me) as to whether there are standardised (apples vs apples) measurement?

• CTR (Click-throughs) — actions, exits, abandonment rates; sources being email, direct/search, shortcut, ads, referrer, drill-down, onsite cross-promotion

• Keywords — search referral, SEO, content relevance

• Content strength — time on page, pageviews

• Benchmarking — against call volume, against other councils (NB, apples vs. apples issues, note city profiles), goal valuation (ROI)

Use of Google Analytics by many if not most councils provides an opportunity for benchmarking.

• Is view access shared?

Web Team/marketing/comms

• Trends — pageview, keywords

• Finding problem pages — drop out rates, low/high time on page, click backs to indexes, broken funnels (CTR, with follow ups eg surveys, customer services data, focus groups, usability testing application)

• Other council comparisons — eg Google Analytics view share comparative page drop out rates, low/high time on page, click backs to indexes, broken funnels

• Establishing goal use practice/policy to measure funnels

• Testing different designs

• Goal measurement tied to marketing — landing pages, funnels

• Keywords — search referral, SEO, content relevance (primarily relationship to Google search but audience segment)

• Marketing — external link tagging for CTR (click through) measurement

Departments

• Linked to business needs

• Reporting needs

• Work/resource allocation — cost/time benefit measurement

General issues

• Is the stats package correctly set up? — are secure sites (forms, payments), other sites, email links, downloads tagged

• Is there integration with CRM?
  

• Is internal/ other use segmented?
  

• Planning timelines for reporting — also automating
  

• Training — is this resourced, is there buy-in/ comprehension

• Benchmarking – how to set, what to compare to (should be apples vs. apples)

• Segmenting — sourcing demographic audience data

• Use of more than one stats provider

• When to hire expert guidance and for what purposes
  

Postscript: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

The fallout from the relaunch of Birmingham City council's website (#bccwebsite) has continued, not just online but in the local press as well thanks to the strong interest of Birmingham Post Editor Marc Reeves.

It's not a coincidence that the Post has a 'web 2.0' site and in its reporting about #bccwebsite has even included comments left on its news stories as well as comment sourced from online feedback - including mine.

But by far the most interesting developing is the first step in the concretisation of webbie attempts to influence the council's web development in the shape of a wiki (capture above).

This echoes some of the major developments bringing together webbie citizens and government around the world, such as the just launched Code For America who say "we believe there is a wealth of talent in the web industry eager to contribute to the rebuilding of America."

It seems there's also a wealth of talent wanting to contribute in Birmingham as well. Whether they will be heard depends as much on their own abilities at lobbying as creating useful stuff online, alongside the council's abilities at listening of course. Let's not start off being cynical!

Socitm's Helen Williams noted on the Communities of Practice public sector social network my main point, that - from this disaster (and acknowledging it as a disaster) - Things Must Change:

I think there are some specific reasons for the level of interest (reaction to the high cost, perceptions of the third party contractor, the size of the council / city and the fact that it has many digitally active citizens). However, I also believe we have entered an era where councils can expect their websites and any re-launches to receive a whole new level of public scrutiny and comment (and not just in the Web Improvement and Usage Community!)

Let down by Comms, and politicians?

As I noted before, part of the disaster has been a PR one.

In private conversation I have expressed my sorrow for the staff member forced to step up to be the fallguy. Glyn Evans, Birmingham City Council's Corporate Director of Business Change, responses have been unfortunate but betray a lack of help from the Council's PR department.

Even more unfortunately why is he the fallguy and not a local politician? Doesn't it say something for the political leadership's attitude to their website - and possibly explaining why they got in this mess in the first place - that they can watch it be trashed in the press and online and say nothing?

Birmingham Post Editor Marc Reeves agrees with this analysis in a comment on my blog post:

I don’t know Glyn Evans very well, but I do know he’s an effective and passionate public servant who cares deeply about doing the best for the city of Birmingham and its citizens. Much of the opprobrium has centred on him, which I think is a little unfair, although no-one should shirk from holding him up to the ‘cabinet responsibility’ principle.

However, he has been let down by the absence of a cohesive, proactive strategic comms process which – if it existed – would have spared the council some devastating reputational damage, and Glyn this undeserved personal and professional embarrassment.

A well thought-out public affairs / public relations approach to this simply wouldn’t have let the website ‘launch’ proceed. The simple expedient of quietly announcing that the first ‘below the line’ phase of the web overhaul was complete, with functionality to follow, would have avoided this mess. If, as Glyn says, there are major improvements on the way, then simply wait for them to be up ad running, then unveil all in a hail of publicity.

The website scandal just illustrates a much larger problem at the heart of BCC, I fear.

The non-reaction from local politicians (bar Sion Simon MP's retweet of my post) shows why the effects of the Birmingham digerati (aka 'twitterati') need to be as much political as they are digital.



Amongst other developments

• It has been suggested that the task of transferring content fell to council staff rather than the contractor. Also that the statement '17,000 pages' actually means 17,000 content items.
  
  
• An old post by Charles Arthur in The Guardian has surfaced which contains the claim that the project was "essentially trying to knit 35 sites operating under the council's umbrella into a single one. "
  
  
• Reviewers have noted that the forms system, at the heart of any possible cost-savings and 'service transformation, is extremely outdated with "a bewildering array of options?" and has bits which simply don't work.
  
