Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

4 Elements Of Successful Digital Transformation – DIGITAL LEADERS
We start from strategy. My strong belief at the start of this was that we did not need a separate digital strategy. We needed a business strategy with digital throughout. We need to retain our focus on our customers who still demand multi-channel access to our services. Business leaders that get digital don’t differentiate between business, digital and technology – the latter represents thinking from the early 2000s.

Is it time to ditch Digital Government? – PolicyBytes
As we all seek to further progress during the next Parliament with digital government, big data, smart cities, the Internet of Things, crowdsourcing and Government as a Platform, let’s make sure we say what we really mean: ‘reforming public services’, ‘making better use of information’, ‘improving cities’, ‘connecting devices’, ‘engaging the public’ and ‘coming up with common tools and ways of doing things’.

Schneier on Security: Everyone Wants You To Have Security, But Not from Them
The reason the Internet is a worldwide mass-market phenomenon is that all the technological details are hidden from view. Someone else is taking care of it. We want strong security, but we also want companies to have access to our computers, smart devices, and data. We want someone else to manage our computers and smart phones, organize our e-mail and photos, and help us move data between our various devices.

Those “someones” will necessarily be able to violate our privacy, either by deliberately peeking at our data or by having such lax security that they’re vulnerable to national intelligence agencies, cybercriminals, or both.

Rebooting the government | Civil Service World
Those first few years of work have been an alpha of a different sort: proving that radical change is possible, that digital should be at the heart of government, and that people are key to making big change happen.

What’s really different at DWP? — Medium
Just because the fundamental purpose of the department is different doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be delivering the digital services people expect, in a modern and efficient way.

In one sense, our unique purpose makes it easier for DWP to define its vision than a commercial enterprise, because we won’t have a competitor who will come along and disrupt our market. We need to disrupt our own delivery — which is why it’s such an exciting and challenging opportunity to bring fresh thinking from outside. Is it frustrating at times? Of course!

When experience matters (and when it doesn’t) – disambiguity
Lack of diversity in experience-levels (and lack of diversity in general) in the team will reduce their ability to consider a full range of service design options that can streamline the experience for users. This will limit the potential for transformation.

There are some roles where experience the domain of the project is essential and teams would be foolish not to include them. Designers and user researchers are not those roles.

Internet of Crappy Things – IoT | Kaspersky Lab Official Blog
In general, the problem is that those who develop home appliances and make them connected face realities of a brand new world they know nothing about. They ultimately find themselves in a situation similar to that of an experienced basketball player sitting through a chess match with a real grand master.

Things get even worse when it comes to the users of connected devices. They don’t bother with security at all. For an average user, a connected microwave is still just a microwave. A user would never imagine it is a fully-equipped connected computer which has means of influencing the physical world.

Technical architecture at MOJ Digital | MOJ Digital
Making sure that change isn’t expensive is vital for digital services because they have to change and adapt.

Bits or pieces?: On Government, platform, purchasing and the commercial world.
As with any large system where one size fits all project methodologies are ineffective, the same is true with purchasing. Any large scale system requires a mix of time and material, outcome based, COTS & fixed contract and unit / utility charging. Each has different strengths and merits as with project management methods. All activities evolve and how you purchase them will change accordingly.

Business Design for an Agile world — Medium
In our future world, the change is never finished. Our Business Design is for an organisation that continuously iterates to improve itself. Is our Business Design a TOM? If you think of a TOM simply as the description of the way that we want to operate a business, then it certainly is.

But if you see a TOM as a prescriptive, absolutist, linear description of exactly how the organisation will work in 2020, then that’s not for us.

This thing called agile might kill us all | plate and serve
Agile transformation through service design is inherently political and therefore a challenge to established power structures. One, service design cuts across organisational boundaries, because that’s what customers do. They are ruthlessly horizontal in a way that vertically silo’d organisations really struggle with. Two, agile is ruthless in its slaying of sacred cows because it has to prioritise ruthlessly, based on the as-pure-as-you-can-get empirical customer and operational data.