We are approaching the traditional time of the silly season in UK news and politics, the quiet period when in the absence of real news, the frivolous and the dotty get more column inches than they otherwise would.1 In Poland and indeed much of the rest of Europe, that period is know as the cucumberRead… Read more »
Seen from a certain distance, local government looks untidy and inefficient. The same functions are replicated hundreds of times over. There is limited scale efficiency of operations. Boundaries create anomalies and inconsistencies. So it must make sense to join it all up, to standardise, to have common platforms and common tools. The counter-argument is thatRead… Read more »
Let’s put this as neutrally as possible. People interact with public services. Now, here’s a simple question: what should we call those people – and why? Perhaps it’s not such a simple question after all. They – we – are many things. We are patients, customers, passengers, swimmers, clients, taxpayers, claimants and more (as wellRead… Read more »
However hard you try to represent people, the chances of their feeling well represented remain small. That’s not a reason to despair. It is a reason to remember that there is a gap between those who consult and those who are consulted, between those who provide and those who are provided for, which is likelyRead… Read more »
Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web Sensible security | Cabinet Office technology The answer isn’t to compromise security in order to meet the user needs. The answer is to think about security as part of the user needs, something that is integral to (and should be balanced against) every other facet ofRead… Read more »
The web is a failed information management system. What is odd about that statement is not that the attempt has failed – I don’t think I have ever heard of any other fate for an information management system – but that the fact of the attempt has been so completely forgotten. Information is everywhere, ofRead… Read more »
Many of the ambitions of twenty years ago still resonate today. Their realisation is still work in progress. Jerry Fishenden has taken on the labour of recording the main trends of the history of e-government, or online government, or digital government (even the name has archaeological layers) in the UK over the last twenty years.Read… Read more »
A lot of care goes into designing successful interactions. The same level of care is needed in the design of unsuccessful ones. Three times in the last three days I have been wrongfooted by interaction failure, from which I draw three lessons. The three examples are very different from each other in some ways, butRead… Read more »
Just before Easter, I spent a couple of nights staying in a rather nice hotel. As it turned out, the fact that I can dimly remember watching Fawlty Towers many years ago proved to be of no help at all to me in understanding what was going on or how to navigate its processes. IRead… Read more »
Governments govern. Oppositions oppose – or, more positively, present an alternative set of policies based on an alternative political perspective. Political initiatives taken by one government will be looked at critically by its potential successors, for the obvious reason that the decisions embodied in those initiatives will have been taken by people with different politicalRead… Read more »