towards “deep” personalisation of e-government services

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Enabling Networked Knowledge

Towards “Deep” Personalisation of E-Government Services

A Co-evolutionary Perspective on Electronic Public Service Personalization

Adegboyega Ojo [email protected]



Outline

1. Background

2. EGOV Service Personalization

3. Issues in EGOV Service Personalization

4. Addressing the Issues

5. Looking Ahead



Personalization is Still Hot

Relatively, interest in personalization is still rising.



Top Personalization Terms



Personalization as Rhetoric?

What was happening?



What is Public Service?

ISA’s Core Public Service Vocabulary

Service is a means of delivering value to a party by facilitating the outcome desired by that party.

Services are provided through interactions.

Public Services are those services provided by public organizations directly or indirectly by their agents



Outline

1. Background




5. Looking Ahead



Personalization in EGOV

The need for personalization in EGOV Services has been identified as early as 2003.

“What needs to happen is a move from one-to-many (broadcast) service to one-to-one service. This move is not about simple personalization of websites; rather, it is about

matching services and the structure of services to make it easier for one individual to do business with the government.” [Accenture 2003 EGOV Leadership Report].

o Personalization is an aspect of inclusive e-government [UN Global EGOV Report 2010]

o Personalized and user-driven services should meet and reinforce shared expectations and principles of social justice as well as personal and public value, so they must also be genuinely universal and available to all [UN Global EGOV Report 2010].



Definitions – Examples 1

From Citizen perspective include:

o Tailoring certain offerings (such as contents and services, product recommendation, communication and electronic interactions) by providers to customers based on knowledge about them with certain goals in mind [Shambour, et l.,

2007].

o Fully personalized e-government portals, for example, should provide citizens with exactly those services they need, increasing citizen satisfaction levels, making communication between governments and citizens more effective and efficient while reducing bureaucracy [Dais et al.

2008].



Definitions – Examples 2

From Government perspective:

A personalized EGOV service helps in making communication more effective and efficient, inferring and predicting citizens’ behaviour and even influencing it, in order to make citizens abide by the law [Pieterson et al. 2007]



Expectations

Citizen Perspective

Exploiting information related to past contacts with citizens to simplify future contacts.

No wrong door and complexity of service implementation should be hidden from citizens/businesses.

Reusing of data collected in past encounters to strengthen government-citizen relationship

Government Perspective

Making the communication between organization and user more efficient and more effective.

Predicting the behaviour of users.

Influencing users in order to make them demonstrate desired behaviour.



Approaches - Patterns

o Personalized cross-organizational services based on life events and business episodes [Dais et al. 2007]

o Recommender Systems to reduce information overload based on personal and collaborative filtering approach [Shanbour et al. 2007]

o Involving citizens and businesses in the Participatory design of EGOV Services, e.g. through development of EGOV user requirements [Verben et al. 2008]

o Custom EGOV Service interaction dialogs [Loutas et al. 2011]



Implementation Frameworks

o Semantic and Semantic Web Technologies to achieve desired flexibility in modelling citizen information, with the contents and services of interest

o Web Services for flexibility and interoperability of e-services

o Workflow technologies for cross-organization process development and integration

o Collaborative design tools to support participatory service EGOV service design



Outline

1. Background




5. Looking Ahead



Challenges

Two categories of obstacles to EGOV Service Personalization have been identified over time [Pieterson et al. 2007]:

1) Organizational – internal obstacles that government have to address while implementing EGOV service personalization. They are process based, financial, governance based, legal and technical.

2) User – these include those obstacles user face when engaging with personalised EGOV services. They include access, trust, privacy, control and acceptance.



Challenge 1 - Process

o How will government provide citizen access to internal business process and possibly back office applications?

o How will existing processes be re-designed and made sufficiently flexible to support such collaborative evolution or change, particularly in a cross-organizational context?



Challenge 2 - Financial

How will government raise the required resources in terms of time and money to implement the variant and possibly new personalised services for citizens?



