I recently attended Govcamp–an amalgamation of table conversations where several open data activists got together to discuss the opportunities and obstacles of opening up government data. As a highlight, David Eaves spoke about how the evolution of government is inextricably linked to the implementation of an open government or an open data platform. In fact, Open Government has become a movement of its own; A movement that represents a “shift from a culture of permission, to one of participation, expression, action and innovation.”

Obstacles for Open Data

One of the mayor concerns around open data is privacy. It is probably the single most important issue that is keeping this movement from going forward. The federal government is prone to make excuses about protecting SIN numbers and citizen’s private information, but it’s simple enough to solve this: only share data that doesn’t directly implicate citizens. Nobody is saying to share health records, or address details – but health industry statistics or population census reports might be useful. On a more serious note, there is also concern about a breech in national security and how an accidental leak might lead to dangerous, unintended consequences. But this isn’t new, people that want to hack into the government’s mainframe will find a way to do it, if they haven’t done so already. The real issue here is that the government doesn’t want to give up control over the information they have gathered.

Open Data as a strategic asset

The problem is that many government decision makers don’t understand the full breadth and significance of the information they possess. Their next step, to be able move forward with Open Data, is to analyze how and by whom it can be used. Of course, there’s no way of knowing all the ways this information will be used, but it’s important to target prospective users of this information, so as to maximize the benefits that can be accrued from open sharing with the public. As David Eaves expressed in an interview with us, “[he’s] always seen open data as a way to not only empower citizens, but to drive culture change in public service.” In this sense, data can be used as a strategic asset that won’t only benefit the government, but also citizens, start-ups, and traditional businesses that can use it to evolve their organizations.

An example of this is Homezilla, a “home buying and neighborhood research assistant.” Homezilla is an online platform that gathers and puts together everything you would need to know when buying a home in one place: schools nearby, whether it’s a safe neighborhood, how far away the things that interest you are from your potential home. It reduces the amount of time a person spends researching, asking, and browsing around homes and uses open data to achieve this. Homezilla also uses open data to improve their Google street view accuracy for potential homes.

How to build a community for your platform

Another issue is participation. How do you build a volunteer community around an open source platform? How do you motivate people to participate and collaborate? Richard Weait, Open Street Map representative, says the most effective strategy they used is to make the collaboration fun. This is the same for Manor Labs, by making the online platform fun, people are more encouraged to volunteer and share. As Thomas mentioned in one of his blogposts the key motivators for participation are Love (for what you’re doing), Money and Glory. Both Manor Labs and Open Street Maps have found a way to build a contributing community on their sites.

Other platforms, such as Torontopedia.com, have not been so successful. Torontopedia is a non-governmental wiki for Toronto; it is meant to harness information from its citizen to create a comprehensive guide to everything you can find in Toronto. To do this, it needs people to participate, create pages, add/edit/update information. It is meant to be easier to use than Wikipedia because you don’t need to program or know how to use html. You do, however, need to sign up with your “Real Name” as your user name, create a page, and be “accountable” for the things you post. This, along with the fact that the site is unattractive and unintuitive, deters, rather than encourages, people to participate. It also dissuades people from commenting what they really think for fear of being immortalized negatively on the internet. Because of this, most of the pages that are on the site right now have been written by the creator of the site, HïMY SYeD; who ran for mayor last election period, and is planning to run again. The site does have some registered users that contribute from time to time, but it has yet to “take off” as a wiki platform.

For open data, or any kind of open source platform, it’s important to keep in mind that progress takes time, and even though this is the internet, and things happens at the speed of a click, people need to take some time to adapt to changing behaviours and learn to do things in a new way. We should also keep in mind that privacy will always be an issue, and the only way to move forward is to innovate pretending it’s not a pressing concern, come up with new ideas, and then tweak here and fix there to accommodate privacy. We have to push boundaries in order to create progress.

Editor’s note: Nitla is summer intern working at nGenera. She is currently enrolled fulltime at the University of Toronto majoring in Industrial Engineering.

