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 [...]
The requirements are pretty clear: an obsessive attention to the detail of how your service works, and the ability to fix glitches quickly and easily. It really shouldn’t be hard, but far too often it clearly is.
Back in February, I wrote about the battle between the big endians and the little endians, between those who see service design as an engineering problem and those who see it as a customer agility problem. Like most battles, it should be an unnecessary one.
The Oxford Internet Institute organised an intriguing sounding seminar under the title of Gov 2.0, or Truly Transformative Government. The implied raspberry in the subtitle was itself a promise of some entertainment while the main title implied radical realignment of boring government with the hyper trendy of Web 2.0. The combination made it unmissable.