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 [...]
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 [...]