  
• Reviewers have also noted that there are payment forms with no encryption.
  
  
• Questions have been asked about whether there was any public consultation as well as pre-launch testing/breaking and fixing (including usability testing), partly as comments by Evans have suggested this is happening post-launch - "there is little point in assessing our residents' perspective – the view we value most – at this stage".
  
  
• The exact role of the council's web team in the exercise remains a mystery.
  

• The CMS wasn't built by Capita, it was a commercial java-based CMS called FatWire (source: Stef Lewandowski).
  
  

Going over the top (in another sense)

In a great post about the website, local web business owner Jake Grimley has bravely nailed his colours to the mast (more people with potential business to lose will have to follow Jake if efforts like that started by the Wiki are to succeed) and made concrete suggestions from his own experience of developing large and mission-critical websites. He also goes with my guess on what £2.8m actually bought.

He says:

For me, it’s not really the lack of RSS Feeds (inexplicable as that is) or the failure of the CSS to validate, or the difficulties keeping the site up on its launch day that really bother me. It’s the complete lack of attention to detail or quality in the content, design and information architecture that I find astounding. For those that need examples, there is a log of snarky highlights, but you just need to spend five minutes clicking around the site to see what I mean. It’s the equivalent of re-launching the Town Hall with bits of plaster falling off, missing roof-tiles, and sign-posts to facilities that never got built.

Another great follow-up post by Pesky People details the accessibility issues and comes out fighting:

At the moment they are saying Disabled residents in Birmingham are not important enough as Gly Evans was quoted in the Birmingham Post

All the signs are that this one will not go away, for the reasons Helen Williams outlines. But it remains to be seen if the 'Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster' will actually be learned any time soon. That's down to all of us, including you, the reader of this blog post.

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One other consequence

As I endeavored to make clear in my previous post, none of this should be taken as a criticism of the City Council's Web Team. It is unfortunate that it appears that this may not be the case. It would be more than good to hear from them as developments continue - it would be invaluable.

• Past post: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

A win-win in the cloud for UK Public Sector?

Image via Wikipedia

News that Portsmouth Uni has moved all of its students into the cloud with free, multi-lingual access to an advertising free version of Google Apps, including webmail with 7gb capacity, online documents, spreadsheets and calendars, chat and collaboration and site building functions.

They have around 30,000 students who will get @myport.ac.uk addresses.

In a deal with Google - which runs a similar discount exception for academe in the US - they get it for free for four years with no ads (Google quoted a commercial price of $33 per annum per user at the #googlelocalgov event last month). They will also - for free - establish application programme interfaces allowing data to be exported if the university decides to move.

The Uni believes that despite recent brief downtime, Google will provide a better service than doing it in-house. Answering critics, they repeat that Google is signed up to the Safe Harbour Act which commits a US company to comply with European data protection standards, even when information is stored outside Europe.

One of the best received presentations at their recent local government event was about Google Enterprise Tools. Given that the Government's CIO, John Suffolk, is promoting the take up of cloud computing it would seem that Google is kicking at an open door and pushing apps will be a key task for them (disclosure: I am currently in talks with Google).

This task is one they are taking up. Their local government targeted website has a savings calculator which specifically compares Google Apps with Microsoft Exchange 2007. Socitm 2009 in Edinburgh in October has Adrian Joseph, Managing Director of Google Enterprise, as a key speaker.

However, furious debate over the take-up of Google cloud in US local government should flash some warning signs about their potential progress, and where a backlash might come from, in the UK.

The discussion over the pond on the cloud computing push by White House lead Vivek Kundra has generated heat and light over issues such as transparency and how the regulatory constraints and certification and authorization should be handled and managed. This shows the potential for the cloud's seemingly, cost-savingly, obvious UK local government advance to become bogged down.

Those with most to lose, such as Microsoft, will undoubtedly have their own strategy to throw mud and it will be fascinating to see how this plays out, including how the incoming agenda and policy setters in Whitehall react.

Local government 'needs Digital Stream Managers'

Peter Barton, who heads up Lincolnshire's web team, is one of the most experienced local government (LG) webbies around and also a great thinker. We have chimed very often on his usual hang-out, the Public Sector Forums Bulletin Board.

A new post of his hits all my sweet spots by describing the issues with where web teams currently sit in local government - either under Communications or IT. He wants them sitting out on their own, as 'digital stream' managers.

Managing LG web sites has developed into a specialism in itself requiring a varied set of skills not singularly found within either of the web’s conventional current homes in the Comms or IT teams of a council.

What's interesting is that at a Better Connected event in Birmingham two months ago, where myself and Vicky Sergeant of Socitm held a well-attended discussion about the forming Public Sectors Web Professionals body, this came up in a lighthearted way, because it seemed, I think, a radical wish to the webbies there, but got nodding acceptance in the room.

As Peter points out, good LG webbies draw on skills found in the commercial sector (many actually originate from web experience there) in particular from Sales and Marketing.

In order for there to be a good local government website experience and for users to take-up online services in a big way those commercial skills are exactly the sort you need. Plus, as he argues, you need a customer focused perspective which understands that this user experience needs to match that found on successful commercial websites to have any hope of achieving 'transformation' of service delivery.

Peter draws on the same print media analogy I made in a debate with then SOCITM president Richard Steel last year.

