This is how news travels in the new world. Except it doesn’t because those whose job is to help it travel seem to do the opposite. A bit on the broken process first, then a few thoughts on the elusive information. Let’s start with the indispensible Public Sector Blogs. Or rather not, since it is [...]
Tower 09 was over a fortnight ago. My notes are, as always, close to illegible. The attribution of thoughts to speakers may bear no resemblance to what they think they said. The failure to attribute thoughts to speakers does not mean either that they didn’t have any or that they weren’t interesting. I was only [...]
Qimo is an operating system with a difference: it’s aimed at three year olds. Application software for toddlers has been around for a long time, of course, but the existence of an entire operating system (even if it’s Ubuntu a little bit under the skin) gives food for thought. The much hyped digital natives are, [...]
It is all too easy to forget, from the lofty heights of public strategy, that public services are about people. It is all too easy to forget that although we are all users of public services, that there are some among us for whom public services are not something at the margin but are the [...]
The question of whether users of public services are appropriately or usefully called ‘customers’ never seems entirely to go away, though in my view, it’s a question which no longer illuminates much of value. To the extent I had thought about it all though, I had always assumed that it was a post-Thatcherite debate, perhaps [...]
It starts so well. Promotion and demystifying of an online service tuned to the target audience: check Silver surfers: check Actor from a sitcom appealing to the target market: check Government services online: check Faster and easier than having to queue up at an office: check Online guidance which takes you through the form line [...]
I rang my bank this morning, at their request. The opening greeting, in full, was: All our operators are busy. Please hold. Do not hang up. The words do not do justice to the terseness of the tone. Mack the Knife playing in the background was a curious counterpoint. Hearing those words eight times before [...]
Not every elderly person with a computer has a child able to do system support, and not everybody who could benefit from that support is an elderly person – digital exclusion is a much broader and more pervasive challenge than that.
Last summer, I read John Seddon's Systems Thinking in the Public Sector. I have been intending and failing to set out some reflections on it since then – and have now left it long enough that I will have to read it again before I can write the sort of post I originally intended. It [...]
The writer already knows what he or she is trying to communicate. The only way to judge writing, and thereby improve it, is to learn from people who are confused by it, who draw the wrong conclusion. You don’t assume that they failed, quite the opposite, you try to learn how you failed. And then [...]