Ignite Lab

Many district councils are considering outsourcing and shared service solutions.  The concern is whether by outsourcing too much or the wrong services that the heart of the council is lost.  This raises the question….what is the heart of the council.

I have a friend who is CEO of a district council.  He is grappling with this very issue and as decisions need to be made on each service he keeps encountering the same question.  “If this service goes, have I damaged the heart of the organisation?”  Further….”what is the point of the council if we don’t do this?”

So how do you know?  We think there are three key questions that help determine what the council believes it is there for: Read on →

They may be busy cutting every major IT project this country ever thought of, but just look at the leadership and sponsorship that oozes out of their every pore.  Forget their politics, they are in this together and are making every effort to take us all with them.

Not so different from what most big (or even small) systems implementations need.  Generally, you see an embattled IT manager busting all he has to meet the deadline, with the business sponsor giving the occasional set-piece motivational speech (or perhaps just an e-mail).  An exaggeration perhaps, but how often do you see business and IT leaders really showing that they share the same ground?  Let’s see what Nick and Dave are doing….

Read on →

The world-record breaking tennis match the other day at Wimbledon captured everyone’s imagination – the heroic players and umpire really battled on to the bitter end.  Of course, it’s always been theoretically possible for such a match to happen – but somehow we prefer our sporting events to have a defined end-point.

It’s not so different with technology implementations –the go-live date is nearly always set as the end point of the project, maybe adding on a week or a month to allow for teething troubles.  But when does the benefit from the new system become apparent?  Usually many weeks and months later, when the users have become accustomed to new ways of working and have found their own ways to make improvements on the, often globally-designed, processes.

Read on →