I went to two events yesterday. The first was the launch of the Government Digital Service, or rather a housewarming party for their shiny new offices. In fine agile tradition, they put on a slick show and tell with short sharp presentations about their work and achievements topped and tailed by Francis Maude, Mike Bracken [...]
Everybody who has had much to do with the development of government web services knows that there have been failures of imagination, failures of bravery, failures of technique and failures to seize opportunities – as well as successes in the teeth of opposition and incomprehension. Few have had the opportunity to start from scratch (though [...]
I went a couple of weeks ago to a fascinating discussion about the nature of service design, organised around a book published last year called This is Service Design Thinking. The two editors of the book were due to lead the session but were at the wrong ends of a skype three way video conference [...]
I have cracked the problem of government IT. A few months ago, I argued that there is no such thing as the government. Now, in a further breakthrough, I have realised that there is no such thing as IT either. Putting those two thoughts together leads unavoidably to the conclusion that the problem of government [...]
I have written a couple of times about the gap I see between the brilliance of hack days, as exemplified by Rewired State, and the need to build customer needs and user experience into the mix: These projects can get off to a great start using their originators as their own use case, but they [...]
The Google Reader team are pleased with themelves, not without reason: Today we built the 500th version of Reader; over the 5 years that we’ve worked on Reader, that works out to almost two builds a week. I suspect that’s distinctive, if at all, only in that they are both keeping score and saying so [...]
Rewired State has taken another step towards becoming the next generation systems integrator for government. In a piece of delightful recursion, a Rewired State project becomes the vehicle for accessing the formal status of Rewired State – or as it has been since last Monday, Rewired State Ltd. In other news, the Rewired State gang [...]
In a world of increasingly open government data, who is going to create the services? Brian Hoadley has a powerful go at the answer: Those who campaign for the release of Government data seem to fall into a few major camps: Those who want more access to information because it will inform their work – [...]
My colleague Chris spotted a thread on a web forum about one of our services. The user was getting confused by a change in the presentation of the search function. Chris tracked down the people responsible for that bit of the user interface with a couple of detours to pillar and post along the way [...]
It was a mistake to have breakfast with William Heath. In his charming way, he took one of my long-held ideas, held it up to the light, and found it wanting. Worse still – and equally characteristically – the challenge was as powerful as it was simple. I have argued for some time that there [...]