Find a problem, and fix it

There are a lot of problems out there that need fixing. Some are big, and complicated. Others are quite small, and simple.

Why not try picking one of the small and simple ones, and fix it?

Back in 2007, I started a new job in local government. I was a risk manager! I hadn’t been one of those before.

I needed to write a risk management strategy. So, in the best traditions of local government, I hit Google to find someone else’s that I could, er, take inspiration from.

Only, I couldn’t find anything useful. All my results were cluttered with non public sector stuff. What a pain.

So, I decided to fix this small, simple problem. I set up a customised search engine in Google, effectively feeding it a whitelist of sites to restrict the search to. My list was of all the URLs of UK local authorities.

Now, when I searched, I only got results back from organisations like mine. Lovely!

I put the search box on a website, where it resides to this day as LGSearch. You can give it a go yourself, if you like.

I do not claim that, even in 2007, this was a technological breakthrough of any particular sort. It was however a quick and dirty solution to an annoying problem, and it worked.

No need to build a new search index. No need to seek funding. No requirements for a programme board or any such thing.

What problem could you fix today?

Just what is digital, exactly?

I’ve seen a few comments bouncing about Twitter and other places debating the meaning of the word digital, and why it hasn’t caught on in some places at all.

I’ve also seen some people saying that ‘digital’ is an unhelpful term, given the broad range of things it seems to describe.

I’d agree that it isn’t perfect, however, it’s what we’ve got. May as well make the most of it.

My definition of digital is:

The delivery of information, interactions and services over the internet.

However, that’s not all. It is also:

The approaches, skills and behaviour that have been popularised by digital projects.

Hence agility, responsiveness, user focus, and so on are all ‘digital’ even though they don’t specifically require the internet.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but this definition works for me, and hopefully for those I work with.

Letting things go, making things happen

The way to make things happen is to let them go.

I learned this from hard experience. For the last three or four years I spent my time trying to build a business. It didn’t go very well. It turns out I’m best working alone, within organisations, helping them to get things done.

My business was to have products. This meant – to me, at the time – spending hours, days, weeks and months secretly making things. Plans, websites, content. The aim was to have something nobody else did, so I could sell it over and over.

But nothing terribly worthwhile got planned, or made, or sold. I got depressed, and that’s about it.

Then, at the turn of this year, I woke up. I remembered what I was good at, and what I liked doing. And I remembered that making things is a lot easier when you do it in the open.

It’s so easy to default to wanting to make things perfect before you tell anyone about them. This generally means they will never be finished, and never be as good as they could be.

It’s also easy to revert to wanting ownership of something. Don’t do it. Let everyone have a piece if they want it. Get them involved.

This is what I’ve been doing with Think Digital. I do have ambitions for it – to create some kind of framework or model to help people with digital transformation. But I haven’t waited until it’s all in place before I get it out there. Instead, as soon as I had something worth publishing – a simple list of ten ideas – I did so.

As I develop these ideas, I’m publishing them, through talks in webinars. Giving it away to help me get feedback and refine my thinking.

It feels good – but it’s a challenge. Every day, pretty much, I have to remind myself not to keep things to my chest, not to try and build a product, just to come up with helpful ideas that others might find useful enough to want to put some time into themselves.

WordPress 4.0 is out

Oh, goody. A new version of WordPress is out!

WordPress 4.0 is here, and it’s packed with new features:

  • New media manager
  • Embedded media now visual within the editor
  • The editor now works more smoothly, expanding as necessary to fit your content and keeping the formatting tools visible at all times
  • The plugin directory is a lot prettier and makes it easier to find the plugin you want

Here’s a video explaining it all.

[wpvideo bUdzKMro w=400 h=224]

Get rid of friction

If you want to get people to use your service, get rid of the friction.

This really hit home with me the other week, at an event I attended as part of my work at the Department of Health, which was about the patient of the future.

It struck me that what will make the real transformative change in healthcare (for example) is when people’s access to services, data and indeed connections is entirely frictionless.

Downloading an app is friction. Signing up for an account is friction. Finding a wifi connection is friction.

This is where I think internet of things stuff comes in. When your coffee cup has an internet connection, when lamposts have an internet connection, when wifi is everywhere, friction disappears.

This isn’t so far away. You can already get a coffee cup that measures the calorific contents of what you are drinking. When everyone, everything and everywhere is networked, everything changes.

The friction is replaced, of course, by a bunch of other issues – mostly ethical ones. Another, technical one, is how we handle and what we do with all this data.

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