Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • Innovation in customer experience It is often the process of taking away that truly gets to the essence of simplicity. The new innovation is about taking away and stripping down. It is not about focusing on the lifecycle of the product, but rather focusing on the journey of the customer as they go about their daily tasks. Innovation does not have to be some flashy new thing. It can also be some pared down old thing.
  • A Shiny World: The responsibility of communicating The danger is the assumption that the voices, opinion, crowd sourcing and data obtained online is a clear and current representation of all voices and opinions which exist, and that all sectors of our society are adequately represented in the digital world. They’re not. They never will be. The responsibility is entirely on us to ensure that they are not excluded as a result of that, that we continue to include them in the national conversation, that we check in with them, that we send them bits of paper, that we print a photograph in all it’s stunning glory and continue to give joy to people who do not have the luxury of a screen to see it on. Inclusion means including everyone.
  • Six Attributes Every Business Architect Should Display | Forrester Blogs At the end of the day, business architecture isn’t worth the napkin it is scribbled on if the organization doesn’t change. A business architect should see himself as a change agent fist and an architect second. He should use business architecture as a tool to agitate for action.
  • Citizensheep » Public consultation or user testing? The problem seems to be that perennial one of the Web: lots of people have great ideas for layering technology on top of society, and rush to deliver them. What doesn’t seem to happen is a questioning of the underlying processes; it’s all very well encouraging conversation, but what do you do with it?
  • Why do we believe in economy of scale? There is a growing body of evidence to support the idea of economy of flow. Work designed to manage value – serve customer needs – provides better service at much lower costs, and transforms morale at the same time. In the private sector, moving from a ‘specialised’ service centre to one trained to handle all customer issues releases an average of 20% of the operating costs. Removing the front/back-office split releases a similar amount. Both tactics also deliver improvements to the service.
  • Puffbox.com » Archive » How can a website cost £35m? Easily. How do we break the cycle? I think the forthcoming austerity measures will help. There simply won’t be the same amount of money sloshing around the system. Departments will simply have to try other, cheaper approaches – no matter what the current contracts say. And they’ll simply have to get tougher with suppliers who fail to deliver.
  • Government Reservists 2 – an idea for the Big Society? | Podnosh What is interesting though is how we habitually structure most government on an assumption of permanence.  That means that when we need more government we struggle to find the capacity and when we need less we are clumsy at shrinking, often reluctant to scale it back and put the excess capacity to useful work elsewhere.
  • My phone’s been blacklisted – honestlyreal As soon as a centralised system becomes powerful enough to be any use, almost by definition it becomes unusable when exposed to many real world conditions. The blocking process might have been quite effective when almost all handsets came via your MNO, and you didn’t swap networks much. But those days are long gone.
  • Open Government Data › Why Open Government Data? Why Open Government Data?
    Why open government data? Specifically why should government data be open?
    Transparency.
    Releasing social and commercial value.
    Participatory Governance.
  • It’s not what people say, it’s what they do The worst way to design a website is to get five smart people in a room drinking lattes and posting post-it notes. The longer you leave them the worse the website becomes. The next worst way is to get 10 customers in a room drinking lattes and giving their opinions on the new design. That model is really, truly broken.
  • Digging digital government: recent major works and what they mean The much-discussed culture change needed for ‘government 2.0′ is happening now – very high profile commitment from Ministers + hierarchical nature of the civil service = crowdsourced opinion taken seriously by Department officials. Only the thickest-skinned of Sir Humphreys can ignore this latest groundswell, surely?
  • Delivering the IT promise – Public Service IT has under-delivered on investment over the past decade. But we should look at the reasons. One was lack of real pressure on public sector organisations to change and to realise savings, and, if nothing else, the size of today’s public sector deficit means change has become non-negotiable. You cannot apply IT over the top of outdated and inefficient processes and hope that, as if by magic, technology will change everything. It is time for a more mature approach to public

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