Policy development is rarely simple even, or perhaps especially, when the question looks ludicrously simple. There is a door between the lifts and the working areas of the building I work in.* The door sits at the intersection of three policies, and as a result, cannot satisfy all of them. Of the three, the one [...]
The time to embrace Government 3.0 is now. Social networks are becoming more ubiquitous and relevant every day. It is necessary to incorporate this channel into your citizen experience planning, processes and open government toolkit. I hadn’t been intending to implement Government 3.0 any time soon, but perhaps I have been missing something important. I [...]
If the people who read this blog are the sort of people I think read this blog, few will have paused over the title of this post. For better or worse, people who read this are people who are comfortable in an online world. They will shop online, bank online, talk to their friends online, [...]
In the opening days of 2010, I am reading a collection of essays proclaiming itself to be The Best Technology Writing 2009, every single one of which was written and published in 2008. It’s a curious book, for several reasons. The first and most obvious is how very strange it now seems to be reading [...]
The glamour of New York high fashion is a long way from the grit of government service delivery. But if you half close your eyes, imagine away the fur coats and unwearable frocks, and photoshop human variety and frailty in rather than out, some surprising similarities emerge.
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 [...]
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 [...]
I suspect that the airline congratulates itself on its customer insight and, for all I know, acts on it to improve the service. But while they clearly have a lot of customer research, they have deprived themselves of the opportunity to get insight.
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 [...]
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 [...]