Public Strategist

Try as we might, we just couldn’t make a mortgage application fun, so we made it simple instead. ING tube advert

The idea of service minimalism is a very attractive one.  Perfection -  in service design as in other things – is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. I have written before about government being most successful when it is least intrusive and also [...]

There are two things I understand about cloud computing. The first is that it works as an insurance policy. My house might burn down, my computers all get stolen, my hard disks fail simultaneously, and still I will not have lost any of the data I care most about because quietly every night Jungle Disk [...]

I walk in, slightly tentatively.  It’s not altogether clear quite where I should be.  I stand in what looks like the right area.  Nobody takes any notice of me.  There are one or two members of staff talking to other customers.  There is a woman whose job seems to consist of walking around importantly with [...]

Things go wrong.  Processes don’t quite work.  The requirements change before the software is finished.  The deadline is approaching so the scope is reduced.  The system isn’t quite as scalable as the vendors claimed.  The training was designed to support the original design, not what has actually been implemented.  There are seventy six legacy systems [...]

Rick Segal realised he needed a visa in a hurry: I happened to wander onto the Australian site which talks about all the visa requirements and, golly gee, it’s all electronic.  Click this, fill in that, fork over 20 bucks, and bob’s yer uncle, get the barbee fired up.  Yup. In just under 6 minutes, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Over and over again in service delivery, you find that there is somebody with a clear responsibility for delivering one part of the service, somebody else who is equally clearly responsible for delivering another part of the service, or a related service – and nobody at all who is responsible for supporting people in the [...]

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; [...]