The print media publishing industry in this country has huge web sites compared to LG so where are they going? Some years ago it became clear where the management of web sites should sit within their organisational structure. Publishing web sites are not run by IT departments nor are they generally run by journalists, the sector’s equivalent of our Comms departments. They are run by dedicated digital publishers who utilise platforms and services from IT and content provided by the journalists. Furthermore the web sits front and centre within their business. It is the first, and sometimes only, port of call for a large and growing proportion of their customers. And of course the publishing web sites are about making money from their expensively sourced and produced content.

Thus:

The role of managing the ever changing and volatile, digital stream is best served by having an independent view; a view where the customer is king; a view not hampered by the old, over-simplistic and clumsy, shorthand labels of “Comms or IT”.

The plain fact is that within current LG structures 'webbies' do not have clout. This is why a lot of debate is about how to win arguments, make cases, get champions, struggle for resources - because 'webbies' don't actually run web (or digital) in the final analysis.

Peter's argument, which I completely agree with, is:

So what is this Digital Stream Manager? It’s a new, or perhaps evolved, role for a new age.

• An age in which the majority of contacts[if measured by number count of clients served] made to a local government organisation are made through a web site or service.
• An age in which the “on-line” is becoming the norm.
• An age in which immediacy is key.
• An age in which clients “expect”
• An age in which we are being compared to sites which are commercially driven.
• And especially an age in which satisfying the customer is king.

It’s a multi-faceted role that requires the ability to pull together all the diverse resources required to populate a content-rich site; to manage the application of technology to efficiently deliver that content; to act as the intermediary between the various sources of content; to ensure quality across the output and user experience; and - critically in a world of user-generated content - to manage the delicate and increasingly complex balance between ALL the stakeholders.

So which council is going to be first?

• Read: Who drives your website...the public, that's who?

Google moves into local government

Twitpic Ross L Grant

Google UK launched it's local government division on Friday August 8 with a day-long event held at their London offices and attended by around 65 people.

As I have been talking and writing about their stuff (aka promoting!) for a few years now this day was pretty exciting for me.

I wondered how many actual local government webbies would be there, given how many not .gov people (consultants) I knew were going but there turned out to be lots.

As predicted, there was a certain magic to being @google with very funky offices, pretty funky people, a nice meet-up room (though the seats with little tables reminded me of old school desks and were a bit too easily tripped over), a smattering of 'Google gifts' ('Google goo'?) - including £300 of AdWords - and the most fantastic food I have ever had at a meeting/conference in my life.

As the day progressed it was very clear that they were new to this local government lark (they only opened shop in January). Given that the sponsors and the people they have been talking to thus far are Whitehall ones, and local government's needs and issues are very different, it's hardly surprising that many of the pitches needed refining.

But they were completely open about not knowing, about having lots to learn, and given that so much of their offering is free some of the slight bitching I picked up on the way the day was pitched seemed a bit rich.

My only thought with this is to wonder why - it appears - they didn't try to hire someone/some people with local government experience when they started? There's enough commonality of experience in the sector for anyone who has worked in it to be able to steer them better towards what's likely to be of most interest to most local government people. I would imagine that one outcome of the day will be talking to and maybe partnering with groups like Socitm and IDEA.

Producing better websites

The sessions about their products worked best for this audience when there was a self-evident cross-over from commercial to public sector experience, as what they generally did was simply present the pitch which they would make to any company about their products.

For example, the one about producing better websites, which boiled this down to ten things they'd learned, was spot on as to a very great extent a website is a website is a website from a user's perspective. This is the exact same message which people like Gerry McGovern are sending to local government via Socitm's 'Better Connected' work.



As well, the OpenSocial and Enterprise Solutions sessions demonstrated that these Google products have self-evident potential local government uses and they chimed with existing use by individuals present and existing discussion within the 'local government community' such as, for example, around open-source/'free' and nationally with 'cloud computing'. (Following the event they set up LocalGovCloud, 'a place for local government folk in the UK to have a play with some of Google's enterprise tools' - this needs pitching at IT bods in lgov)

Video for visual explanation

Less successful were the YouTube, Adsense and Adwords sessions because they weren't tailored for the audience. I understand that the Google Maps session didn't address in the presentation it's issues for local government (to do with Ordnance Survey copyright), despite this being a major discussion is local government circles (though I'd left by then).

I wasn't impressed that the YouTube presenter felt that 150 hits was quite a lot. Though he did mention the use of video for visual explanation unfortunately he hit on a recycling example.

I've presented on YouTube use and written previously highlighting one video on littering which honestly seemed like a few council officers having fun rather than a well thought through online marketing exercise. To do both littering or recycling needs thinking through (i.e. 'what's our views target?' 'who are we targeting?') and is probably best done by professionals and either nationally or with a group of councils chipping in.

Better use of Youtube

View more presentations from Paul Canning.

It appears to me that, at the moment, the most likely growth area for YouTube use is with politicians and maybe senior council officers using it.

This has enormous potential to go wrong, as I showed with a hilarious and viral mash-up of Gordon Brown's now infamous twitch-to-camera video. As well, the clout of those making use of it has the potential to waste budget/officer's time better employed elsewhere.

Yes, video can be a excellent medium for communication but only if it makes use of being a visual medium. As the Google guy did say, anything which needs to be shown, to be demonstrated, has this potential.

