In part 1 of this post I reviewed the various statistics that State Departments provided to Paul Cullen when he was researching this Irish Times article on the use of State Websites.

In this instalment, I scrutinise the response Paul received from the Department of Defence, and analyse the strategy and infrastructure which contribute to the problems that I have highlighted.

Return on Investment

The Defence Forces reported that it is not economically viable to monitor traffic on their Irish language Website.

Such a conclusion would require at least a rough return on investment (ROI) calculation. The Defence Forces English Website is tracked by their chosen Web analytics tool Site Analyse by Site Improve, presumably because the volume of traffic justifies investment in this paid tool.

Although I commend the Defence Forces for requiring a measured justification for any outlay, they appear to have missed the point, that there is a free, high quality, and light weight Web analytics tool, Google Analytics which could be deployed in place of their paid solution.

Ireland Inc.

If we consider the State to be Ireland Inc., the government then are the management, the civil service are the employees and all enquiries sections in the civil service are the equivalent of call centres and branches.  For the purpose of this analysis I will limit the customers of the State to be the citizens of Ireland.

Ireland Inc. does not have a single Website.  Each department has its own site, although the departments serve the same limited audience, are managed by the same management team and operate under the same brand.  This is unusual at best, when considered in relation to the private sector and gives rise to the following issues: 

• Hosting and maintaining separate Websites for each department is not cost efficient. 
• Customers have trouble remembering all of the  URLs.                 
• It can be difficult for customers to figure out which department deals with the business they need to conduct and so they do not know which Website to go to.

In short, Ireland Inc.’s online presence is not very customer-centric. 

When trying to locate a service I would probably end up calling one of the organisation’s departments with a request to direct me to the correct department. 
Ireland Inc. should attempt to replicate this real world service on-line by providing a centralised information point e.g. an FAQ or a Help section, to assist customers direct their query to the correct department. This would be better for the customer, and would save money, since dealing with routine enquiries via a Website is an efficient means of cutting costs to call centres.

A Business Case

It is standard practice in the private sector to produce a business case, including a cost benefit analysis or a similar return on investment calculation prior to being allocated a budget for a project.  If the benefits outweigh the costs over an acceptable period of time then the project gets the go ahead.

The business case for investing in improving on-line help or FAQ sections is compelling, and is consistently so across many industries because of the high cost or servicing queries via a call centre or branch. 

The cost saving is highly likely to justify the outlay on improving the content and search functionality in the help section(s) of the Website(s) in the case of Ireland Inc.

I do not have access to the figures in order to do a simple ROI calculation to illustrate this but the sad thing is that I doubt CEO Cowen, could access accurate figures to calculate the return on an investment in his organisation’s Website(s).

If a Website is not being measured accurately then it is not possible to conduct a cost benefit analysis and it is likely that money that is spent on the Website is being wasted as there is no visibility on what works and what does not work.

The Web analytics data that could be used to inform this country’s Web strategy appears to be wrong or in the case of the Revenue Commissioners a decade behind the private sector.

In the final instalment of this article, which I will post on Friday, I will conduct some root cause analysis of the evident problems measuring the State’s Websites and I will propose solutions, including a basis for a long term Web strategy (25 years) and some quick fixes that could be undertaken with two weeks of work.