The promised axe is coming down hard today on 192 quangos that will be abolished, with another 289 being radically overhauled. 380 quangos are staying. As one insightful blogger noted: The regular hoeing to keep the soil clean has rather been neglected these last few years. Hence the need now for the Round-up and flame-thrower approach. It’s brutal, but it’s cleansing. With the rubbish cleared, the productive can be nurtured. Any bets on when the first new quango of this…
Much has been written about ‘Lean‘, and what a ‘lean’ organisation looks like. ‘Lean’ quite simply means creating more value with fewer resources. A popular misconception is that ‘lean’ only applies to manufacturing industries, but in fact it can be applied to any business process, including within service industries. Clearly it it is a concept that should be concentrating the minds of Government and Local Government in these austere times, though whether an intelligent and disciplined approach is being made…
Below, just some of the reaction to the UK government’s response to a petition submitted to Downing Street in February that opposed UK Gov’s continued endorsement of Microsoft’s IE 6.  It shows a complete and absolute misunderstanding of the issue. As the author here says, “…you could quite easily use IE6 for IE6 only sites, and receive the protection of a more modern browser such as IE8, FF and Chrome for everything else”. Apart from which, it’s not just…
It’s taken a while for me to get around to posting an update to my “Knowledge Hub Part 1” post, mainly as a result of being fully immersed in the technology procurement process these past several months. This phase is now almost complete and we will shortly be starting on the actual development of the Hub, so now seems to be an opportune moment to remind everyone what this Knowledge Hub thing is, and to give a first airing of…
The presentation looks at the phenomenon of Communities of Practice and how they can develop into effective knowledge sharing environments. Topics include: What is a ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP)? Moving from conversations to collaboration Community culture and behaviours What makes a successful community? Measuring success and the elusive ROI Lessons learnt from deployment of CoPs in local government. My thanks to Jesus Matinez Marin and the organising committee for inviting me to address the Congreso Internacional EDO 2010 Conference in…
This notice from PayPal caught my eye today in relation to safe web browsers. Getting on my hobby horse again (see previous post on this topic), I wonder when the UK public sector are going to wake up to the fact that the vast majority of government staff (central and local) have no other choice but to use Internet Explorer 6. IE6 is no longer supported by Microsoft, does not benefit from the latest security software patches, is not supported…
On 23 December 2009, the Government published a consultation paper on policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey. The purpose of this consultation was to seek views about how to best implement proposals made by the Prime Minister on 17 November 2009, to make certain Ordnance Survey datasets available for free with no restrictions on re-use. This was part of the PM’s vision for the role of public data and information in the delivery of Smarter Government that would…
It’s always pleasing to get some good publicity about how Communities of Practice are reshaping the way that local government works; creating new opportunities for knowledge sharing, collaboration and co-creation. The article in e-government bulletin says it all, and indeed I was one of the panel of three who were invited to judge the entries for the CoP of the Year award mentioned in the article. A very difficult decision I might add, since all of the entries demonstrated the…
The second meeting of the Knowledge Hub Advisory Group took place yesterday, 7th December. ( For some background to the Knowledge Hub see previous posting). It was regretable that we didn’t get more attendees from local authorities, but those who did manage to attend were involved in some excellent workshop sessions aimed at teasing out their vision for how the Knowledge Hub would deliver efficiency and performance improvements for the local government sector. This was a valuable exercise because we…
This is the first opportunity I’ve had to write anything about the Knowledge Hub (Khub) Advisory Group meeting that took place last week (17th September) in London, though a number of my colleagues have been pretty active in the blogosphere and twitterverse on the topic. In particular I found Ingrid Khoeler’s post pretty much spot on and wondered if indeed if I had anything more to say on the topic. Well, clearly yes, because I’ve started this post! Maybe I…