Day: 16 January 2019
It’s OK to reinvent the wheel
A couple of weeks ago, Steph announced his return to front line blogging. That seemed promising; this post shows the promise too be real. Even wheels need to be improved and even wheelwrights need to get better at what they do (or, of course, to be supplanted by jetpackwrights). Doing that in a monoculture may be efficient in the short term, but there’s a price to be paid, and the price can turn out to be high. That is emphatically not let a thousand flowers bloom, and let the devil take the hindmost – the points in the post about how to shape and manage diverse approaches are as important as the recognition that there is value in the diversity. The goal is “inefficient short-term competition in pursuit of long-term optimisation” and there is plenty of good advice here about how to achieve both.
Help us start a data revolution for government
Kit Collingwood and Robin Linacre – Data in government
There is lots being written – a small subset of it captured on Strategic Reading – about data and its implications as a driver of new ways of doing things and new things which can be done. There’s a lot written about the strategic (and ethical and legal…) issues and of course there is a vast technical literature. What there seems to be less of is more practical approaches to making data useful and used. That’s a gap which this post starts to fill. it’s not only full of good sense in its own right, it’s also a pointer to an approach which it would be good to see more of: given a strategic opportunity or goal, what are the practical things which need to be done to enhance the probability of success? Strategising is the easy bit of strategy; getting things done to move towards the goal is a great deal harder.