In the current climate of open, transparent and accountable government, it is now mandatory for government websites to have stats audits. But how did this come about and why is it beneficial?

Policy background

Back in July ’06 the National Audit Office published the results of its survey of Government on the Internet. The results were pretty shocking:

Over a quarter of government organisations still do not know the costs of their websites, making it impossible to assess whether they are value for money

16% of government organisations have no data about how their websites are being used, inhibiting website improvements.

The quality of government websites has improved only slightly since 2002.

These findings were used as evidence before the UK Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) hearing in November ’07. PAC recommended the development of a single set of measures for government website costs, quality and usage which were to be reported centrally. Government’s response to the PAC Sixteenth Report was laid before the House of Commons in September ‘08.

Consistent data

The single set of measures was developed and is now in place, but how can the data be collected reliably? Measuring website usage can be done in a number of ways with sites using different methods, tools, standards, filters and terminology. To get consistency is a real challenge.

The media industry has solved this problem. Advertising revenue is based on the number of Ad Impressions – like Page Impressions but for ads – and rates vary with volume of site usage. Advertisers need a reliable way to ensure return on investment. They need to know that the websites on which they are buying space and surfacing content measure usage accurately and consistently. The solution is to insist on a site audit certificate.

Government websites don’t tend to generate revenue from advertising – although the practice is not forbidden in principle – but they are accountable to the taxpayer. Surely taxpayers have the right to expect a decent return on their investment? If I visit a government website, how much does it cost me? Is it value for money? I want to know!

The ABCe audit

In May 2009, COI appointed ABCe to be the sole auditor of government websites. ABCe is the industry owned website auditor and is the standard for the media industry, both for media owners and media buyers. COI has negotiated cost savings for the taxpayer by centralising the spend. The average cost of an audit is approximately £2,500 compared to £4,000 if departments went to ABCe independently. By the end of the financial year, all websites run by central government departments will have had one month’s usage data audited by ABCe.

The bigger picture

Why go to all this trouble and is there any benefit to the government departments themselves? Aside from increased accountability to the taxpayer, departments do stand to benefit from the increased rigour in site measurement and evaluation. Website audits are the first step towards properly managed performance improvement. It is only with consistent and reliable data that performance metrics – or KPIs – can be developed. These are things like:

• Average number of Visits per Unique User which measures how often a user returns to a website (customer loyalty)
• Average number of Page Impressions per Visit which provides a measure of user engagement (sometimes referred to as stickiness)

When usage levels are considered alongside costs, we can also begin to consider value for money metrics such as Cost per Visit.

Central reporting of quality data also enables benchmarking of government websites against each other. For example, if I get an average Visit Satisfaction of 70% for my website, how do I know if that is good or bad compared to other websites in my sector? With a standard set of core survey questions, this is now possible. It is also worth mentioning that local government are ahead of central government in this respect. Because of initiatives like the SOCITM Website Take-up Service and Gov Metric, Local Authorities have integrated satisfaction benchmarking into their site performance management.

Monitoring KPIs over time is a key business tool for demonstrating performance improvement which is so important for getting the appropriate level of investment in government digital media.

Central reporting of Visit Duration is a contentious issue. While it is probably not useful to compare websites on this metric – a long time on site may indicate a high level of engagement or a site that is difficult to navigate – it does provide interesting census-level data. Measuring Visit Duration enables Government to calculate the total amount of time spent on its websites by citizens. We can begin to get a picture of the value delivered to citizens by government online. For example, if we compare the cost of delivery to the cost for the citizen then we can begin to address the cost-benefit of online services to the citizen. Now that would be interesting!

Read the full article (11 Comments)

I’ve been pondering on what kind of online feedback would best help improve our public services.  Of course, government already has it in some places – on NHS Choices, through third parties such as Patient Opinion, and for many local government services (that’s where I live).    

 The citizen might give a description and rating of an experience (just like restaurant and hotel reviews), an observation note (low hanging trees over pathways, abandoned cars) or photographs with GPS reference.  What we lack is any kind of consistency. 

•  How might the citizen expect to do it? 
• Where would they find where they could give such feedback?
• What kinds of descriptions and information will be required?
• Are they hampered by yet another interface, or are there similarities to make the feedback process familiar?

 There are a number of approaches:

• Set a common framework, so that when feedback mechanisms are implemented, people can learn what to expect
• Adopt some leading examples and copy across the different public sector websites
• Setup a few Web Services that deliver the feedback functionality to many different websites, so that users have the same experience wherever they go.

