We are not the customers of our own services. And even if we think we are, we are still not: we know too much, we cannot stop thinking as provider or designer. Sometimes we are the customers of other people’s services and that holds up a mirror – sometimes a very distorting mirror – to [...]
I have cracked the problem of government IT. A few months ago, I argued that there is no such thing as the government. Now, in a further breakthrough, I have realised that there is no such thing as IT either. Putting those two thoughts together leads unavoidably to the conclusion that the problem of government [...]
As I was getting money out of a cash machine, I saw a proud boast in the window of the bank, highlighting one of the commitments in their customer charter: We will aim to serve the majority of customers within 5 minutes in our branches Pause, if you will, to savour that masterpiece of wording. [...]
The best service is the one which disappears. Alan Mather has written an interesting piece about whether government is still doing too much of its own IT. His interest is not in the possibility of further outsourcing, but in letting third parties incorporate services which also provide value to government. He is on to something [...]
“Why”, asked the visiting official from Singapore, “do civil servants have to fill in tax returns?” He was genuinely puzzled. It was 2000, and the world of e-government was still in its infancy, though more advanced in Singapore than most places. His thought was simple. The government pays its staff in the first place, why [...]
Yesterday, in a moment of distraction, I put the wrong password into my office smartcard three times, causing it to lock up. There are two ways of sorting that out. One is to go cap in hand to the IT support people, and wait while they do mysterious things on phone and screen, feeling mildly [...]
Good services depends on good systems. But good systems do not guarantee good services. The distinction is all too often overlooked, not least by designers of systems and services. The London congestion charge is a fascinating case study of a superbly engineered system supporting a service which has some important deficiencies. I was told a [...]
In the UK, we appear to have a government. It looks like a government, often talks like a government, and sometimes behaves like a government. But you can’t really understand the way government works until you realise that it doesn’t exist. Bits of government exist, of course, lots of them. Sometimes we call those bits ‘departments’ and [...]
To the post office this morning. Twice: once to queue up to post some parcels and once to queue up somewhere else to collect one. At the post office, the woman in front of me wanted a form to convert her Portuguese driving licence into a British one. Easily done. And she wanted some advice: [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about some barriers across a footpath as a simple illustration of how easy it is to skew public decision making if the question is defined too narrowly. Since then I have come across a number of things which add up to much clearer thinking on this than I managed [...]