I've just received a press release from Otago University about research conducted by Associate Professor Robin Gauld from the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine. Apparently his team of researchers has been studying e-government responsiveness – a flash way of saying that they’ve worked out how long it takes to get a reply from a government agency when you send them an email.
Professor Gauld says the team emailed 273 government agencies in New Zealand Australia. The message asked two simple questions – where are you located? what are your opening hours?
According to the Professor, 209 agencies responded within 45 working hours (which by my calculations at 8 hours – 9am to 5pm – is just over 6 days).
NZ performed better than Australia – recording an 89.3% response rate compared to a 67.5% response rate across the Tasman. Professor Gauld rates this altogether as a “poor performance” although he noted that many agencies provided info that was “well beyond what was requested.”
Quite frankly, I think the results stink.
Take the (better) NZ results – 10% of emails unanswered and those that are within 6 days (what kind of a measurement is “within 45 hours” anyway?).
And then, when the answer does finally arrive it’s filled with information you didn’t want. The questions were pretty simple: Where are you and when can I drop by? Hardly rocket science.
Professor Gauld sums it up neatly at the end of the press release when he says:
“If capacity to respond remains questionable, this will do little to boost confidence and trust in e-government mechanisms.”
Quite agree.
By the way, Professor Gauld’s looking for funding to run a similar study on a global scale. In the meantime he, along with all those slackers in government departments who took six days to answer a simple email from the NZ taxpayer, are more than welcome to attend the TUANZ Contact Centre Conference in April. There’s an open session on metrics which you will no doubt benefit from.
(Apologies to all government departments whose email response times are better than are represented in this press release – but your colleagues are letting you down when an academic study makes public these kinds of stats).