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ARCHIVED - Performance Measurement for the Government On-Line Initiative
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GOL departments and agencies were free to determine the appropriate degree of service transformation for each service by the end of 2005. Fundamental service transformation means changing the form or structure of a service in order to achieve "order of magnitude" improvements in value to clients, and cost savings or other benefits to government. Compared with making incremental improvements, fundamental service transformation is much more difficult, risky, and costly. It also involves working across programs, departments and agencies, and jurisdictions to integrate services and move to common databases or back office systems. Doing this is much more complex and time consuming than improving single, siloed programs. It is for these reasons that the federal government has elected to take a cautious approach – to lay a foundation for fundamental service transformation through the development of a citizen-focused, enterprise-wide Web face of government as well as a common secure infrastructure that will support interoperability and the development of enterprise business and information architectures, and to learn from selective investments in strategic service transformation pilots and projects. Nonetheless, it is timely to establish a clear vision and outcomes for service transformation over the remaining period of the GOL initiative, as well as define objectives and outcomes for the following period.
Half of Canadians (66% of Internet users) report having visited a federal Web site at least once in the past year. However, reported awareness of the on-line services that the federal government offers is modest. Only half of GOL departments and agencies have plans to market on-line services in 2004; marketing plans only exist for 22% of services (and only for 13% of services that are complete in terms of having achieved their target level of functionality). A government-wide marketing strategy is needed, as is more effort by departments and agencies to increase the awareness of on-line services, particularly among Internet users.
Visits to gateways and integrated Web portals are increasing – the most frequently visited portals are Business Start-up, Jobs, and Going to Canada; the fastest growing in terms of traffic volume are Canada and the World, Financing, and Public Safety. The number of on-line interactions (queries, browsing for information, etc.) between clients and GOL departments and agencies grew 54% between 2002 and 2003; the growth was mainly due to information services. The proportion of clients completing transactions on-line is also increasing. In 2003, 24% of GOL clients completed transactions on-line, up from 21% in 2002. Individual income tax filing and job searches drove a large part of this take-up – without these services, the percentage of clients completing transactions on-line was 12% in 2003, up from seven percent in 2002. One of the challenges in preparing this report was the varying quality of data. More work is needed to establish better metrics to understand client use of federal Web sites, and to obtain more consistent data on client interactions and transactions by service. Not all departments and agencies set client take-up targets for on-line offerings, and more aggressive marketing and migration strategies are needed in order to encourage clients to move to self-service channels where this is their preference.
