We need to recognise the need for clarity of service design, for clear leadership of service design and delivery as a function of government, making customer understanding a central part of the job for everybody who has anything to do with any of this – and for all of that to to be done with a sense of openness and a recognition of the value of co-creation. That’s a revolution of culture, leadership and innovation which wasn’t on the agenda ten years ago.
Updated 27 August to include video and additional links. Last weekend’s Young Rewired State really seems to have caught people’s imagination, with lots of commentary from the hackers who created the projects, the observers who watched them present their ideas and from people who weren’t there at all (but who rather wished they were). I [...]
A couple of hours this afternoon at the mini-Googleplex in Victoria, watching the teenagers of Young Rewired State present their hacks. It was an impressive show, not just for the ideas, all of which were good ones, or for the clarity and self-confidence with which they were presented, but because of the focus on doing [...]
There’s always a gap between the short-term results of a well-polished system and the first results of a switch to a more efficient one. If you stick with that thing you’ve worked so hard to perfect, the next few hours or weeks or months will surely outperform the results you’ll get from the new thing. [...]
Things go wrong. Processes don’t quite work. The requirements change before the software is finished. The deadline is approaching so the scope is reduced. The system isn’t quite as scalable as the vendors claimed. The training was designed to support the original design, not what has actually been implemented. There are seventy six legacy systems [...]
The Tower 09 conference a week ago was interesting , a slightly smaller follow on to the bigger and brasher event a year ago. It was a curious event – quite a lot of good stuff, but in a format which feels increasingly old fashioned, and with a very strange sense of its place in [...]
Great to have been one of the “govvy people” allowed in to see the show – it was deeply thought provoking at a number of different levels. I can’t afford to be as cheerfully dismissive of the government (which anyway simply does not exist as a singular noun) as many of the creative minds at the event, those of us who are in government certainly do need to respond to the challenge.
That’s a pretty impressive time to market by anybody’s standards. Not surprisingly, it’s more a demonstrator than an usable service, but that makes it no less interesting. What it’s got is a database of schools and provision to tag any school with a note. What’s missing is any information on school closures.
At best — when derived with care — the requirements might reflect what users want. More commonly, however, they reflect the desires of user “representatives” who are too far removed from the coalface to know the details of the real work. In any case, what users want and what users need are two different things, [...]
Government web sites have been a joke for almost as long as there have been web sites. They tend to be slow, clunky, and far behind their private-sector counterparts. Luckily for us, that’s the opening sentence of a piece about US federal websites, so no need here for immediate concern. It was prompted by a [...]