RE: [tgf] TGF PL document public review contribution

[Peter F Brown <peter@peterfbrown.com>]

Hi,
I wanted to chip in on John's response (3) below to Andy's comment on 'citizen' or 'customer'

There are many places in the document where Andy's proposed substitution is OK and actually make more sense in the text - although I would be in favour of using 'service consumer' (or simply 'consumer') instead of 'customer', in order to align ourselves with generally accepted SOA terminology.

On a deeper level, however, I would tend to align myself more with John's PoV as I think that there is an important issue here that a pure SOA approach has never really had to address: the situation in which the 'customer' doesn't have a choice of 'service provider' because the service is a uniquely public one. Although the SOA paradigm holds up, the concept of 'service consumer' does imply (and is intended to imply) a freedom to choose between service providers and we've never really addressed the unique duality in a public service context of 'universal service provider' vs 'captive consumer'. Neither am I comfortable with the idea of implying that businesses have the same status as citizens in their relationship with government - even if the 'captive consumer' idea also exists for certain business transactions with government agencies (business registration, employee social insurance, corporate tax filing, etc). Whatever the US Supreme Court may have controversially ruled (admittedly only in the scope of party political funding), we should be careful of endorsing 'companies are people too'.

Not sure how to resolve this: customer, client, consumer, citizen, public service user? We should indeed discuss this...

Regards,
Peter

Peter F Brown
Independent Consultant
www.peterfbrown.com
P.O. Box 49719, Los Angeles, CA 90049, USA
Tel: +1.310.694.2278


-----Original Message-----
From: tgf@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:tgf@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of John Borras
Sent: Monday, 24 October, 2011 01:13
To: 'Andy Hopkirk'; 'TGF TC List'
Subject: RE: [tgf] TGF PL document public review contribution

Andy

Thanks for this comprehensive review!  It looks a daunting set of changes but I suggest if we break it down it's not that bad.

1.  There is a lot of basic word-smithing type stuff which I'm happy to accept and we can treat as non-substantive.
2.  There are some suggestions of naming inconsistencies and sequencing particularly between Fig 1 and the text of the document, eg Franchise Model, Transformational Roadmap.  You're probably right on these but I'd defer to Chris on them as it's mostly his source material.
3.  You suggest a basic change from Citizen to Customer throughout. I'm not happy with this.  When I was in Gov't I could never accept that governments had customers, it just never felt the right word although it's probably very PC. Customers normally have a choice of suppliers, but taxpayers don't. So I would want to stay with the generic use of Citizen as we have it.
4.  Your suggestion of consistent formatting of the Patterns seems fair comment but I'd ask for Peter's views on your proposals.
5.  You suggest we shouldn't express opinions unless we can back them up with referenced material.  I don't altogether agree with this. We as a TC of experienced eGov professionals have the right to express opinions based on our experience and judgment so I wouldn't agree with your view on this.

So in an effort to clear your comments, perhaps Peter could deal with 1 and
4 above without further discussion unless anyone has any objections, and on our call next week we can focus on points 2, 3 and 5 plus anything else anyone wants to raise.


John

-----Original Message-----
From: tgf@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:tgf@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Andy Hopkirk
Sent: 23 October 2011 20:52
To: TGF TC List
Subject: [tgf] TGF PL document public review contribution

hi,
My contribution to the TGF Pattern Language document public review is attached.
Is in Word .docx and should be viewed showing comments and Tracked Changes.
Andy


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