Challenge
How we can collect and manage ideas and proposals for improvement of AOC service users, in an easy, open, transparent and easy to follow way.
Current issue
The services of the AOC Consortium are used by tens of thousands of public employees and hundreds of thousands of citizens. The experience of all these users (external and internal to the Administration) is invaluable in improving AOC services and helping to prioritize future developments in a time of budget constraints.
The philosophy of open innovation tells us that knowledge is distributed and that everyone can have good ideas, regardless of their responsibilities and position. For this reason, it is necessary to promote mechanisms to collect good ideas, encourage participation in the prioritization of these ideas and facilitate the monitoring of their implementation. And this needs to be done systematically and continuously over time.
From the AOC Consortium we analyzed the experiences of innovation open to the public sector. We have identified some timely initiatives in some governments and some proposal gathering portals that address future challenges and new projects. But we did not know how to identify a solution that would facilitate the systematic and ongoing collection of existing digital service enhancement proposals.
There is more experience in the private sector, and various solutions can be made to facilitate these tasks; especially used by software development companies. One of the main market solutions is Uservoice, which has a set of features that facilitate the collection, management and monitoring of proposals for improvement.
Proposed solution
Implement the Uservoice solution to facilitate the collection, management, voting and monitoring of proposals for the improvement of users of the AOC services, in a systematic and continuous manner.
In particular, the solution we have implemented has the following functionalities:
- Entry of proposals for improvement and suggestions from any of the AOC services in an easy and agile way
- Publication of the improvement proposals in an open and transparent portal, with filters by area (Citizen, Administration and AOC Laboratory), services and others
- Registration of an email associated with the proposal to allow the monitoring of the evolution of the improvement
- Users can vote on improvement proposals to help prioritize ideas
- Users can register with their email to follow the evolution of a proposal
- Solution administrators can easily handle improvement proposals. Specifically:
- Change the status based on a predefined list of states that define the lifecycle of an improvement proposal
- Reply to the user
- Merging similar or equal improvement proposals
- Statistics on the proposals for improvement
In addition to implementing the Uservoice solution, we have created a space in the AOC Laboratory where we publish the alpha version of new services of the AOC Consortium to gather the opinion of users who wish to try them.
Global indicators as of October 28, 2022 (6 years of collection and management of improvement proposals)
The main indicators are as follows:
- 13.315 users
- 16.073 votes of support for ideas/proposals
- 5.454 proposals
- In addition, another 1.880 ideas were received and merged with the 5.454 final proposals
Given the large volume of ideas and the limited resources of the AOC Consortium, a service level agreement has been defined in which all improvement proposals that have a minimum of 10 upvotes are analyzed and responded to. In this way, the users themselves help us define the proposals that we should evaluate as a matter of priority. In this way:
- 696 proposals have been implemented and 3 are in the pilot phase
- 104 proposals under review
- 21 planned proposals
- 148 proposals without "status" because they have not yet reached the minimum number of support votes.
Valuable ideas are taken into account, among other things, when prioritizing future developments.
This space for improvement proposals is dedicated solely to the improvement of the services of the AOC Consortium, and thus is informed in all stages of the process of collecting ideas. However, citizens who browse the websites of Catalan authorities are not always clear enough, confuse and / or do not read the instructions, and we receive comments that are outside the scope of this portal. Specifically:
- Approximately 28% of the proposals generated are incidents or inquiries from the AOC services, and not suggestions for improvement.
- Approximately 5% of the proposals refer to aspects of administration management (usually of a town council) that are not related to the digital services of the AOC Consortium.
All these comments out of reach, are answered and the user is informed which is the appropriate channel to manage incidents or queries relating to the AOC services (the Support service) or to the electronic headquarters of the administration for proposals that refer to general issues of administrative management.
This fact shows that if the Administration facilitated agile spaces for collecting improvements from the general administration (as in the case of Userovoice), they would be used by the general public.
Status of the project
- In production: https://aoc.uservoice.com