 We not only hinder the citizen in their ease of reporting (thereby potentially adding to their distress or preventing them from complimenting the service), we also lose something much more valuable – the ability to analyse where small changes across public services could result in maximum effect.

 Those are systemic aspects that are not visible because believed specific, until some grunt work is done on the feedback in a comprehensive way.  For example people’s experience of hospitals may  be coloured by the difficulty or ease of getting there, or delays in responding to enquiries may be a generic response within certain organisations, rather than team specific.  We don’t get that kind of information unless we start to listen to citizens in a more comprehensive way about their experiences of public services. 

 So how can we best do that online?

Read the full article (8 Comments)

Many people want to be able to contribute to the development of government policy, either as key stakeholders or citizens.  The problem is finding out about what is going on to which they can contribute.  Key stakeholders get invited – for example the British Chambers of Commerce or the British Computer Society.  Others are aware through looking at the website, setting up alerts or monitoring via RSS, or through other means including links and third party information.

What would be useful is one place to find all the consultations that are open at any time.  Harry Metcalfe sought to do this in his service www.tellthemwhatyouthink.org, but found the identification of where all the consultations were and the different ways they are structured difficult in providing a full list.  Of course a list that looks complete but isn’t is the most frustrating of all  – potential contributors don’t know what is missing and may miss something important because they are not looking elsewhere.

The Consultations Code committed to a complete list of open consultations.  This is now being formed with Directgov with a target date of the end of the year.  And we’re doing it using semantic web mark-up (RDFa) so that anyone can extract the data and use it.  I see the possibility of key stakeholders downloading the information about consultations directly onto their websites and providing online response forms using social media tools that can then be integrated and fed back to government.

The commonest question I get, is why not use plain old XML data streams?  We could, but there are many useful aspects to open government if we use semantic web mark-up.  Before that stage, putting all descriptions of consultations into a common form, helps people identify quickly what is relevant and allows people to bring together into new services.  Ensuring each has a URI by a single web page to itself (using the URL as a URI), allows reference to where all the documents are.  Making them indexable by Web search engines (not all were!) means that people can find all the different consultations, including relevant ones, even if you didn’t know of all the organisations that have consultations.  Finally putting in RDFa markup means that they are re-usable, so third parties can encourage participation.  Government providing a service by creating a single list from this data on all the different public sector organisations is just one use of that data.

Formal consultations are only one way of many that seek to engage the public.  We could apply the same principles – and display them in a single place – for other time-limited means.   And we could bring in statutory notices that include such items as planning notices, which are mini-consultations, encouraging people to comment.  When I go onto my professional sites, I want to see relevant policy discussion.  I also want to do so in my personal life – identifying all those changes that might affect my locality and my interests.

Read the full article (5 Comments)

My very first blog, and yes I have been having nightmares about it as I have not done this before. But hey, there is always a first time for everything. So this is mine….

Hi everyone, this is Linda Morakinyo blogging all the way from the Central Office of Information. I’m certain you are aware of what the digital policy team does. But if you are not, I’ll rectify that.  In one sentence, our team is set up to improve public services online, making information easy to find, easy to use and easy to re-use. How do we do this? By setting up standards, guidelines and policy, monitoring and measuring performance plus compliance, co-ordinating and advising cross governmental activities and departments etc…

I manage the .gov.uk domain process; I’m responsible for delivering website naming and registration. The general rule is that each Department should have one corporate website for information that relates to the workings of the Department (e.g. Policy, Ministerial and PSA targets) and should use Directgov and Businesslink.gov.uk for customer information, self-service transactions and campaign support.  Did I hear you ask how we implement this rule?   There’s a Service Transformation Agreement, where Ministers have asked Departments, Executive Agencies and Non-Departmental Public Bodies to reduce the overall number of websites they own, by encouraging a convergence of citizen and business facing information on www.direct.gov.uk and www.businesslink.gov.uk respectively, or on the site of the applicant’s relevant parent department.  In adhering to this rule, departments avoid the expense of setting up and maintaining a website.

The aim is to have all government content accessible through the very minimum of self-standing sites – the objective of the government’s website review programme is to be audience -focused and close confusing non-approved  sites. So when the .gov.uk applications arrive, I have the enviable task (sometimes referred to as power, but I totally disagree!) to grant or reject the initial application. You’ll be surprised at the number of organisations that want the .gov.uk domain name attached to their websites to give them an increased level of credibility. Pretty exciting stuff huh?

Government website usage audits! Now this is a totally exciting, interesting and very challenging project. This project was initiated by the Public Accounts Committee placing a requirement on government websites to measure and report a consistent set of metrics on cost, quality and usage on a regular basis. Bringing to a close an era riddled with government websites that are not as user friendly as their private counterparts and ushering in a new era of professional websites that are user friendly usable, efficient, accessible and used as benchmark.