“Truthiness” is probably the best word to describe The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, a blog that more often than not does too good a job at parodying what Steve Jobs might be thinking on any given issue. Of late, the posts have been really ringing true, and there was even a bizarre “life imitates art” moment where Fake Steve made a comment about how the suicide rates at Foxconn are actually lower than the Chinese average, only to be parroted a few days later by Real Steve. Awesomeness of that aside, yesterday’s post “There is no spoon” has more truth to it than any statement issued by any company in recent memory.

I’ve held off writing about Apple to avoid being yet another one of those bloggers who’s doing so, but this latest Fake Steve post bumps the discussion up to a new level. Yes, Apple products run the exact same hardware as PCs, but cost more. Yes, they are aesthetically very well designed. Yes, they tie plastic bags and coffee cups as first-rate examples of planned obsolescence. And yes, I should have a second point in favor of Macs here, but I can’t think of one. What’s going on with the iPhone and iPad ecosystem simultaneously empowers consumers–by giving them access to some powerful and easy to use technology, thanks to some very nicely designed apps–and disempowers them–by casting computers as non-technological sealed-boxes that do only which actions are on a neatly manicured whitelist. People seem to like it: and the devices are selling with little sign of slowing down.

Using the example of the recent signal issues with the iPhone 4 as an example, Fake Steve’s post cuts right to the core of why Apple’s doing so well. People are confused, sell them an answer:

Probably the biggest thing I’ve taught the team at Apple is that people never know what they’re supposed to think about anything. This is true in Hollywood, in the book business, in the art world, in politics. And especially in technology.

So we put out a new phone and everyone is sitting there wondering what they should think about it. What I realized many years ago — and honestly, it still amazes me — is that most people are so unsure of themselves that they will think whatever we tell them to think.

So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say it’s incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over.

It’s all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it.

I own a MacBook but won’t ever buy another. Because I own one, and am seen as a tech-savvy guy, it offers legitimacy to this idea “macs are better/safer/faster/more stable/easier to use.” They aren’t. Even still, I’ve had people who admit to knowing absolutely nothing about computers tell me about how macs really are better, and that Microsoft has no idea what it’s doing (Windows 7 is a great OS, really it is). What it amounts to is that the whole computer space is one that’s confusing and overcomplicated to most consumers, and Apple is in the middle of the market with attractive devices that work decently well, saying “we’re better” with confidence and the appearance of authority. People are responding to the message, strongly.

I’m kind of surprised actually that this strategy isn’t found in more places. Fake Steve points out that religions have done a great job honing the strategy, but that discussion is outside the scope of this post. How would consumers react if Toyota or Ford simply stated “We’re better. Buy us.”? In fact, the only example at the front of my mind where there’s such a strong chorus preaching that “the new way is better” is with the Web 2.0 space. Yes, there’s a lot of value in collaborating, but not every 2.0 tech is as world-changing as it is confusing. Many an analyst has made quite a living saying “this is the next big deal, you need to learn it and you need my help.” The truth is that for many companies traditional communications (face to face, phone, email) are still functional and and will continue to be; sometimes older technologies will continue to work just fine. In cases where collaboration technology is desired or beneficial, the purchasing decision doesn’t have to be rocket science.

There’s a lot of money to be made off confusion, I just question how sustainable the approach is. Or maybe I’m just being profoundly naive, and this is the way it’s always been.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend who introduced me to the concept of design charrettes (no, it’s not a classy version of Chat Roulette). A design charrette is a way to super-charge the planning phase of the project by collecting a group of cross-functional stakeholders together in a series of workshops to vet different design options. My friend works for a company that helps implement sustainable development projects, in many cases, building projects. In these types of projects, planning is tremendously important because design choices become locked-in and are costly to change. Also, when designing to simultaneously optimize for natural ecosystems, the usability of public spaces, and aesthetics, there is a great deal of complexity, both from a sustainable planning perspective and from a stakeholder perspective. Complex systems result in more long-term unintended consequences (see Complexity and Wikinomics), so a project plan that maximizes feedback and expands options and scenarios earlier in the process is desirable.

