The UK's e-Government Strategy, due to be launched in the next few weeks, will borrow from Canada's experience in setting up 'customer insight' panels to help improve online public services, Cabinet Office minister Jim Murphy said on 10 October 2005.
In his first public speech since taking office this summer, Murphy said the forthcoming strategy would detail "how the government will set a course to change people's perceptions and attitudes towards government IT". He told the FT e-Efficiency Conference in London that the government is looking to "tackle the generic causes of failure of the past" in IT projects.
The customer insight panels would be a way to get "regular and quick feedback" of people's experience of how they consume public services, and would help the government configure those services. Murphy said that further details would be released with the publication of the e-Government Strategy.
He also said he had been particularly disturbed when meeting a group of young people in Kent over the summer who said they found government websites boring.
"They said why can't they be more like other commercial websites that they used that are focused on them instead of bossing them around in a boring way," Murphy said.
He added that the strategy would also focus on the IT professionalisation agenda, as well as improving customer services and people's perceptions of e-government. Plans to embed an IT profession across government will centre on establishing a career path rather than civil servants just moving on through a series of jobs.
"We have to change this," he said. "We need first class services delivered by a properly trained IT profession."
Quelle: KableNET, 10.10.2005