For example, in my presentation I picked a video of a council officer teaching students in a college about local building regulations. That's a obvious case where the benefit is self-evident and the entry/skill level for production is low. But in order to be sustainable and embedded in local government practice it does need a business case, it needs to be watched, which means marketed, and my presentation gave some ideas on how to do this. This example doesn't appear to have been promoted properly as it's only had 50 views - there must be more than that number of local apprentices, architects, joiners and builders for whom it would be useful?


Allerdale Borough Council's Building Control officers visited Lakes College West Cumbria

Most if not all of the people there were webbies rather than marketeers or communications people and the YouTube product - as well as, as Ingrid Koeler pointed out, tools like Google Reader and Google Alerts - could perhaps be best demonstrated to a separate audience of those council officers who can get best use of them.

Advertising

It is also the case with AdWords and AdSense that Google needs to be talking to people other than webbies in local councils, tapping into other networks of officers.

I have written about advertising on local government websites, expanding on the issues for local government.

The presentation by Nottingham on their implementation was by a webbie and ended, after some discussion of whether the number should be revealed, with the income being stated as around £15k a year, which I don't think is a lot.

It was said that this money was used for website development but a missed danger here is that budgets will simply be reduced by that amount in a time of squeezed budgets and backed by arguments that other spending, such as on social services, is 'more deserving'. If website budgets become expected to be partly raised through advertising what happens when there's a recession and income drops?

This area needs much more serious work by Google, primarily I'd argue with the more commercial arms of councils. I would bet that most of these operations in councils - tourism, events, sport - are sorely lacking in any knowledge of how to maximise revenue from their web operations, so Google would be pushing at an open door.

The Google USB Stick Man pressie

Lincolnshire pioneered advertising on their council website but moved from using a big national operator with no experience in local government to one which specialised in council advertising (partly because the revenues were so low). The company they chose had the specific experience selling ads in council print and billboard but no experience in online so will take time to learn how to maximise revenue - there is an example of a gap where Google could move in but it needs to be talking to a different group than council webbies.

Usability and analytics

I did a session on Google Analytics at short notice (slides below). This followed on from the Site Conversion and optimisation bit, which had the excellent ten things they'd learned which ended on a #1 thing to do being usability testing. This meant that despite not being a pre-arranged tag-team with the Google presenter it ended up as a tag-team as we were both essentially talking about the same thing; the basics of producing a good website experience for users.

Both usability and analytics are something deprioritised and deskilled (usually explained as due to a lack of resources) in local government and this is reflected in most of the reviews of the day published thus far (links below). Yet both are vital to users and also to the aim of driving more users through online services. They need way more attention.


Sales funnel

As I said on the day, my impression is that local government has low expectations of service use - the bar is somehow lower. Socitm and others are trying to do something about this, through benchmarking for example, but this is an unsexy area yet an essential one politically because it explains to those making the decisions why budgets need to be maintained and the worth of investing in web.

The frankly laughable move by an individual through FOI requests to benchmark the value of council websites as well as the expose of the cost of Birmingham City Council's website and the hostility of media like the Daily Mail should serve as a warning of what's down the road.

As Charles Arthur argues in his piece about Birmingham's website, yes, moving away from exorbitantly priced monoliths like Serco and Microsoft to open source should be happening but it:

1. won't mean in the real world of local government just lower development budgets but staff cuts as well;
2. will still produce unoptimised sites and less successful 'funnels' to services if usability and understanding of web stats isn't similarly prioritised;

if the political case for the value of websites isn't made and backed up with facts and examples.

The answer here is education, with both a surface exercise and a deeper one as well available to people online skills development and through face-to-face training. Sorting out how to do both usability and analytics often leads to a haze where the amount of information, options and ideas confuses. The required skill level for entry is perceived wrongly far too often as high. For example, doing simple 'guerrilla' user testing is not hard.

I think people need plans and business cases in order to be able to get the resources they need to get the most out of usability and analytics and to know when they need them as well as online education resources to show them what they can do themselves.

Here Google can play an enormously useful role I think. As they have a huge and diverse customer base, they have developed excellent, usable learning tools which have both simple, grounded take-aways and great detail. The Public Sector Web Professionals group has skills development as one of its main aims, so a collaboration seems like an obvious road to go down.

Here's my slides from the analytics presentation.

Localgov Google Analytics

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Others on #googlelocalgov:

• Sarah Lay had written up her extensive notes from the sessions
  "Every conversation has to start somewhere and I think the relevance of yesterday will be best judged on what happens next."
  

• Ingrid Koehler picks up on similar themes to mine
  "Google knows there’s money in the public sector (maybe less than there has been, but still a lot), they know we’d make good customers, they know they have products that we can use to achieve what we need to, but they didn’t quite know how to make the sale. And the key to this one was helping the people in the room make the sale to internal stakeholders."
  

• Michele Ide-Smith
  "Very thought provoking and Google were great hosts."

• Al Smith
  "The day was not very well tailored to the audience. But it's best not to dwell on the negatives"

• Sharon O'Dea
  "This was only a first date; we’ve got a lot of flirting to go before local government will even consider going to bed with Google. Local Government just isn’t that kind of girl, you see."

