Category: organisational design
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Rebooting digital government
I’ve written this article for Computer Weekly. It outlines some of what my new book, Fracture. The collision between technology and democracy—and how we fix it, is all about. Nearly 30 years after the UK’s first pan-government website, what has been achieved in digital government—and how do we make it better? Rebooting digital government to…
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Fracture—the Foreword
My new book Fracture is being published early 2023. Here’s an early taste—the Foreword as it currently stands (the final edition may differ). Update 7 February 2023: Fracture has now been published. Foreword The Internet provides the means by which citizens can have a direct role in shaping policies and influencing the decisions that affect…
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A state machine for the state machine
Digital, data, and technology (DDaT) are being used to build shared platforms and infrastructure, and to improve the user experience of government services. But improving services within their current policy and administrative silos won’t achieve the “digital transformation” much spoken of and little delivered. Let’s step back briefly to 1996 to understand why. In July…
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‘Fracture’—an overview
I thought I’d add a bit more detail about my next book exploring the interplay of politics, policymaking, and digital, data and technology. Right now, it’s in three sections: ‘The backstory’, ‘Digital trends’, and ‘Policy and technology’, plus a concluding summary with some ideas for action. Here’s a brief insight into the current scope and…
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“Dysfunctional, damaging and sometimes dangerous”
“Dysfunctional, damaging and sometimes dangerous” That’s how the Public Accounts Committee describes government technology in the press release that accompanies their latest report, “Challenges in implementing digital change“, published today. They found some encouraging signs that parts of government understand that digital isn’t about polishing and automating existing services, but that overall: “Departments have failed…
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Digital Government—stuck in a groove?
For the past ~27 years, UK digital government efforts have largely focused on the left column of this table, occasionally drifting into ‘Rationalisation’ — and then, as teams change and drift away and memory fades, repeating the cycle. It was Ed Vaizey MP, the former minister at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), who commented nearly 5…
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Policymaking in the digital age
UK Authority have published my article Rethinking policy making in the digital age. It explores the need for a national digital infrastructure that provides open, real time interfaces to public sector systems, processes and data to help open up, democratise and improve the policy making process. Creating this would benefit all those who want to…
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‘Blueshift’ and the evergreen promise of the ‘future’ of work
15 years ago at Microsoft, I proposed a programme called ‘Blueshift’. It was a deliberate provocation, an attempt to move away from rusty soundbites about ‘new ways of working’ and ‘digital transformation’ and similar digital-blah-blah towards the delivery of practical improvements in the way organisations operate. Microsoft was a well-established global brand, yet I felt…
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Fixing organisational design
I’m still seeing service design in many brownfield organisations being compromised by current organisational policies, dogma, assumptions, culture, silos, processes, egos and structures. However much effort they put into service design, and however competent and insightful their design teams, I can’t see many of these organisations meeting the needs of citizens/consumers, employees and other users…