Month: June 2007

Spent an entertaining few hours today at GC expo. The show is mainly for IT bods rather than webbies but there were a few creative design and build agencies there who were good to make contact with, suppliers such as Adobe were demonstrating how to make the most of their products and there were some interesting presentations – such as Francis Irving from My Society and Paul Hodgkin of Patient Opinion talking about online citizen engagement.

After lunch I took part in a workshop exploring how public services could be reengineered around the customer. This was supported by some insightful observational video of five families experiencing public services in real scenarios. Fascinating stuff and stimulating discussion around improving the minefield that citizens often find themselves in when negotiating the myriad of frontline service providers. Called The Public Office, I recommend visiting the website to view the videos and the supporting information. No doubt you will hear more of this in the near future.

You may recall the announcement last January that the government was to close a good chunk of ‘.gov’ websites to improve both customer experience (by shifting content/online services into DirectGov or Businesslink) and efficiency (by reducing each department’s website support and development costs).

Conceptually this is pretty much a no brainer – most people accept that DirectGov/ Businesslink has visitor traffic that their servers could only dream about trying to support, and there are many sites out there (one estimate puts the total number at over 2000 but who really knows…) which could benefit from tighter control, consistency of presentation etc to ensure the user experience is better and the content up to date. Continue reading “Website rationalisation – its all a bit tricky”