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 …
Change Management
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 …
Risk, failure, Sir Gus and obsessive compulsive incrementalism
Lately I have been hearing much talk about government needing to take more risk and learn from failure (and so on); not least from Sir Gus O'Donnell in an article in the Telegraph yesterday. But I can't help feeling that this thinking is more than a bit wobbly: government should be taking less risk...
Creating cultures in government that cope with complexity
Following on from thinking in a few recent posts about the emerging nature of change in government (and after inspiration and help from Noah Raford) I have put together a white paper available as a PDF or here... Governments are facing new, game-changing complexity. They are dealing with increasingly pressing and diverse problems: from improving public services, to ensuring national security, to dealing with the global financial crisis. Each problem has its own specific set of issues; but now, in a world of mounting complexity, these issues interact and it is near-impossible to manage them separately. A focus on applying the right technical solution for each problem in isolation is unlikely to work. The real challenge is to develop cultures that will …
There is not "No chance for G-Cloud"
I was stirred by an article in the Guardian's government computing section: No Minister: No chance for the G Cloud which questions the viability of the Government's approach to cloud computing. Whilst doing anything transformative in government IT is going to be hard, I see much to recommend in the approach being taken. I wrote this comment in response (copied here)...
When things aren't working
Nuff said.
Noses for hire: a new kind of help?
This post is about how I think government organisations need to change, and how to get the right people to do the right things to make this change happen. In particular, I will talk about hired help. And about noses.
"I object to this social... stuff"
I talk with people quite a lot about using social software in organisations. This post is about the objections I hear and how I respond.
