A couple of days before Christmas, I went to buy some cheese. So did a lot of other people. The queue was out of the door and well down the street. Inside, the initial impression was of utter chaos: there were twelve people serving in a space which could comfortably accommodate about four. Lindsey Schechter [...]
Ten years ago, overcome by the twin excitements of the dot com boom and the arrival of my first delivery of groceries ordered online from the Food Ferry – which boasted of being London’s Grocery Home Shopping Company – I wrote a paper predicting the demise of the supermarket. I wasn’t quite daft enough to [...]
To some extent they confirm what you might have guessed – younger people are more likely to use social media, and their use of the internet is itself more likely to be social – but confirmation is better than speculation, and some of the detail is well worth reflecting on.
In a discussion about service delivery yesterday, a colleague urged caution about the promotion of self-service transactions on the grounds that people will be less inhibited about lying to a faceless computer than they would to a contact centre agent (and still less so, presumably, to somebody in a face to face conversation). It’s tempting [...]
Following remarkably quickly from the general point, here is a very particular example: A person claiming to be the hacker who obtained access to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo e-mail on Tuesday has posted a supposed first-person account of the hack, revealing the relatively simple steps he says he took to crack the private [...]
This is new – at least in the UK, as far as I know. DVLA are entering people who renew their tax disc online or by phone into a draw to win a car – and moreover a car so efficient that it is not liable to car tax. If I understand it right, they [...]
For many government services, the rules and regulations are horribly complicated. Working out which conditions need to be applied to which people in which circumstances is hard enough. Explaining that in a way in which normal people can understand can be harder still. There has been years of sustained effort to make explanations more comprehensible [...]
There is a famous New Yorker cartoon – two dogs sitting in front of a computer with the caption, "On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog". I would save you the trouble of clicking on the link to see it, except that the New Yorker would like me to pay them $360 a year [...]
The idea that the best kind of government service is no service at all is not a new one. Government is necessarily part of the service economy, but much of it destined never to be part of the experience economy. The best kind of tax return is the one you don’t have to fill in; [...]
We are all familiar with the ‘nine out of ten cats prefer fresh mice’ school of advertising, so much so that it is a parody of itself. Here’s an interesting variant from BA: I am pleased to let you know that Terminal 5 continues to perform well. In May, 80% of our customers told us [...]