I have heard mention a number of times lately that the term 'Business Change' is out of favour in Government IT circles. And quite right too. Here's why I agree... The (now defunkt) Office of Government Commerce used to be pretty hot on Business Change. After all, it was the thing so often perceived to be the problem: a lack of engagement between technology folk and 'the Business'; poor 'Benefits Realisation' and so on. But I think it's more complex than that: there was something more fundamental wrong and it's exemplified in the idea of Business Change itself. I believe that the term Business Change is used, broadly speaking, with an underpinning model of thinking (pl forgive geeky equation) that …
In praise of the Post-it
This very nearly caused a serious tea-spill this morning... Analyst: Government’s digital leaders’ network shouldn’t be using post-it notes It's a story about an analyst who, having read a post on the Government Digital Service blog - First Digital Leaders’ meeting, said this... “Why did they have a physical meeting? This could have been done far more effectively using digital tools – communication and collaboration tools that would have taken ideas and automatically captured them, rather than the joys of Post It notes and pens,” Earlier in the day, having read the same post, I had tweeted this... First Digital Leaders meeting j.mp/HhbLu6 I have a good feeling about how this stuff is happening @govuk #ukgovit — Mark Foden (@markwfoden) …
Sitting people on chairs in rows at meetings is a criminal waste
Bee trapped in bonnet. Write... Quite often I go to big meetings to do with changing things. Almost invariably these meetings have lots of people sitting on chairs in rows - sometimes for hours. The people at the front talk; and the people in the rows (mostly) listen. I struggle to think of a worse way of promoting change. Change in organisations is about encouraging people to work with other people to do things differently. If we sit them down - doing little but (if we are lucky) listening and pretty much isolated (because rows are like that) - we just can't expect them, immediately afterwards, to leap up and start dancing a new dance. Of course change programmes are …
FG and G-Cloud
We are properly chuffed to announce that Foden Grealy (Ltd) has been awarded a place on the Government's new G-Cloud Services Framework. The framework has been set up to make it easy for UK public sector organisations to procure low-cost, flexible cloud computing services from a wide range of suppliers: see the announcements - CloudStore open for business . We believe that the Government's approach to IT is very clearly changing for the better and G-Cloud is a good example of the positive stuff that is happening. Moving to cloud-based services is absolutely the right thing to be doing; but what is really encouraging is the way that it is being done. G-Cloud has a refreshingly open inclusive approach and, crucially, is working in an incremental, learn-by-doing, …
Panel discussion on SMEs in the public sector
I was on the telly last week (well, sort of) in a live panel discussion on the role of SMEs in public sector IT... ITU Live - SMEs, Agile and the Public Sector in this Age of Austerity It's an hour long and there is no singing but there's some useful natter covering what the Government is doing to embrace smaller companies; and what 'agile' is and what it might do for the public sector.