The website usage audit is a relatively new project which started in June, and presently we have a little over fifty websites registered for the audit. Not bad, eh!  Hang on…email alert. Oh my goodness!!! We just received six new registrations for the website audit. Gradually bringing us closer to the big seven five…..Whoo hoo!!

Read the full article (8 Comments)

In June 2008, COI published the guidance Delivering Inclusive Websites (TG102) with the aim of making government websites easier to use for everyone, including people with disabilities. This set the minimum standard of accessibility for all public sector websites at WCAG 1.0 Level AA in line with the The Riga eInclusion Declaration.

Since then WCAG 2.0 has become a recognised W3C standard and the general feeling is that it’s a better standard than version 1.0. There’s greater focus on the user and less focus on the technology. It’s not just about HTML now; it’s technology agnostic and based on user outcomes rather than technical specifications – which can only be a good thing.

There is certainly a lot of activity in the European Commission looking at adoption of WCAG 2.0, what Member States are doing and what a common approach might mean. Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of clear direction from the Commission… so we might have to come with a plan on our own!

Having discussed this with several colleagues in government, agencies and user community representatives, it’s clear that we need a plan for transitioning from version 1.0 to version 2.0. Moreover, Government has committed to reviewing its current policy:

At such time that version 2.0 becomes a W3C Recommendation, this policy will be reviewed within six months. Consideration will be given to the adoption of version 2.0 as the minimum standard for public sector websites.

So what might a plan to transition from version 1.0 to version 2.0 look like?

Well, assuming that we want the transition to be as smooth as possible, a first step would be to update the current policy to allow conformance with version 1.0 Level AA or the version 2.0 equivalent. This is the current working position that we have been advising departments unofficially. Allowing a choice of standards for a period of time seems like a fair stance to take, particularly given that the current target for complying with version 1.0 Level AA is December 2009 for central government department websites. A sudden jump to version 2.0 would risk jeopardising a lot of the work that has already gone into reaching the current minimum standard.

The following steps also seem sensible:

1. Accurately define conformance criteria for version 2.0 that are as close to the current target of version 1.0 AA as possible.
2. Allow site owners the option of adopting either version for a transitional period.
3. Re-assess the conformance levels for version 2.0 and put in a timetable for moving to the appropriate level of conformance (e.g. version 2.0 Level AA).
4. Put deadlines in place for a move to a version 2.0-only system, allowing sufficient time for organisations to update their training, policy documents, accessibility statements etc. (e.g. December 2010 in line with Executive Agencies and NDPBs).

We need to manage the transition from version 1.0 to version 2.0 carefully, allowing sufficient time for the new standard to “bed in”.

We should also be careful not to focus solely on WCAG when addressing the accessibility debate. We should always talk about usability as well. The focus is on the user.

I welcome any views on the suggested approach, particularly on the appropriate level of WCAG 2.0 to aim for and on the length of time required to make the transition.

Read the full article (12 Comments)

I’m the Departmental Website Review Officer at COI – I believe LTT referred to me as the ‘Wacky Webrat guy’ however that may owe more to alliterative convenience than reality because in any event, the programme is ‘Website Review’ rather than ‘Website rationalisation’.  As for being wacky, I enjoy a cup of tea and an episode of Bergerac after a hard day’s work.  Admittedly Bergerac could be quite a ‘wacky’ show at times, as anyone who has seen ‘What Dreams May Come’ will attest.

Speaking of work, the world of Website Review is a busy one right now as several processes continue to move forward simultaneously.  The end of another quarter is almost upon us with the attendant figures and reports that will entail.  More immediately there is a large Freedom of Information Request pending which will require information on the entire programme.

Last month we submitted a list to Parliament of all the websites closed and committed to close – thanks to all departments for your assistance in putting this together at short notice.

On a less positive note, a few new websites have been coming out of the woodwork as of late.

‘The end result is that the citizen who needs multiple services is left to join up the various islands of service to meet his or her needs. As departments do not appear to accept each other’s identification of the citizen, the citizen has to validate his or her identity at each service transaction. This model of service provision is underpinned by a mass of helplines, call centres, front-line offices and websites.’

- The Varney Review, 2006

It should be clear to everyone by now that when it comes to the internet, people’s browsing habits tend to be focussed and functional.  Recent research has shown that emailing remains the most popular online activity, with 90% of surfers using the internet to send and receive messages, 71% of those using the internet say they have read a blog and nearly two-thirds of active internet users have joined a social network site.  Other than this, popular activities online include reading news sites, Wikipedia and online shopping.

