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Out of the mouths of (relative) babes

I was having a conversation with my 12-year-old daughter this evening.  She has a reasonable idea about what I do for a living and she was asking me about a particular job with a client whose brands she can relate to, because they taste nice.  I was telling her a little about some of the changes we’re helping the client to make so that it can be more responsive to customer demand (though that probably isn’t exactly how I put it). 

And she observed, ‘the trouble is that in some places they make up rules and they never change them, even though they don’t work any more and nobody can remember why they started doing things that way.  If you can make them change the rules they can change everything.’  And I felt rather proud and said ‘that, my darling, is absolutely spot on’.

Posted October 19, 2008 by Tim Connolly. Comments (0).
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Using consultants in tough economic times

It’s the most common and most predictable question in any social conversation I have at the moment.  I usually wait to be asked it, simply because I’m interested to see how quickly the subject comes up.  it does, very quickly, very often.  And the question is, ‘how is your business being affected by what’s been going on in the financial world?’ 

Read on →

Posted October 19, 2008 by Tim Connolly. Comments (0).
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Driving openness at the BBC

How do you make a huge public service institution more open? How do you advance the idea of openness in an organisation founded on British Empire-era discretion and rigid central control? How do you communicate big, radical ideas like open source and content sharing to media people whose idea of openness is a premium rate phone line? How do you translate a monolithic, broadcast-model state broadcaster into a network-model ‘common platform’ that drives enterprise, learning, democratic participation and community coherence while still entertaining and informing?

Read on →

Posted October 15, 2008 by Steve Bowbrick. Comments (0).
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Computers in the Home

Birmingham is taking a lead in the UK in providing technology for the home as a means of engaging whole families in the opportunities to learn, connect and gain access to employment opportunities.  The attainment levels in schools seems to suggest that it does work. The collaboration involved also seems pretty impressive.

Posted October 13, 2008 by Mark Smith. Comments (1).
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Virtual Cities – Second Lives

Found this paper on the Digital Birmingham website outlining a very wide variety of potential virtual applications.

“Second Life”  arguably represents the next generation of interactive web applications.  There are not too many implemented examples, but this paper outlines a fascinating insight into how the thinking is developing.

Posted October 13, 2008 by Mark Smith. Comments (2).
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Innovation in a financial crisis

The Prime Minister made a point of praising his government’s innovative proposals to ease the banking crisis last week and indeed the apparent willingness of political and economic leaders in Europe and North America suggests they may have come up with solutions that go to the root of the issue.  Whether that is really the case, I doubt anyone knows, as the single most disturbing aspect of the current crisis is that nobody, however expert and experienced they may be, appears to really understand the depth, the extent, indeed the simple enormity of the issues and the threats to economic, social and political stability.

However, I’m not going to add any more words to the billions already written about the global economy (perhaps trillions – I am not sure I realised that trillion was a real number as opposed to the smaller end of the unquantified but extremely large ‘zillions’ category).  I’d like to pick up on Mr Brown’s enthusiasm for innovation and to start some thinking about how it could best be channelled. Read on →

Posted October 13, 2008 by Tim Connolly. Comments (1).
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Giving young people get a say

We ran a workshop for non-adults this week in Harrow.  We were invited by the Borough’s Student Advisory Group to test young people’s views on social cohesion.  This was a slightly different challenge and we needed to use all our engagement skills to ensure two groups of twenty 13-14 year olds really got a voice.  Young people from all the borough’s schools were represented, including special needs schools, and we were grateful for the expertise of teachers who were on hand to help.

Not unsurprisingly, the children had fairly strong views, giving us a fresh perspective on the overall social cohesion challenge.