We are delighted to hear this week that our services have been accepted for the G-Cloud III Cloudstore. The 60 second video above explains what we do and was inspired by the G-Cloud in 60 seconds video we made for the G-Cloud programme in 2012.
New focus: new website
If you have been here before then you may have spotted that our website and its livery have had a fairly major re-fettling. This post explains why.
Over the past year or so there have been earthquakes in Government IT. Good ones. Some enlightened folk in the Cabinet Office with the right mindset and a sensible approach have begun a substantial and workable-looking reform.
This week, for example, the last of the 24 ministerial departments has switched off its website and moved to the new centralised gov.uk website created by the Government Digital Service. A striking technical achievement certainly; but it […]
Put a bit of ‘un’ in your conference
This is the story of a successful traditional conference having a shot at ‘unconferencing’.
You may know that I have a hobby horse about conferences (see We must get more from conferences). For the click weary here is a snippet…
Nowadays I hear much of the need for organisations to become collaborative, innovative, agile and suchlike; and I hear that achieving these things will depend much on transformation of culture and behaviour; but I can’t see how this will happen if, at significant gatherings, we do the same old things and behave in the same old ways. That so many […]
Working Out Loud
I use this term a lot. And I tell everyone who will listen (and many who won’t) that I think Government needs to be doing a lot more of it. In case I am talking nonsense, I thought I better write down what I mean. Please put me straight if I am erring…
If we share an office or workplace with colleagues; we overhear, we ask quick questions, we sense mood, we have a feel for what others are up to. This can help teams to be hugely more effective; but, nowadays, many of us are part of lots of […]
“Business Change”: Dirty words in Government IT
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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…
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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 […]
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)…