In all cases, usage is concentrated towards certain ‘super-sites’ and so it is becoming with the government domain – Directgov now boasts over 15 million visits a month and 8 million unique users.

All of which points towards the logical way for a government department to reach an audience being to use a popular existing portal of communication for what they have to say, rather than establishing a new one each time there is something new to say and going through the associated start-up and fight for audience in a crowded marketplace with users most accustomed with visiting their favourite, and most trusted, sites.

One of which is, of course, the Government Website Database – which sits on The National Archives website.  Within the space of just a few months we have successfully switched to using this, from a previous system of Excel spreadsheets.  I hope all users are finding it a boon and have begun to extract reports through the recently released Reporting tool.  For more information on any of the latter points, or indeed any questions about Bergerac, please contact me and I will be more than happy to inform.

Read the full article (11 Comments)

I may be leaving Digital Policy, but this is probably not my last blog…

Today I leave Hercules House – and my team! The happy little team of geeks! Wacky Webrat Guy, Groovy Guidance Guy, Slinky Audit.gov Girl and of course The Doctor! I almost forgot F1 RDFa man (he’s always been around – but only just started coming to meetings).

I’m heart broken! Gutted. But I am trying to leave with a little dignity – I’m not going to cry…

In the last 11 months I’ve learnt so much! Lots on standards and guidance, how we inform people about that guidance, what we might do better, and what Digital Policy actually means to Government websites. I now know the who’s who of Heads of e-Comms, the difference between an NDPB and an Accredited NDPB, why it’s essential to implement an XML Sitemap, why you need ABCe to audit your website… it’s a long list, it’s been a challenge, but it’s actually been a lot of fun. It’s not the technology I like – it’s the people who press the buttons. It’s a fascinating world of rapid change, but it’s not as hard as it sounds. However I do quite like dabbling in a bit of jargon now with my mates – dropping Semantic Web into conversation – as long as you don’t meet a proper geek a little bit of knowledge goes a long way.

The good news is that I am just about hanging in there with my favourite project Civil Service Jobs Online. Although the site is currently very active – with almost 600 jobs posted at any one time, most of the development has been put on hold, while we explore the best way to proceed. There are some exciting proposals coming out in October, which could make a massive difference – but I’ll write more about that nearer the time (such a tease!) We do know it’s not finished – and we will finish it, I promise. Sooner or later (by Spring?) it really will be one form per job, maybe even one application form per candidate… all in one place, all searchable.

I wont really miss Livelink (our filing system) or Groupwise (email – don’t even ask!) – although I mastered them both in the end.

Again, it’s not the technology, it’s the people. COI has been very good to me, and although I’m very sad to go, I’m very happy I was here!

K.I.S.S.

Read the full article (7 Comments)

Welcome to Digigov, the new blog brought to you by the Digital Policy team at COI. The purpose of this blog is to share information and get feedback on digital policy  across government and to stimulate debate around digital policy with other departments, agencies, web developers, bloggers and academics.

COI Digital Policy roles and responsibilities include:

• Developing guidelines for public sector websites
• Co-ordinating Departmental Website Reviews
• Approving or rejecting applications for new government websites
• Reporting on government website costs, quality and usage
• Advice and consultancy on all aspects of website management

We started blogging on CivilBlogs to share our work with other civil servants and foster greater collaboration. It was a good starting point and gave us the chance to experiment with the safety net of keeping communication internal to Government. Unfortunately, we only reached a limited audience and didn’t really get the volume of feedback hoped for. Steph Gray (Head of Digital Engagement at Business Innovation and Skills) commented that we should open up to the wider digital community by blogging publicly.

More recently we ran the Improving Government Online review. Several interesting issues were raised including:

• Evaluating the cost-benefit of Government’s digital engagement, not just websites
• Measuring re-use of government information
• Measuring use of content delivered through Flash and AJAX interfaces

We want to use this blog to continue those discussions and to start many others.

For further details of the review, see fellow COI blogger Ross Ferguson’s excellent evaluation.

Other subjects we want to discuss include:

• digital policy and strategy development
• website evaluation and measurement
• accessibility and usability
• semantic web and information re-use
• web analytics and auditing
• convergence, continuity and archiving
• URLs and the .gov.uk brand
• search and findability
• web performance management
• digital engagement
• training, toolkits and events

Please let me know if there is something specific you wish to debate on Digigov, either via the feedback form or emailing digigov@coi.gsi.gov.uk.

You can also follow us on twitter: @digigov.

Read the full article (20 Comments)