Towards “Deep” Personalisation of E-Government Services

Copyright 2011 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Towards “Deep” Personalisation of E-Government
Services
A Co-evolutionary Perspective on Electronic Public
Service Personalization
Adegboyega Ojo
adegboyega.ojo@deri.org

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

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

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.

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 services
3) Giving users more direct say over how money is spent
4) 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

Personalization Research - CS
EGOV Service Personalization

Personalization Research – Policy
Public Service Personalization

Integrating Research Strands
EGOV
Service
Personalization
Public
Service
Personalization
Deep
Personalization?
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

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (20)

Similaire à Towards “Deep” Personalisation of E-Government Services

Similaire à Towards “Deep” Personalisation of E-Government Services (20)

Plus de Adegboyega Ojo

Plus de Adegboyega Ojo (7)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Towards “Deep” Personalisation of E-Government Services