Challenge 3 - Governance

How will government re-assign responsibilities to agencies in the collaborative service delivery context?

Which organization would be accountable for the outcomes of the personalised services? How would “credit” and “blame” be shared?



Challenge 4 - Legal

Is there an enabling or supporting legal and legislative for cross-organizational sharing of information and integration of data?

How to ensure that the implementation of the personalization initiative would not violate existing data protection and privacy laws?



Challenge 5 - Technical

What additional standards and interoperability solutions would be required to integrate with the legacy and heterogeneous information systems in government?



Challenge 6 - Access

How to provide additional channels to reach digitally illiterate population as part of the service inclusion and personalization program?



Challenge 7 - Trust

How will government gain sufficient trust from citizens to obtain the required information?

How will government leverage the Trust-Personalization duality?



Challenge 8 - Privacy

How will government convince citizens and business over their privacy fears to enable the provision of personalized services?

How can government demonstrate concrete benefits of personalization to citizens with minimal data to stimulate the provision of more information?



Challenge 9 - Control

How will government enable citizen and businesses to have full control over their personal or corporate information required for personalization?



Challenge 10 - Acceptance

How will government ensure that citizens will accept to use and continue to use the personalized service?

Usefulness, Ease of Use, Attitude towards use, etc.



Outline

1. Background




5. Looking Ahead



Solution – A Framework

Source: Accenture EGOV Leadership Report 2007Building Blocks of Effective Customer

Service Program



Solution: Implication

The model implicitly indicate:

o Need for buy-in and support from top management and decision makers in government

o Provisioning all required technical, social and legal infrastructure

o Reform and re-orientation of the public service



Alignment with Policy 1

Linking with Personalization perspective of politicians is key to successful EGOV Personalisation program

Personalization Story-lines [Needham 2011]:

o Personalization works, transforming people’s lives for the better;

o Person-centred approaches reflect the way people live their lives, rather than artificial departmental boundaries;

o Personalization is applicable to everyone, not just to people with social care needs;

o People are experts on their own lives; o Personalization will save money.



Policy Alignment – Examples

o ‘ … we are completing the re-casting of the 1945 welfare state to end entirely the era of “ one size fits all ” services and put in their place modern services which … base the service round the user, a personalised service … ’ ( Blair 2004 )

o ‘ … products previously produced for a mass market ’ are ‘ now … tuned to personal need ’ and ‘ that revolution in business … has found its way into social norms … ; its manifestation in public services is the demand for high standards suited to individual need ’ David Miliband (2004) .



Alignment with Policy 2

Models of Personalization in Public Sector Reform [Cutler 2007]:

1) Providing people with a customer-friendly interface 2) Giving users more say in navigating their way through

services3) Giving users more direct say over how money is spent4) Users as co-producers and co-designers of services 5) Self organization, with professionals creating platforms

which allow people to devise solutions collaboratively



Ambiguity as Opportunity

It is clear from the concept of Personalization in the Public Policy literature is ambiguous.

Is this necessarily bad? No quite [Needlam 2011].

‘To see ambiguous policy language as a problem to be solved in order to improve implementation chances is to ignore the

reality of purposive ambiguity: it temporarily resolves conflicts and accommodates differences, allowing contending parties to legislate and move on to implementory actions’ (Yanow 1996:

228). The elasticity of personalization ensures that a wide range of divergent interests have been able to sign up to and advance it, without needing to reconcile internal tensions



Outline

1. Background




5. Looking Ahead



Personalization Research - CS

EGOV Service Personalization



Personalization Research – Policy

Public Service Personalization



Integrating Research Strands

EGOVService Personalization

PublicService

Personalization

DeepPersonalization?

Can the two research communities co-evolve to foster better understanding and create the necessary scholarly foundation for alignment?



Thank you!

towards “deep” personalisation of e-government services

Technology

egov service personalization

o personalization

government services

personalized egov service

public services

networked knowledge

o web services

matching services