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 →

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.

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Here are a bunch of things I find interesting from the net and tech, with a vague emphasis on innovation.

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This week M&S announced a drop in year-on-year profits of 34% due to lower sales and heavy discounting to get customers through the door. This got me to thinking about discounting and BOGOFs… they work, in the short term – yes – but aren’t they rather indicative of lazy thinking and reactive tactics? If you had a budget to give away discounts wouldn’t you want to have fun with it?

Consumers love getting things for free but if we want to really impress our customers shouldn’t we give them freebies in the context of:

• a changing consumer society which is becoming based more on experiences, on status stories, than on gaining more stuff; and
• the situation they are enjoying or enduring – when the going gets tough (like now) customers appreciate any gesture of kindness and understanding and return this empathy with brand love. 

Two things today’s consumers crave are status and convenience. If approached creatively perks and special offers can not only attract footfall, but also build a sense of uniqueness and specialness, and spark masses of PR and blogger attention.

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‘In the beginning computers were human.  Then they took the shape of metal boxes, filling entire rooms before becoming ever smaller and more widespread.  Now they are evaporating altogether and becoming accessible from anywhere.’ (About as brief a history of computing as anyone can make it, The Economist, 25 October 2008).

It’s hard to know where to start when thinking about the pace and scope of technology innovation.  Every aspect of our lives has been transformed and will be transformed again.  Some of the wildest predictions in the past have proved to be no more than pipedreams whilst others turned out to have understated the change that followed.  Consider these four quotes as examples:

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