Jim Donald, who runs Starbucks does time management: Every month Janet catalogs my schedule and gives me a pie chart. My ideal is 40 to 45 percent travel, 20 to 25 percent time with staff, about 8 percent walking around and sticking my head into meetings, 8 percent talking with other CEOs and business partners. [...]
ACCORD ACCORD is the DSS programme for the next generation of IT. It will be central to modernising social security services at the turn of the century. At present, DSS assesses claims and holds information benefit by benefit on a series of administrative chimneys each with its own IT system. Information is duplicated and inconsistent. [...]
Many years ago – back in the last century – the government made some big commitments about joined up government, including one very simple one: Changing address A committment for people to be able to notify different parts of government of details such as a change of address simply and electronically in one transaction. The [...]
Joel Spolsky has an engaging summary of a (the ?) consultancy business model. A more specialist audience will particularly enjoy the exploration of the underlying validity of some aspects of parametric modelling, but there is fun to be had for everyone: Here is how the game is played. Big Consulting Company calls up Big Oil [...]
One of the sources of information we pay less attention to than we should is the expression of complaints. So much easier, of course, if you have a complaints choir. Here are the woes of Helsinki set to music. There’s one for Birmingham too – musically and imaginatively less successful than Helsinkis’ (with bits of [...]
… from PC Pro, including, at No 7, the whole of e-government: Back in 1999, when the prime minister Tony Blair promised 100% of government services would be online by 2005, it sounded like groundless bluster, yet now, a year after the deadline, it sounds like, well, groundless bluster. Though what the 1999 white paper [...]
High on a wall in T’s school, two juxtaposed boxes. The one on the left is firmly labelled ‘Post Office Television’ – whatever that might have been. The one on the right, lopsided and casually installed is a WiFi access point.
Transformational Government – the video was part of the razzamatazz of the launch led by Ian Watmore las November. It’s quite entertaining in its way, and a fair bit of money has clearly been spent on it – but it’s not exactly on general release. So some bright spark in Cabinet Office put it up [...]
It is perhaps timely to remind ourselves of three questions quoted in a remarkably pertinent paper written by John Mueller in 2004: Three key issues require careful discussion but do not seem ever to get it: How much should we be willing to pay for a small reduction in probabilities that are extremely low? How [...]