• Carrie Bishop
  "The new local authority role will be as a service enabler – the glue that holds a locality together and supports other organisations to provide services that residents need, as well as helping to create the conditions in which residents can meet their own needs – from neighbourhoods getting together to share the cost of green energy through to social startups and local businesses. It’s a new model for local government and a radical adjustment that I just don’t think Google have got their heads around."
  

Two flip interviews at #psw09

Socitm held its annual 'Building perfect council websites' event this week at Olympia, London. Must have been over 200 people there and a very interesting line-up of contributors.

I took my Flip camera along and managed to grab a couple of people for short interviews.

Kingston upon Thames councillor (and former Mayor) Mary Reid is a real pioneer in use of social networks in the UK. She's had a blog for a long time and driven a lot of development in her council. Here, continuing from a point I'd made in one of her sessions, she talks about whether the development of social media policy is really needed.



Gerry McGovern is an old hero of mine. He's basically a usability guru but he doesn't talk like one. His presentation style is very funny, pointing out the silliness of how much web design looks to an outsider - woods'n'trees stuff.



Here's the website for 'psw09' with links to other posts and presentation slides.

It was also the 'soft launch' for Socitm Web Professionals - of which more later!

How bad floods created great egov web 2.0

At Socitm's Better Connected event 2 June in Brum by far the hit of the day was this presentation:

Inbc09 May19 Session5 John Steed

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John Steed from Cheltenham Council talked about how the massive flooding of the town a few years ago gave a kick-start to their social media efforts - and quickly won top level support after a brief hesitation.

They used a free blog service, Flickr and YouTube to keep residents and others informed during the crisis. They couldn't rely on the website alone and this allowed them to help residents help themselves - posting photos of what was happening for example.

John talked about what's been going on since then and they are making some great use of social media, being innovative and implementing some good ideas. Their Flickr content has evolved into a 'go to' place for local photos as local photographers get engaged. Their videos are useful in being visual and showing some beautiful parts of the town.

His talk inspired a lot of people on the day and - as one twitterer noted - why we don't seem to applaud any longer at these sorts of events is a mystery.

Montpellier, Cheltenham, UK

Postscript: Why .gov webbies need professional status

A couple of weeks ago I made the argument 'Why .gov webbies need professional status'.

This is not a new idea, it's been circulating in the UK for a couple of years. Problem is it hasn't actually gone anywhere.

Now the idea has some solidity through the efforts of myself and Socitm.

At Socitm's Better Connected event in Birmingham, 19 May, attended by 120 mainly local government webbies from all over the UK, a meeting was held at the end of conference and was very well attended after a long day.

Myself and Vicky Sergeant from Socitm presented on where the proposals were at. This will be repeated 2 June in London, if you are not attending that event as a delegate you are welcome to join the meeting at ~4pm. Let Socitm know of your intention to attend by emailing insight@socitm.gov.uk.

This was Vicky's presentation:

Webprofessionals19may

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I'm working on adding video :/

I explained how the idea germinated, how I had been discussing widely over a year of so on sustainable models. I explained how the organisation once started would decide its own priorities and what I thought the potential was.

Audience questions were extremely positive and one exchange in particular was amusing. Relating to the old question in egov of where web lives - in ICT or Communications (or customer services) - the thought of being in neither but being its own department was raised. Oh, the radicalism! (More on that concept below).

Anyone can contribute to the discussion about the web professionals group on Communities of Practice.

I also spoke about the inspiring work done by the organised web professionals in US government.

One inspiration, aimed directly at the competition around who 'owns' web in government came from the recent Government Web Manager Conference.

Macon Phillips (the US government’s New Media lead) and Vivek Kundra (the US government’s head CIO) acknowledged the third distinct group of players at the table: web managers. They said they weren't interested in asserting authority or oversight over web managers or suggest that Web Managers should be subject to their oversight. They acknowledged that there are three distinct pieces to this puzzle of online government, and we citizens need all three to fit together seamlessly if we are to be served well.

This was significant because it was clearing the air after behind-the-scenes fights on exact those issues of authority and oversight.

An example which would be very familiar to Whitehall web managers were fights when US web managers wanted to push top tasks – those government services that citizens want most. US 'Public Affairs Offices' instead wanted to promote the agency’s and administration’s message.

The descending peace - and benefit for citizens - is an outcome of US web managers being organised.

The Federal Web Managers Council – and the broader Government Web Manager Forum – has laid out this strategic plan:

“We believe the public should be able to:

• Accomplish their most top government tasks online quickly and easily
• Access government content online whenever and however they need it
• Have direct online interactions with their government
• Trust government web content to be accurate, timely, easy to understand, and coordinated across agencies

To achieve this vision, we’ve chosen one primary goal on which our community will focus: Improve how the public accomplishes their most top government tasks online.”

Why .gov webbies need professional status

Neil Williams published a great post: Beyond cut and paste: the professional skills every government web publisher should have.

As a man who hires webbies for government, and who deals with lots of devolved publishers, Neil's skills list comes from a truly knowledgeable source. I had one addition: marketing.

What his list shows is that to be a good government webbie, a professional government webbie, someone who knows how this stuff works within government, you need to have a wide breadth of skills. Only some of those skills could be argued as being particular to government.

The trouble is that Neil is fairly rare in recognising this wide breadth and those who actually run government appear to have no sense of the range of web skills required to do these jobs well and tend to assume that they're all government-specific and definitely not web-specific.