Interestingly, the same could be said for many of the platform design projects currently underway in the Enterprise 2.0 space. In many cases, IT teams are designing and implementing collaborative software without the benefit of collaboration. Yet, collaborative business platforms suffer from many of the same challenges as sustainable building projects. They try to optimize for interactions across complex business ecosystems, usability of digital tools, and aesthetics. They also involve multiple stakeholders and risk costly lock-in if poor architectural or design choices are made early in development. I’m convinced design charrettes can enhance the performance of platform projects as well.

Here’s how it works. In a typical project, as time goes on, the ability to make changes that greatly impact resource allocation and design diminishes. At the same time, the cost of implementing changes increases as successive design choices create inflexibility and lock-in. The effort consumed by stakeholders and the allocation of resources typically follows a bell curve, so a large portion of the project unfortunately takes place during a time of diminishing impact and rising costs. Moreover, if you don’t get people involved early you tend to have a long tail of resource expenditure on after-the-fact customizations, modifications, and revisions.

In a design charrettes, the idea is to shift the project curve to the left so that more time and resources are devoted to planning and a significant portion of the decision-making occurs when the impact of changes are high and the cost of implementing changes is relatively low. Ideally, at the end of the project, the need for modifications would much lower since input from relevant stakeholders was baked into the original design. Since I’m a pretty visual learner, creating the graphs helped me understand how beneficial this approach can be.*

One of the arguments against charrettes is that they result in “design-by-committee” outcomes (usually meant as a derogatory statement, invoking images of the Homer car, designed for the “average” American) and design delays brought on by conflicting egos. In fact, we’ve seen some leading examples of where design-by-committee works great, including Local Motors and CrowdSpring. A good, recent post advocating for design charrettes is “A Camel designed by committee is a camel,” by LEED architect Rob Fleming, where he argues that, given the current state of the World, what we need is design-by-committee “camels,” not “race horses” by impresario architects. In terms of managing conflict, independent, third-party moderators and mediators also play an important role in steering collaboration for productive charrettes.

* Kudos to Jeff Ranson for his leadership in the area of design charrettes and his back-of-the napkin graphs that helped inspire this post.

I recently had a “discussion” with a friend of my wife’s who argued, in essence, that data from surveys are invalid unless the data are perfect. By perfect, she appeared to mean that no “statistically valid” survey exists because it cannot represent every potential view or experience of every person in a target population.

Specifically, I was talking about surveys about Gen Ys and the conclusions being drawn, by us and by others, about them – generalizations really, not conclusions, e.g., that Gen Ys are closer to their parents than other generations; more altruistic/less altruistic; more resistant to authority; more interested in finding their own way; and so on. My wife’s friend countered that the survey could not accurately represent some people who probably are not surveyable, e.g., the Gen Y children of illegal migrant workers in Missouri, so no conclusions about Gen Y or even generalizations about them are valid because they are not likely to reflect the views of or apply to this subset of Gen Ys who are likely not going to be reached by a survey.

My understanding of her position is that unless 100% of the people you are targeting with a survey are included, the survey data have no meaning. Okay, I admit to losing it here in that discussion and just withdrawing. There was no argument I could muster against “perfect or nothing.”

I won’t argue that surveys reveal “The Truth” (if that exists), but data from statistically valid and well constructed surveys do reveal a reality that may or may not apply to everyone but that does exist.

I also admit that it was hard for me to argue my position because I am already suspicious of how accurately Gen Y surveys actually reflect the Gen Y population. I tend to rely on anecdote – which has little validity – as a touchstone to what the surveys reveal. I have two Gen Y children so I tend to ask myself whether survey conclusions about Gen Ys work for them. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. My children are more open by far than I was about their lives, but they do not reveal everything, nor do I want them to.

All this is really a lead-in to saying that survey data – about Gen Ys or anything else – at the very least provide something to think about and consider, even if the surveys and the data are always imperfect. To simply declare that we can know nothing unless we talk to everyone is too easy and lets everyone of us off the hook when it comes to digging into the why of everything. That said, I tend to validate survey data by the organization that does the work; like everything else, some are just much better than others at this. We at nGenera will continue to survey because we are curious.

