We built it - but will they come? Councils in England have, on average, 79% of their services available electronically. The task now is guide citizens away from traditional contact channels - mail and personal visits - and into the cheaper "e-world". Promoting e-government is more complicated than it appears. Unlike private business, public bodies cannot force their customers on to the web by shutting down high-street outlets, or charging extra to use them. Because the government has to deal with all comers, it will have to maintain multiple access channels indefinitely.
Most local authorities offer services through two main e-channels: the internet and e-enabled call centres. These run alongside post, face-to-face meetings, traditional phone calls and fax. Some public bodies also offer communication by digital TV, public kiosk and text message.
Different audiences prefer to communicate via different channels, and some transactions will involve more than one channel - especially when something goes wrong. Hence the growing importance of "channel management", the art of guiding citizens to the most appropriate (or cheapest) channel for the service they need.
One piece of good news is that Britons seem to like the idea of being e-citizens. Few, however, have tried it. The first large-scale research into attitudes to e-government, carried out for the e-Citizen national project, identifies 46% of England's adult population as "ready and waiting to use local authority e-channels".
The study, to be published this spring, suggests that councils concentrate first on an untapped market of 17.5 million early adopters. These tend to be men aged under 55 who already shop on the internet. The research, involving 4,100 interviews, identified six "attitudinal clusters", of which two look promising. These are "e-amenable progressives", likely to be male, high-income earners with high access to technology. There are apparently 6 million such people in England. Cluster two is "contenteds", those happy with their council and comfortable with technology. These number 11.5 million in England, the research says.
The "e-amenable progressives" and the "contenteds" add up to a market for local authority e-government services. They are people who have access to the technology, the skills to use it and who trust the process. All they need is to be told that it is possible. How many actually take up services "will be determined by the effectiveness of promotional campaigns to make citizens aware of services available via e-channels".
Today, however, only 12% of all adults in England say they have contacted a local authority by an e-channel. Of these, 90% say they would be likely to do so again. Email is the favoured e-channel for communication, followed by the council's website. The service most likely to be used on an e-channel is booking a facility, such as a tennis court.
The problem with marketing e-channels to sporty, affluent young men is that these are exactly the people least in need of council services. However the e-Citizen research also suggests some opportunities for marketing across the digital divide. People in social groups C2DE have an "encouraging" interest in texting. Meanwhile, although people from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds are less likely to use e-channels today, they are more interested than the white population in using them in future. "The promotion and use of more e-communications, therefore, should be particularly welcome to members of BME communities," the e-Citizen research report says.
The findings suggest that no single e-channel will dominate council services. Just over half the population (52%) says it has some form of internet access but only 42% of adults use the internet. People from most minority ethnic groups are more likely than average to have access.
Roughly the same proportion, 41%, have digital television, once seen as the key to bridging the digital divide. However the e-Citizen research finds that many digital television owners are not aware that interactive services are available and that use of these services is very low. "The volume and value of pay transactions via digital television is currently negligible." The feeling in the ODPM is that digital TV will be a niche service for the forseeable future.
Kiosks are another inclusive channel, but the e-Citizen research says that trials of these services have concentrated on providing static information rather than two-way transactions. This research seems to confirm the experience of councils that have piloted interactive TV and kiosks.
The most universal channel is the telephone: 94% of people living in the UK has access to a landline, and more than 90% of younger people have a mobile telephone. One significant technological advance made since the birth of the e-government programme is with interactive voice response technology, or systems that can recognise spoken instructions. Voice-recognition was piloted last year by the Inland Revenue as a channel for self-assessment tax filing.
To help councils and other public bodies decide which channels to develop, the Cabinet Office e-Government unit has prepared a "channel decision framework". It says that organisations planning e-services should start by identifying customers and follow five distinct steps from idea to deployment. At the end of each stage, the process should stop while a decision is taken to go further.
Marketing should begin only when the organisation knows who it wants to reach. Today, such efforts are in their infancy, Cabinet Office officials say. The e-Citizen report agrees. "There is an opportunity for English local authorities to do more." Only one-third of authorities promote their website through telephone inquiries, and one in five of those who have marketed their e-services would say that they have carried out any innovative campaigns involving e-channels.
One exception is the London borough of Southwark, which spent £24,000 in December on advertising online services. The campaign doubled the number of people using the website.
There is an alternative to marketing, and that is compulsion. However, the feeling at the Cabinet Office e-Government unit is that this should be a last resort - even for business.
Autor: Michael Cross
Quelle: Guardian, 23.02.2005