Last year I got into a debate with then SOCITM president Richard Steel, about this very issue.

At the PSF event in June last year he had presented 'Why we should no longer distinguish web from ICT'.

His argument was that web should be 'run by IT, not communications departments'. Some of what he said I liked:

What made me applaud was his line that, basically, senior managers who don't understand the basics with IT no longer have the requisite skills to do the job, they should go. He, like me, is sick of senior people who wear their ignorance 'like a badge of honour'. I also liked that he was arguing that services must take more day-to-day responsibility for what they do online and that government gains from being subject to the same forces as business.

In response to his quite inspiring (he has done some great work in Newham) talk about the future, I also pointed out that there still many things we, government, don't do:

I don't see anything suggesting that in another ten years either of these factors will change, that we will be doing the things we don't or that we will be absorbing the right influences. However we will probably be in a more competitive environment simply because many more businesses will be in our territory - people selling recycling bins, people promising to better handle your passport enquiries, people trying to make money from your health enquiry, other services like charities. When this is happening, how do customers find you and steer past the commercial providers?

That Richard could make the argument that web equals ICT comes entirely from how government websites have grown up. In other sectors they've had other drivers, editors or the sales department for example. Only recently has there been a shift within government to move control of websites away from ICT and to communications because that's, in government, where they tended to start from.

The problem is - citing Neil's skills list - neither of these parts of government tend to be run by people with any web skills (or, at best, only some of them), this leads to massive distortions in priorities.

This is why this particular skill is cited by Neil:

Negotiation, explanation and persuasion. See writing for the web, accessibility, information architecture above - all of these things need explaining to people who don’t see why they should care. And often it means persuading senior people (often in both senses) that they can’t have a PDF of a scanned letter on official headed paper on the homepage. Enthusiasm and advocacy helps too, for talking to those customers who don’t think they need to put information on the website at all.

Another problem is that skills development within egov is patchy to none existent. This also leads to distortions such as a failure to take usability seriously or the infamous 'build it and they will come' mentality. I blame this on the 'walled garden', where government people only meet and learn from other government people and don't tend to learn from and apply lessons from the rest of the web.

You could argue that webbies outside government also experience similar problems but the key difference is how they are judged by non-webby bosses - I would say the bar is both set higher and made clearer. In order to deliver, commercial webbies can't afford, or not for long, to not have that breadth of skills. Whereas within government I rarely come across people like Neil.

One solution to the myriad of problems I see in how government webbies operate and the environment in which they operate, on which I have been working, is to establish professional status through a new organisation.

My main argument with Richard Steel was that web skills are both new and unique. IT doesn't have them, Comms don't have them - only webbies do but they are unrecognised. Raising recognition must happen alongside raising standards. Simply put, a way must be found for webbies who know what they are talking about to have a real voice.

In the United States such an organisation exists. The Federal Web Managers Council has existed for some years but has achieved much prominence with its advice to the incoming administration and it's extremely sucessful conference (see the tweets) which included input from such people as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Gerry McGovern and media guru Jeff Jarvis. It also runs a Web Manager University Training Program and serves as the steering committee for the Web Content Managers Forum, a group of nearly 1,500 government web managers across the USA.

Says Candi Harrison about the Web Managers Conference:

When web managers start thinking and acting collectively, their power – and their results – increases exponentially.

So there is a model. There's also the beginnings of a dialogue, as in conversations of mine and others with US colleagues the Americans have expressed interest in a two-way learning process.

The problem has been how to sustain such a new organisation. Volunteerism is not enough when you are dealing with busy people, it can only last so long. It can also lead to the sort of distortions in direction and activity which I pointed to as a general issue.

This is why I organised a meeting of key people earlier this year with Socitm to explore what such a organisation could do and how it could be made sustainable, and I'm pleased to say that the process begun at that meeting is bearing fruit.

If you are interested in hearing more and contributing to these plans, there will be opportunities to do so at meetings arranged at the end of the Socitm Insight web events on May 19 (in Birmingham) and 2 June (London), starting from around 4pm.

They will be open to people at any level of seniority or career stage who are employed or freelancing in the public or third sectors, or in any organisation working with them.

If you are not attending these events as a delegate you are welcome to join the meetings at the times advertised. Let Socitm know of your intention to attend by emailing insight@socitm.gov.uk (say which meeting you're coming to).

Looking back on Richard Steel's presentation for this post it's a good feeling to know that the same body is now positively encouraging egov web professionalism and our presence within its ranks. Who knows, maybe they'll live to regret letting us in!

• Postscript: Why .gov webbies need professional status
  

Another kick at councils on accessibility

E-access Bulletin has another go at council web site accessibility, citing SOCITM's annual Better Connected Review. It claims that this had shown minimal progress and therefore there's a "a gloomy picture".

Several colleagues on twitter have reacted badly, as well they might. Government in general is the only sector which actually has policy to implement the Disability Discrimination Act online and it's not like all disabled people access is government. Who knows, they might just want to buy stuff or play games!

Commercial websites have never been seriously challenged by the accessibility industry, despite it being a much more lucrative sector to potentially target.

