Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • The power of infographics
  • Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers – Harvard Business Review Two critical findings emerged that should affect every company’s customer service strategy. First, delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does. Second, acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.
  • Importance of workflow in social technology | DavePress it’s all about workflow.The best software keeps out the way and just lets you do stuff. There shouldn’t be anything new to learn, and the process should be completed within one or two clicks of a mouse.
  • Innovation functions in large organisations | Kate Bennet You need some very experienced people in the team: People who know the organisation inside out and are aware of what’s been tried before are invaluable. They’ll have the contacts to move things forward, the know-how to understand when to stop, and a full understanding of navigating complex governance to implement projects.… and people who are fresh to the organisation: New ideas/ perspectives, fresh insights, and constant questioning will help keep the innovation function challenged and on the ball. Employ additional interns and apprentices where possible, give them responsibility and see what they create.
  • Small mercies – honestlyreal No drama though – no letters to the Trust, no official complaints, certainly no raised voices or threats. Just a bit of wasted medicine, a heart-rending sense of frustration, and quite a lot of avoidable pain. Life goes on.
  • Stories vs. Statistics – NYTimes.com There is a tension between stories and statistics, and one under-appreciated contrast between them is simply the mindset with which we approach them. In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled
  • A Shiny World: The hacker ethic: or work as play Big ideas don’t happen in offices. Offices don’t encourage thinking. I sit in front of my desk and I look at my screen and I feel guilty for reading my RSS feeds for research, or reading Twitter to catch others sparks which fuel my ideas, because it feels as if it’s playing, not valuable, not quantifiable, and therefore not justifiable. But all my ideas, all the things we will be implementing in the near future, all of these things were not ideas I got from sitting at my desk at work. […]Work is not for play. But in playing with things, testing things, discussing them, wrestling with them, yes I know pontificating about them, comes understanding, then quietness and then spirals of ideas coming from the understanding. Play has it’s value.
  • Open data, fraud… and some worrying advice Government/big-company bureaucrats not only think like government/big-company bureaucrats, they build processes that assumes everyone else does. The problem is that that both makes more difficult for ordinary citizens (as most encounters with bureaucracy make clear), and also makes it easy for criminals (who by definition don’t follow the rules).