A Tale of Good and Terrible User Experience — Summary In this article I review and compare IngramSpark and CreateSpace. The conclusion is a drastic difference in user experience, demonstrating how one of these platforms actually tries to understand their users’ needs and cares about their experience. The lessons are widely applicable to many other companies. Background Amazon is disrupting the…

The Tragedy of Document Management in Government A Tragedy Let’s start with the problem: Government bodies spend millions on so-called Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) technology. But users don’t use it. So they can’t find stuff, share stuff, secure stuff, delete stuff, archive stuff, … Let’s say that last bit again…

Or How Device Authentication Could Get Google More Office in the Clouds Google’s product suite for office productivity is fantastic. It provides all the expected stuff … word processing, spreadsheets, email, calendar, wiki, search, presentation slides, survey forms, instant messaging and video conferencing, archiving and ediscovery, and … Here’s what it gets right: Pure…

Why Public Bodies Should Open Source with GPL2 not MIT Publishing Code Government departments are required by the Digital Service Standards to publish, as open source, code that has been developed for their digital services. But publishing doesn’t just mean dumping some source code files to some online repository to tick a…

How a Local Digital Service Would Work — What’s The Problem? There are two things we need to fix urgently: User Experience of public services can be poor — well below what users today expect from other sectors. Cost of public services is too high, and is increasingly unaffordable. GDS is Succeeding — How? The Government Digital Service is succeeding where many others have failed. …

How to Recognise It, and Treat It Right — Buzzword Bingo There is rarely a strategy document that doesn’t promise great benefits through the use of “commodity” technology and services. The problem is — these great benefits of commodity don’t happen. So what goes wrong? Economist’s Commodity The benefits of commodity products are economic. …

Better to Get Four Things Right, Than Twenty Wrong Paper Jam In 2015 too many enterprise technology projects fail. Worse, an even larger proportion are far from exemplary, even if they escape being classified as total failures. Typically, these enterprises will have many units, teams, programmes, projects, each doing their own thing…

Much More Than Just Procurement The public sector, more than the private sector, has suffered from a lack of commercial savvy: Over years many public bodies established a procurement function — all about process and compliance — which they found culturally natural. …

Why Enterprise Architecture Is Wrong And Fails Reuse! Rationalise! Consolidate! Enterprise technology strategies frequently wave the flag of reuse as one of the most important things to do. The idea is to avoid different technologies and services apparently duplicating similar functions and effort. …