Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • Gov 2.0 in Australia This showcase has been set up to collate and create a gallery of Australian Government innovation in the Gov 2.0 space, from which others can learn. Once a few submissions have been received and verified, we will publish a gallery of case study videos and images which people can click on to get the full details of each case study.
  • Civil Service Live: Conservatives – Interview “We know that huge numbers of public servants at the front line get hugely frustrated by the way things are currently done: by the restraints, the detailed targets, the monitoring, the auditing, the regulating, the inspecting – all of which get in the way of them doing what they want to be doing, which is delivering public services,” says Francis Maude.“So the deal will be, yes, there is going to be less money around in the future, but the other side of this is that there will also be less interference, less micromanagement, more responsibility taken by people at the front line. And that means more freedom for them to do things themselves in a way that responds to the needs of the public.”
  • Customer Journey Mapping Resources On The Web ” Experiencing Information Below is a list of English resources on the web for Customer Journey Maps. The focus of the list is on CJM as a document and deliverable, and how to create them. It doesn’t include general resources about serivce design and, with one exception, doesn’t include resources about service blueprints. The resources that begin with an asterisks are recommended starting points with particularly good practical information.
  • Question everything #4: James Woudhuysen on innovation | spiked Genuine innovation, consistently advocated and debated, is an afterthought among British officials. Is that because it is thought too expensive, or too risky, especially in a downturn? Certainly. Is cutting back ‘waste’ of all sorts automatically preferred to creating new products and services? Yes. Have regulations, like the target mentality and the ceaseless propaganda aimed at raising ‘awareness’, gained a kind of unstoppable dynamic of their own, to the detriment of innovation? They have. Are the Cabinet and the shadow Cabinet dominated by people with little experience of science, technology or even business? Yes.
  • What’s so great about the welfare state? | spiked The debate we must initiate needs to move beyond the limited political imagination that dominates both left and right. The state is neither the only institution that can guarantee the wellbeing of the citizenry, nor can we rely on the market consistently to provide for individuals. Rather than understanding the current situation as a reason for despair, we ought to embrace the very positive challenge that rejecting the interventions of the state would force us to confront: how we might begin to build a new set of public institutions and bodies, through which, acting in concert as citizens, we could begin to decide what kinds of welfare provisions we might actually need, and what kind of society we might really want to live in.