Dave

Anti-patterns of behaviour in big organisations

Michael Coté has written an excellent post describing seven anti-patterns of behaviour in big organisations.

Number six is a particularly egregious crime, in my view:

Pay people to ignore them — BigCo’s love hiring new employees, paying them well, and then rarely listening to them. Instead, you hire outsiders and consultants who say similar things, but are listened to. In fact, the first task of any good management consultant team is to go interview all those bright, but ignored, employees you have and ask them what they’d do. The lesson is to track how many ideas come internally vs. externally and, rather than just blame your people for low internal idea generation, ask yourself if you’re just not listening.

Go read the whole lot – it’s good stuff.

How much does your technology define what you do?

A fairly quick thought this, but one than keeps occurring to me. It feels like a self evident truth that the technology an organisation uses should follow that organisation’s purpose, and not the other way around, but I wonder how often that is actually the case?

I’d argue that for many organisations, with legacy infrastructure and applications that have been in use for many years, technology is defining the way they run.

This is because the technology locks in ways of working, the design of a service, perhaps even the entire operating model of the organisation.

I’ve been involved in many projects in the past where radical redesign of services was scuppered because the technology wasn’t flexible enough to deliver the new vision.

So while it is vital to rethink how services are delivered and how the organisation works, sometimes you need to fix the technology first to enable that change to happen.

Interesting publications on design, technology and change for ‘good’

I’m pulling together a list of interesting, thought-provoking reading on how design, technology and change (the three things that, for me, define ‘digital’) can help organisations that work in the community, voluntary, charity, non-profit, social enterprise type space.

Is there a less clumsy way of describing these organisations? I think under the last Labour government, ‘the third sector’ was adopted, but that seems to be used less these days. Have heard ‘civic sector’ and ‘civil society’ bandied around, but don’t know how well established those terms are. Any help on that one?

Anyway, I’ve found a few I will point to here:

Any others? Leave a note in the comments or on Twitter and I will add them.

Our strategy for digital transformation

I recently gave a brief talk on our digital strategy at Adur and Worthing. Here are the (rather dull) slides, in case they are useful. Important to note that only one of the five key themes are anything to do with technology!

[slideshare id=55264642&doc=davebriggs-for-southwark-151118184242-lva1-app6891]

Load more posts!