When governments think about using crowdsourcing instruments like the participatory budget model of Freiburg or platforms like Manorlabs one of the biggest concern is: How can we prevent that lobby groups or the opposition uses this tool for their purposes?

First, the extent of this concern is dependent on the environment in which the government operates. In local governments in Europe, like in Austria and Germany, political parties play a major role. In North America, party politics play a less significant role on local level. However, the bigger the city, the more important the issue of partisan politics and the interests of lobby groups become. Well organized, lobby groups and opposition can make mountains out of molehills on a crowdsourcing platform. A government, which refuses to take care about an issue that has gained acceptance on a crowdsourcing platform, is likely to be grilled by the media. The headline: “Government does not listen to ordinary citizens”. Subhead: “Electronic participation served solely PR interests of government”. So my first answer would be: In an environment where a government or the ruling party fears that crowdsourcing could be exploited by the opposition for partisan politics there is one remedy: The activists of your own party should be active on the platform as well. Fight out the competition of ideas on the platform.

However, I think the core issue is the fundamental principle of representative democracy. We elect politicians e.g. every four years, which should represent the will of the citizens. Citizens can hold the politician accountable within the democratic system. Admittedly, this system is not perfect. I believe that democracy is more than casting a ballot once a time. Politicians should harness the wisdom of the crowd to improve government public policy and services. Although we can’t neglect that lobby groups or opposition could use these tools to push their agenda. Politicians also have to think about the interests of those people who do not participate in the crowdsourcing process. The reason for this might be digital divide, less awareness, less interest, or simply lack of time. In other words, politicians have to represent all citizens, not only those who participated on a crowdsourcing platform.

Key issue: participation rate

I had a look at the participation rate of the participatory budget models. In Freiburg, the participation rate was 0.84 % (still higher than having town hall meetings about the budget, the rate was in that case 0.09 %). The City of Solingen used crowdsourcing to get support and understanding for an austerity budget. They used the participatory budget model to collect suggestions from citizens on how to save public money. According to the homepage sohlingen-spart.de („Solingen economizes“), over 3,600 citizens – 2 % of the population -agreed on saving 31 Million Euros. In the Brazilian town Belo Horizonte the participation rate in participatory budget process was at almost 10 %. Admittedly these rates are certainly higher than in any other participatory process. But the lower the percentage of participation, the higher the chance that lobbying groups and interest groups can influence the opinion on the platform. Dustin Haisler, the CIO of Manor, told me that approximately 30 % of the population is using Manorlabs. Although Manorlabs does not include participatory budget, the high participation rate is astonishing.

Naumi and I have the hypothesis that the higher participation rate of citizens, the less the influence of lobby groups. We created following graph:

The assumption is that the influence of the population grows at a much faster rate because they are a much larger percentage of the population.  The “back-of-the-napkin” assumption is that 15 % of the population is somehow affiliated with a lobby group or opposition party and all of them participate. So, once you reach participation rate of about 30 %, the voice of the public evens out the lobbyists.  As overall participation increases, overall bias from lobbyists decreases even more.

If this hypothesis is true, what would that mean for governments? First, think about the environment you are in. Second, mobilize your own activists in case you operate in a harsh environment. Third, make every effort to create a high participation rate. To achieve this, you must develop an incentive model that attracts the engagement of citizens.

I recently had a look at time banking models in the UK. Without covering the different concepts and applications of time baking, here’s the idea in a nutshell: People receive time credits for voluntary and community activities, instead of receiving money or no reward at all. So for hour of activity, one receives one time credit. One principle of time banking is equality, it makes no difference if a doctor or a homeless person performs tasks to earn credits – every activity has the same time credit value. Time credits can then be exchanged for services from other time bank members, for services of community organizations, or leisure activities like free entrance to a theatre show. A local organization organizes and facilitates the exchange. I summarize the idea in a graph:

Market and Social world

A paper by Gill Seyfang summarizes the intent of the UK government that time banks serve: “the need for informal mutual support, volunteering and community self-help, to grow strong communities and build capacity for regeneration among deprived neighborhoods.” But I was still wondering, why time banking works.

