Rick Segal realised he needed a visa in a hurry: I happened to wander onto the Australian site which talks about all the visa requirements and, golly gee, it’s all electronic. Click this, fill in that, fork over 20 bucks, and bob’s yer uncle, get the barbee fired up. Yup. In just under 6 minutes, [...]
I rang my bank this morning, at their request. The opening greeting, in full, was: All our operators are busy. Please hold. Do not hang up. The words do not do justice to the terseness of the tone. Mack the Knife playing in the background was a curious counterpoint. Hearing those words eight times before [...]
Last summer, I read John Seddon's Systems Thinking in the Public Sector. I have been intending and failing to set out some reflections on it since then – and have now left it long enough that I will have to read it again before I can write the sort of post I originally intended. It [...]
Over and over again in service delivery, you find that there is somebody with a clear responsibility for delivering one part of the service, somebody else who is equally clearly responsible for delivering another part of the service, or a related service – and nobody at all who is responsible for supporting people in the [...]
The idea that the best kind of government service is no service at all is not a new one. Government is necessarily part of the service economy, but much of it destined never to be part of the experience economy. The best kind of tax return is the one you don’t have to fill in; [...]
William Heath is the latest person to experience the joys of online tax disc renewal. As usual, his analysis is spot on: Hurrah for the car tax disc renewal process. It used to be both inconvenient and pointless. Now it’s just pointless. Not being inconvenient is, of course, a big step forward, but still falls [...]
Banks don’t even bother verifying signatures on checks less than $30,000; it’s cheaper to deal with fraud after the fact than prevent it. Notes Bruce Scheneier in passing, in an essay which starts from the oddity of fax signatures and goes on from there. That approach presumably relies on counter-parties to detect and report that [...]
Peter Day’s latest programme for the World Service is about the principles of lean manufacturing applied to service industries. The download is here, but probably won’t work for more than a few days. The link to the programme web page is here. As usual, he finds some interesting people to talk to. One of them [...]
After an afternoon spent confronting an application from which the third panel could be a screen shot, this rings horribly true. Even better, in a deeply perverse kind of way, than the wry smile the cartoon prompts, are the 135 comments it has provoked on the post where it first appeared. The amount of passion [...]
People in government often like to think that government is important, failing to realise that they are seeing it from a rather unusual point of view. For most people, most of the time, government is most successful when it is least visible, or perhaps least intrusive…