What gets me is that they then say the following:

It is not all bad news this year, however. Some encouragement can be drawn from the implementation of a new additional qualitative assessment system, carried out for Socitm by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), and designed to give an overall picture of council website accessibility. The system used its own 0-3 rating, with 0 representing a frequent absence of accessibility and 3 representing a site that was functionally fully accessible. Under this system, 136 councils (33%) were rated by the RNIB as satisfactory or excellent; a far more encouraging statistic than the 8% who achieved WCAG Level A.

Now WCAG is the international standard. It was replaced in December 2008 by a revision which takes into account the developments online as well as a much wider interpretation of disability. All measurement against WCAG 1.0 was therefore carried out (last November) against - effectively - a deprecated standard. In WCAG Level A context is irrelevant, it just gives a (literal) machine score on which councils are judged.

What using someone like the RNIB to give 'qualitative' feedback tells me is that the machine does so much but here's some actual disabled people putting things in context.

It's striking in its absence that much of the industry selling 'accessibility' to government is not disabled people. What their actual needs are isn't the key selling point - it's 'meeting a standard'.

To my mind this lets people off the hook. All councils have the ability to engage with actual disabled people about their websites but instead they're encouraged to keep a distance and follow some coding requirements. So no-one actually knows whether this is actually helping actual disabled people.

For example, is this correctly coded content of any use? Or can the key tasks which disabled people have on sites be easily performed?

These are the same sorts of issues sites should consider for others so why when it comes to disabled people do we take another approach?

Surely that is the very definition of discrimination.

Just as with usability, it pays massive dividends if the coders and designers come out their cubicles and engage with the audience (not that councils do usability well either but hey-ho ... ).

Bim Egan, Senior Web Access Consultant at the RNIB, told E-access Bulletin: "we noticed a significant improvement in the real accessibility of most of the websites we assessed. Unfortunately that doesn’t always show in a strict conformance check.”

The key concept here being 'real accessibility'.

HT: PSFBuzz

NB: reedit following JackP's comment.

Issues with Better Connected's webstats use

The annual survey of local government websites, Better Connected, has a section about website usage (aka 'take-up').

This is based on information from three sources Hitwise, GovMetric and the Website take-up service from Socitm Insight.

The former and the latter measure website usage but the results on unique visitor numbers to websites is based on Hitwise's 'local government market percentage share' numbers. Subscribers get access to the raw numbers.

Better Connected does contextualise their comments, saying that:

Each local authority will seek to understand the patterns of traffic to its website; this is no easy task, because it is fraught with technical difficulties about the definition of usage. This is not a task that we can analyse in great detail, because local website statistics are not available in a consistent format that would enable us to make a comparison across all the councils in the way that we can for useful content and usability.

However this is exactly what the section does, drawing comparisons based on site usage compared with local authority population to come up with 'take-up' numbers for regions, and singling out particular councils as well as a top twenty as having high 'take-up'.

This is not a good use of - effectively - one set of stats from Hitwise. And I can prove it.

For some time now my council has been sharing access to Google Analytics stats with ten other councils. Here's the comparison of those numbers with those from Hitwise.

* September 2008 - to .gov.uk website - internal use excluded (where possible)
** rounded to give some attempt at anonymity

There are a number of caveats. The n/a is actually Hitwise showing 0.00%. Some of these sites have services sitting on other websites with different URLs, not sub-domains. One of them has extremely high internal usage. Obviously, what stats they choose to share may not include some website areas, hence the district with the high population but low website use.

But there are some logical patterns. I cross-referenced with the deprivation index and unemployment rates and then the per capita usage does show simple patterns. There's also some common sense here. A very rural area might have low broadband and be poorer. Our city, for example, is fairly affluent and has very high broadband penetration.

What looking at Google Analytics shows which is most striking as a discrepancy is a much lower per capita website use than Hitwise. Does this mean something or am I seeing things? If it's true then it's a serious finding in terms of how we are perceiving our sucess.

Email paulcanning1ATgmail.com if you want the spreadsheet.

Needless to say, what sparked my interest was the great difference between what Hitwise said and what Google Analytics said about our city. It didn't tally with what GA was telling or what logically made sense.

Both stats packages their issues and both should not be used in isolation or to draw very specific comparisons as Better Connected has done.

Webstats people, such as those working for big commercial transactional sites, say that there are two things to remember:

1. use more than one methodology
2. remember that what you really want is trends, not hard numbers to present out-of-context

I would suggest a couple of things:

1. Better Connected should get some very specific expert guidance on extrapolating from the data they have available on website usage. This is not a easy skill, to draw out real analysis from webstats data although it is relatively easy to match trends to goals. Better Connected simply doesn't provide the contextualisation that I believe such a professional would provide.
   
2. Better Connected should seek access to those councils using Google Analytics - I'm sure the number is far more than eleven. My experience is that such access is freely given but you could easily draw up a usage agreement, using one of the free licenses regarding how Better Connected could use it. Obviously, the more data the merrier.
   

Also, give consideration to promoting the use of Google Analytics, especially for those using other stats services, for the reason I've given, as well as supporting skills training on getting the most from the rich usage data you get from GA and other packages.

Better Connected says that:

In April 2008, the Public Accounts Committee report about central government websites highlighted weaknesses in the knowledge of website costs and usage, leading to the point that:

“The Government does not know how much it is saving through internet services, nor whether any savings are being re-deployed to improve services for those who do not or cannot use the internet”.

