People in government often like to think that government is important, failing to realise that they are seeing it from a rather unusual point of view. For most people, most of the time, government is most successful when it is least visible, or perhaps least intrusive…
Even when the new channel is literally a couple of steps away: I went to the movies yesterday… So, the place is packed. Lines for the ticket counter is 25+ people deep. There are 6 ticket vending machines sitting there, happily waiting dispense tickets. Empty. No lines. No people. No usage. I waited and watched [...]
Having just put up a post on channel integration, I was going to go and do something more interesting in real life with a sense of a job well done. To my horror, I find that William Heath thinks the very concept is dangerous: We’ve been asked to talk about “channels”. Already I’m uneasy. Channels [...]
However much we talk about the convergence of communication channels, it always seems more figurative than literal. Now a new Canadian startup has emerged which has given some real and really interesting thought to what convergence might really mean. They are called Fonolo, and their pitch is simple: Fonolo makes it easier and less frustrating [...]
Kablenet reports that Poor people often have great problems in obtaining information and services from government because of a shift away from face-to-face contact, according to a new study. The National Consumer Council (NCC) has found that disadvantaged people have a preference for personal interaction with benefits agencies or their local council. But the rapid [...]
DWP has launched a YouTube channel. It’s not the first for a UK government department – No 10 and the FCO at least were there before. And there is no easy way of telling whether it is the first government use of YouTube as a campaign channel – that’s one of the problems with emergent [...]
In September this year, the BBC reports that text messages were being sent in the UK at the rate of a bit over a billion a week. That means that as many text messages are now being sent every week as in the whole of 1999. Text messaging remains an interesting example of discontinuous change. [...]
Genealogy and e-government have long had an unfortunate relationship with each other in the UK. The great triumph of putting the 1901 census online in January 2002 was followed within three hours by demand overwhelming capacity and within five days by its being withdrawn altogether for a bit of a rethink – a pause which [...]
If an employer wants to employ a foreign worker – one from outside the EEA – they need a work permit. And the ever-helpful Home Office is on hand to ease their way through the process. In most cases it is the employer, not the prospective employee who has to make the application – which [...]
Substituting telephones for paper has gone quite a long way for incoming customer contact. There are many services where it is possible – and often easier – to ring up than to write or to go there, wherever ‘there’ might be. Substituting phones for outgoing contact is much less advanced. Buff envelopes remain the characteristic [...]