Category: digital strategy

Its recess, quiet(er) in the offices of Whitehall than usual, and a great time to catch up on all the niggly jobs that have been sitting around in the inbox for a while. Not a great bunch of subjects to write about I’m afraid.

I’m off on holiday myself next week and one of the things I’ve been trying to finish up before I go away is to make sense of the ream of paperwork I’ve got knocking around relating to website rationalisation (or web rat as its ‘affectionately’ known around these parts).

The project has virtually become (another) full time job for me over the last eight months or so and for most of that time its all been about ‘closing websites‘ as my regular reader, and other webbies around Whitehall, will recognise with a groan.

I’ve previously bemoaned the lack of a coherent picture of government web/digital strategy. Its not that we don’t between us know what the constituent parts of it are, its just that perceptions are skewed by the headline grabbers.

But as the work moves towards identification of what information and applications should migrate into Directgov or Businesslink (known as website convergence in Whitehall, or webc.. oh, you get it..) we have to work out what to do with what will be left.

Simon D has already pointed out the problem of losing permalinks, especially where content is cited in the official record of parliament. There is a real danger that this will be excaberated in the short term as sites are rationalised – though in the long term it should be easier to manage.

I’ve been involved in some discussions about how to resolve this. I’d love to tell you about it. Its not that I can’t (though maybe that wouldn’t be a good idea) its just that I don’t understand how to explain it. I’m convinced it will work, but not being a techie I got lost when being told the difference between a URL and a URI. Needless to say, the scale of the task is large. But the approach seems robust.

Other recent developments have been a raft of draft guidance looking at what role departmental corporate sites will have in the future, improving accessibility, channel strategies, updating the government website guidelines etc etc

This is all good, and starts to clarify what we are about for the future. Still can’t help thinking we’re missing a trick though. It feels like a classic civil service problem solving scenario: issue identified, official(s) commissioned to draft guidance, draft circulated, a few comments received, then its policy.

While I don’t have a problem with that in principle (and the people doing the legwork know what they are doing) it just feels like it goes against the grain of what we are about – webbies, online experts, social media savvy. Shouldn’t we be using the very tools we evangelise about on a daily basis to harness the collective knowledge of the community and build this vision together? By ‘we’ I don’t just mean webbies. There are plenty of other interested parties in and around government who have knowledge, expertise, experience and views about the best way to do all this stuff. We should be harnessing that, not imposing solutions – however good they appear.

I’m rambling know and losing focus so I’ll stop for the moment. Suffice to say I think its moving in the right direction but it needs something else, a commitment to change and invest in improving how we do all this. Not sure what the answer is but I have some ideas. They can wait for another day.

I’m a bit behind the curve on this one, because I could never get the time over the last week or so to actually finish it. But now I’ve got to the end of the NAO report on government websites, I can’t help feeling that it was a real missed opportunity.

Most of the coverage it received was pretty negative and although the report is quite well balanced, its inference is that government is nowhere as good as it could be in its online activity. I’m no apologist and recognise that government web provision could be a lot better. But the media was bound to look for good (read: bad) headlines and they found them quite easily.

Statements like ‘the overall quality has improved little since 2002’, ‘search engines remain ineffective’, and ‘stringent accessibility standards are not always being met’ don’t help and paint a rather pessimistic picture of how it is.

Contrast this with ‘ there are indications that government web provision became more comparable with the best private sector websites in the period 2003 – 04’, ‘they (websites) are rated reasonably well by respondents’, and ‘the majority of government sites have quite similar and effective levels of functionality and design’.

All these seemingly contradictory comments are made in the space of just one page.

My personal experience is that government web teams have worked hard to improve the technical, presentational and content side of their websites over the last few years. Certainly the vast majority of sites are a great deal better than they were five years ago. Yet the impression that the report gives is one of poor quality with little regard for standards or costs. I’m not the only one to think that government is at least trying to do the things its accused of not.

The report’s methodology in estimating the cost of government web services also worried me. Around 15% of organisations responding to the reports authors didn’t give usage figures or costs for the sites. The report claims that this means they don’t have them. But there might be many reasons why they weren’t supplied. The questionnaire could have gone to the wrong place for a start and some departments are big enough for requests like that to fall into a hole. In any case, the statistics for central departmental sites are pretty much public domain as there are regular parliamentary questions answered about the very subject.

But this all gets translated into ‘15% don’t know how much their sites cost’ and so the NAO uses a very broad estimate to reach its £208 million. As a hard number it doesn’t look great. The NAO does at least attempt to contextualise it in relation to the total cost of government IT. But the damage is already done and the headline is found.

As I said at the top of this post, the report is pretty balanced and its a shame that the negative statements have been picked on. But then it wouldn’t be really newsworthy then would it?

Its worth a read, and I encourage any whitehall webbies to find the time to trawl through it. Somewhere in there lurks a government web strategy crying to be let out.

Changing of the guard at Downing Street today. A day of high emotion or long-awaited good riddance depending on your persuasion – but certainly momentous whichever way you look at it.

There is much expectation in the media about how things might change – faces at the top table, machinery of government (please God, not us this time…), presentational style, priorities etc etc.

No doubt there will be a flurry of activity for those working on government websites over the next few days if departments change their names and sites need to be rebranded (or worse still, new ones created at short notice).

But I hope this might be an opportunity to take stock of the enormous amount of effort that is going on in the digital space in government and an attempt to make sense of it all.

There are plenty of examples of departments using social media tools for engagement, Mr Brown’s campaign team attempted to make use of them too – pity they ran out of steam so soon into their campaign…, the team at Number Ten have been keen innovators of new methods of digital engagement as well.

Website rationalisation is beginning to clarify the future role of websites (Directgov = citizens, Businesslink = ahem, businesses, departmental sites = corporate / media). Better search engine optimisation will hopefully be an outcome of this and make it easier for the citizen to find what they after.

Online marketing campaigns have a pretty clear role in the mix.

More recently, better use of public and citizen generated information has come under spotlight too.

As I have said previously, at the moment website rationalisation (read: closing loads of websites) looms large in most peoples’ minds. But its not about that. Its about improving channels to customers, creating opportunities to engage in conversations – find out what people really think and attempt to demystify the business of government (with a ‘g’ not a ‘G’). It’s just that it doesn’t really read like that at the moment.

What’s needed is a clear understanding about how this all fits together. Not necessarily a ‘strategy’, but a simply expressed framework that clarifies the roles, audiences, channels and tools available to civil servants to help them in their online engagement activities.

Mr Brown’s advisors showed that they saw the potential of using social media tools for engagement rather than simply publishing online in the political arena. Hopefully this realisation will translate itself into a clearer push to explain how government should use digital communications channels in a more cohesive manner.