In response the Central Office of Information (COI) has embarked on a programme of guidance about website statistics to be published by the end of March 2009 in order to mandate central government websites to collect new information in the financial year 2009/10. The guidance comprises a set of three documents:

• Measuring website costs
• Measuring website usage
• Measuring website quality [stats are very useful when attached to user testing, especially around new designs]
  

The criticisms have not been levelled at local government, but many local authorities might be equally vulnerable. The guidance will not, initially at least, mandate councils to collect this information.

Nevertheless, the guidance is likely to be helpful for local authorities and others to follow as representing good practice and reminding decision-makers at all levels that investments in websites should be supported.

Ab-sol-utely.

IT rules? No, no Mister Steel

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[Presentation reproduced with permission]

At the PSF event in June to discuss Better Connected, SOCITM's president Richard Steel presented 'Why we should no longer distinguish web from ICT'.

Some of this made me applaud madly, some made me inwardly groan.

It was deliberately provocative and Richard comes from a strong base with his argument; his borough, Newham, is doing some great, ground-breaking stuff (including free wireless, no fixed desks including Chief Exec.) for this deprived part of London. In his presentation he laid a lot of that out, but what I completely disagreed with was his conclusion: that web must be 'run' by IT, they are 'indistinguishable'.

What made me applaud was his line that, basically, senior managers who don't understand the basics with IT no longer have the requisite skills to do the job, they should go. He, like me, is sick of senior people who wear their ignorance 'like a badge of honour'. I also liked that he was arguing that services must take more day-to-day responsibility for what they do online and that government gains from being subject to the same forces as business.

He was looking to the future convergence of technology and especially the coming growth of web access through mobiles or other devices: a 'network of networks'. Government is about services and information and as web access becomes more ubiquitous what matters is that we provide information in a way that can be easily pushed through these channels and found. What he cited as key technologies were identification and data integration.

Here's part of his presentation about his vision of this from three years ago:

By 2012 (Olympics) mobiles morphed into ‘personal communicators’

Technologies like ‘smart chip’, biometrics and GPS, will enable:

• authenticated ‘e’ order & payment
• e-tickets for chosen events delivered to your device.
• e-directions to venue/your seat
• your ID and ticket electronically checked,.
• commentary provided in your own language
• option to follow a particular team or athlete
• view instant playbacks of exciting moments
• personal calls/messages delivered plus appointment reminders.
• remote control of home environment also likely

Device selects the most appropriate combination of fixed and wireless networks - balancing task, cost and performance.

A couple of quotes he used talked about 2018, ten years from now, when this convergence should be in full throttle.

Let's look back ten years and see what's changed: yes, everyone has a website and yes, services are 'online'. But as I've noted in other posts on my blog, there are still many things we, government, don't do and as a sector we are walled off from influences from wider web development - a primary driver for change - or any sense that we are in a competitive environment, online.

I don't see anything suggesting that in another ten years either of these factors will change, that we will be doing the things we don't or that we will be absorbing the right influences. However we will probably be in a more competitive environment simply because many more businesses will be in our territory - people selling recycling bins, people promising to better handle your passport enquiries, people trying to make money from your health enquiry, other services like charities. When this is happening, how do customers find you and steer past the commercial providers?

Richard's ideas come entirely from one part of what makes a web presence and it's not surprising: all websites have come from a few sectors other than IT but that's, largely, where government websites have grown out from.

Take 'content' for one other source of websites - newspaper websites are built on content and the IT development entirely revolves around servicing the editor's needs, rather than the other way around. There it has to be a partnership but you couldn't argue 'Why we should no longer distinguish web from ICT' because there it's understood that 'web' largely means content - which needs it own skill base - supported by IT. Richard's proposition doesn't make sense. Same goes for websites which have grown out of marketing and sales departments, there it's a partnership but there's another primary skill base than the IT one.

Why do we think we are different from other websites, especially when there's little evidence customers behave radically differently with us? I would say this is because we live in our own world without the sort of influences which would shake us out of it. Other sectors largely don't; they absolutely have to understand their customers and hire the right skill base to create a web presence which will meet needs in a rapidly evolving and competitive environment. Doesn't sound like us does it?

Another difference is that the web is becoming more central to businesses, meaning that all aspects of the business have to take it seriously and skill up. Here, this does connect with one of Richard's points about the vital need for engagement by government services - the pointy end - rather than being disempowered (although that's not how he puts it).

The problem with Richard's proposal is not just where it's coming from - as I commented to him, he and the analysis come from IT as opposed to, say, sales - but the impact.

Web skills are very specific, you need to be across a lot of terrain. You need to understand SEO, usability, web content, have good people skills, be across various and ever changing IT, visual design, accessibility, marketing, PR ... Even the very best IT managers don't have this skill range so they can't make informed decisions or informed choices across the range of issues which constitute good and most importantly successful web. In his presentation Richard alludes to this when he talks about the problems in benchmarking, take-up and engagement.

I understand that Richard's forward focus is 'non-web', or 'post-web', thinking of mobile devices for example, but I see no future in which all the other skills involved won't be any the less vital in making a successful, used and useful service/product for government online.

What we need is exactly the opposite of Richard's argument: ICT needs to be in its place and web needs to be raised. It needs to be properly understood as a new profession, a unique skill set and assume its place at the table in government. Because at the moment it doesn't have one.