Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • A Shiny World: Innovation (and JFDI) If you sit and think that innovation, ideas, changing cultures, suggesting and doing the ridiculous things is not possible, as a leader, that attitude will permutate throughout your organisation. If you decide that whatever suggestion someone makes will receive consideration and you are transparent about the process in examining those suggestions for their validity, you will cause a snowball effect. Employees right now have to feel valued. Have to feel listened to. Have to feel that they are not simply throwing words into the wind.
  • The Nature of the Relationship, part 1 – honestlyreal This is a world of baddies, of fraudsters, of the incompetent and the helpless, of the excluded and the disabled. It’s a world of error, of approximation, of faults and mistakes. Lots of gritty reality that, if I’m honest, tends to bugger up enterprise-scale secrecyidentitysecurity systems faster than we can actually squeeze benefits out of them.
  • Going undercover by Michele Ide-Smith What they really drive home is this: if you’re passionate about user experience and you care enough to try to make a difference, you can do. By going undercover, being disruptive and getting results.
  • Using personas for web and service design by Michele Ide-Smith I’m a fan of personas. In the user experience (UX) field, personas are fictional profiles of your users based on research data. Personas can bring your users to life and help guide the design process. Giving your personas names, pictures, personal profiles and using believable narratives will help everyone involved in a project to empathise with user goals, behaviours and motivations in a very tangible way.
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    I don’t believe our personas can just focus on website users. We need to make sure they are rich enough to describe situations when customers might prefer to phone us or use social media, for example. But our personas must also consider our business goals, for example we need to try and encourage our customers to use cheaper channels (channel shift) where possible to reduce service delivery costs.
  • Creating democratic, scalable innovation | The Democratic Society There is a three-way divide between existing public service providers, who understand the context and constraints on change, the public themselves, who give legitimacy and are best able to articulate their needs and aspirations, and innovators both inside and outside traditional public service organisations. The separation between these three elements is reducing rather than increasing the scope for innovation. Barcamp events produce good ideas, but are not networked into existing power arrangements. Public services are trying to innovate within existing structures, but cannot access the local enthusiasm and expertise which could keep programmes running and maintain innovation after outside agents have moved on to other things. Existing structures, cultures and processes within public services hinder innovation, not by building brick walls, but through a thousand little difficulties and inconveniences. As spending cuts take hold, there is a risk that innovation and energy will dissipate.
    Building a network of open and participative spaces – outside the wall of government, but with their active involvement and participation – can connect these different elements and allow better, more focused conversations, massively increasing the opportunities for participation, innovation and local co-production.
  • The 1910 time traveller « thenextwave But there’s perhaps an underlying story here. When we think about long-term change with the benefit of hindsight, the things we think are unfathomable are usually the technology –planes, cars, computers. But it is at least as likely that the things that time travellers would most struggle with are the shifts in social values, which are almost invisible to us because we swim in them constantly and adapt ourselves to them as they change.
  • The Innovation Imperative It seems pretty obvious that budgets will be much tighter over the next few years, which means the heads of these departments and agencies will need to find new, better, and cheaper ways to do things.How? Well, the answer has to be innovation. Economists say that innovation drives more than 85 percent of productivity growth in the private sector. In the public sector, though, where productivity growth has been stagnant for a decade, innovation is much harder to come by. So what should public-sector leaders do to foster innovation?
  • 2010 Gov 2.0 Year in Review – O’Reilly Radar Here are the themes, moments and achievements in the Gov 2.0 world that made an impact in 2010.
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    What is clear is that open government is a mindset, not simply a fresh set of technological tools. Gov 2.0 is a means, not an end. It can and will mean different things to different constituencies.
  • What lies ahead: Gov 2.0 – O’Reilly Radar Tim O’Reilly: At the end of the Web 1.0 era, some people claimed the web had failed because banner advertising, pop-overs, pop-unders and all the increasingly intrusive forms of advertising didn’t work. Then Google came along with a better idea. I think something similar will happen with Gov 2.0. Many of the things people label as “Gov 2.0” are really the early signals and efforts of a “Gov 1.0” period. Important shifts will eventually occur, and they won’t have anything to do with government agencies putting up wikis or using Twitter. We will see many unexpected outcomes over time.