WRITTEN ON January 7th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Transformational Government, What do we want?

Government still doesn’t have a very smart IT strategy despite the best efforts for over three years of Ideal Government. And government still isn’t particularly good, despite the best efforts of something called the Better government initiative which seems to have been going on for about as long (I just first heard of it in in this Whittam-Smith comment piece)

“Better gov initiative” is different from Ideal Gov. It has done a series of considered white-papery reports with top-level recommendations (many in the passive tense), while we’re done thousands of folksonomic articles with thousands of comments, some spam, some fatuous, some deeply thought-provoking. BGI is chocabloc with names of senior chaps who have been in the big jobs and mostly got titles and retired. It’s not big on pertinent art or humour. I guess they’re ex-insiders who know how to play the game and hang out at cool-sounding places like Ditchley.

It’s quite interesting to hear of such a group pooling their concern and putting some effort to thinking about how things might be better. I wonder what sort of energy they have, whether they’re fired up about the possibilities of the contempory net and understand the potential of service design in government reform? I guess they’re at the opposite end of a scale of serious reformers to someone like John Thakara.

Better go and meet them I suppose. Thank heavens I still have a fab PA. If/when they were still in their day jobs they’d have insulated themselves from potentially disruptive influences indefinitely. But now they’re trying to find a way of doing the right thing and looking or bright ideas perhaps we can met with open minds on both sides. I strongly suspect there will be quite a cultural difference. But that’s good. We can learn a great deal from each other. I’m ready to listen, and I’m ready to express our insights in a constructive way.

Here goes…