A minimum of three departments, money, leadership and an extensible contract / OJEU? That’s shared services for government. Nothing like that since Whitehall 1 was cancelled due to “business case” issues - e.g. it didn’t stack up. Additionally it was mostly an ERP contract, not a full extensible shared service. Apparently the Project Isaac contract for
Archive for August, 2006
Not sure I agree with the conclusion, but this book may be worth reading for interest.
Designers, inventors, teachers,
storytellers — creative and empathetic right-brain thinkers whose
abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t
Would you watch ads to get free, quality music for download. Yes, I’d do that, I think. Now, if Microsoft was funding it, that would be a very clever way to get back at Apple’s dominance of this market. Also, if you could pay extra for a higher-quality or video-supported version of the tune, I might even pay for that. Who knows?
Now that Pocket GPS World charges for POIs, you can still get free ones at POIplace. [Update: try POI Edit as well to help manage the POIs you are installing.]
Alan Mather lists some of the reasons that shared services are tricky in government. The Power, Control, Trust trio probably holds in the private sector as well, but there is a P for Profit in there that tends to drive harder than the other three.
I didn’t realise Grainger was asking quite that much!
Time to get a bump key for when I get locked out. All the more reason to use the Chubb every night. Can you believe that we didn’t for nearly three years?
Here’s another cracking guitar piece, continuing the YouTube theme.
Finally found a nice looking filebrowser for websites. Now to get it to work on my webcam images.
I sometimes get a problem with OSXvnc - I can log in fine, but then the screen flashes on then off again. I’m not sure what causes it, but I can fix it by doing the following:
sudo /Library/StartupItems/OSXvnc/OSXvnc stop
sudo /Library/StartupItems/OSXvnc/OSXvnc start
Shame: I’d have liked to see hundreds more planets added, rather than Pluto removed. Just think of all the textbooks and encyclopaedias that need to be changed. Wikipedia has it covered.
Have been having horrible spambots on my wiki (with various recipes and personal stuff on it). I’ve tried a combination of things to try and combat it.
- Long list of anti-spam features
- One stop fix for most “hidden divs”
- Turn off anonymous edits
- Turn on captcha
Amazon launches a utility computing system. It’s more expensive than I pay (ten times more – which is cheap when you think about it given reliability) but is based on Amazon’s systems, which I imagine are pretty scalable and reliable. A very interesting move - allowing others to benefit from their architecture. As they say, this is providing scalable elastic resources rather than fixed resources as per a traditional host.
Lots of videos to watch (when you get the chance).
- Presentation tips from the stars (Godin, Tufte)
- Crazy geetar from Jonny “Guitar” Watson
JRo brings his global guerilla thinking to the truce offered by bin Laden to America last month: “an Islamic tradition prior to an attack”. His prediction: not the scale of 9/11, based on systems disruption. Maybe the trip to Boston in October isn’t so sensible after all…
I agree with Joel; sites that don’t give a) some indication of the price / cost of their product or service and / or b) give you clear instructions about cancellation / moving away cause me to rank them last in any evaluation I’m doing. Looking at the forums on UK ADSL providers tells me that providers with a sticky message about how to leave them are probably the worst.
Trying to book theatre tickets today (for Rock and Roll, fyi), and I could not believe how a) variable and b) expensive the booking fees were. Not content with forcing you to buy the most expensive ticket available. In the end, Lastminute came out the cheapest by nearly £16. At least it pays for the G&T at the interval!
I was so shocked at the crappy options online (the official ticketmaster site wasn’t selling any tickets) that I called the box office directly, but gave up after five minutes on hold for an agent. Given that I might have saved £20 by the phone route, and it would have taken at least 10 minutes to do so, I obviously value my time (vs wasting my time) at around £120/hour (which is way, way excessive). Interesting piece of applied economics.
There must be a better way.
More concern voiced about consultants: we’re not a profession and owe our existence to regulation-created cartels. This may have some validity around Sarbox (horrible contraction - maybe I should veto its use like we all did with 7/7), but doesn’t take account of my kind of business: helping people do something that isn’t core business for them, that they could do but need fresh eyes on or that we’ve had experience of and they haven’t.
Guy has ten things to learn once you leave school for business. Managing meetings rates high. You feel terribly important being invited, but the way they run and whether they were “good” appears completely mystical. Maybe this is because they are mostly a waste of time? Second is the brevity / business language piece. You’ve used every rhetorical trick in the book to pad essays up to a “reasonable” length, used sparkling adjectives in a superfluous manner, and suddenly you have to write short, compact sentences that communicate? In the first person? Very hard - we used to have to beat it out of people (mentally) at the Waz.
Interesting list of 2×2 matrices applied (mostly) to non-business areas. Consultants’ delight!