A concept from Daniel Ariely’s book “Predictably Irrational” offers some insight. Ariely argues that we live in two worlds simultaneously: The “Market World” where everything is rooted in the exchange of money, goods, competition and cost/benefit analysis; and the next is the “Social World,” where we do favors for other people, volunteer for charity and community organizations. Ariely has a useful example to illustrate what happens when you mix the market world with the social world: A day care center was discontent that parents picked up their children late. They introduced a fine to solve the problem, but instead of reducing the rate of tardy pickups, the rate rose up. Why? By introducing a fine the day care center switched from the “Social World” to the “Market World,” and the parents felt it was ok to pick up their children late because they pay for it.

My experience with Non-Profit Organization has echoed this result: when you start paying volunteers for basic activities, their motivation drops sharply. So, if time credits serve as a currency, do time credits introduce the “Market World” into the volunteering sector? It seems like the contrary is the case, and time banking could serve as an engine for mutual exchange and co-creation of services within the “Social World.”

Goals and Results of time banking

First, time banking recognizes that everyone is equally capable of making valuable contributions to the community. This empowers members of the society who are excluded and feel empowered by sharing their skills, resulting in higher self-confidence and well-being. A study of the University of Wales concludes that time banking lead to increased volunteering and engagement of citizens.

Second, it has a positive effect of “knitting together” community organizations and people. It creates social networks for people and organizations and increases the spectrum of opportunities.

Third, the co-creation of tailored services and help between people and organizations solve problems.

Obstacles and constraints of the model

Seyfang summarizes in her study the obstacles of time banking. People have problems to “getting people to understand the difference between Time Banking and ‘traditional volunteering’ as the coordinator describes it. While members like to give time, they are reluctant to ask for help themselves.” There are not enough spending options, and you need an office and a full time staff to facilitate the time bank. Finally, government regulations, institutions and social policy is sometimes incompatible with the time banking model.

I want to focus on the last point: Time banking may be an instrument to spark interaction within a community that faces social disparity. However it cannot replace social policy like affordable housing. Government needs also to re-think the top down approaches of social policy, which treat citizens like “problem customers.”

To ease the exchanges between people, some cities, like Lower Mainland Vancouver, are using web platforms to facilitate the exchange. Anyhow, I am still skeptical about this idea, but it seems worth observing its development in the future.

The unloved son of recessions is the place. The town or city. When the going stops being tough for national economies places pick up the pieces. So how can places respond to the situation they now find themselves in? Added to their woes is another issue that is part consequence of the road into  Government 2.0. Place as the primary source of job creation might be a thing of the past as the network takes over.

First, where do we stand on recession? There’s still room to debate whether we are in or out of it. Officially the USA is out but with concern about a double dip, with Krugman giving odds of 2:1 against back in January and the mood worsening a little since in some quarters. Friday of this week will be something of a watershed as the EU releases the outcome of its bank stress testing against a backdrop of rising industrial production.

It seems though there is still plenty to fear in the system, hence the stress tests, and this might still be the big issue  ahead of worrying over regeneration – do we still know the full extent of the problem?

The UK Office for National Statistics last week announced that UK public debt is five times its published level at 5, not 1, trillion GBP. Spanish debt levels far exceed those of Greece. Last week it emerged that 400 Spanish local authorities were unable to pay their utility bills with an empty payroll looming in August.

Whether the stress tests look good or bad the markets are already sounding cautionary notes about the tests themselves. All this is a way of saying if you manage a small town or a big city, your work is going to get tougher. You have opportunity in the age of Web 2.0 and Government 2.0 but the chances are your revenues are in decline.

Places currently lack a comprehensive management theory perhaps because they are rooted in traditional urban or rural spatial planning paradigms.

Over recent years places have been buoyed by the development of direct inward investment  as a supplementary way of managing employment creation and by cluster theory (another way of saying specialize your local labor force) or by the idea that the creative class can provide an engine for renewal. Grafted on to these fruitful but dislocated principles is place-branding, and the big gamble – sporting events and creative festivals. Get a big sporting event and like London you can justify spending $10 billion on regeneration programs.

The problem for many cities and towns is that even as they try to adopt these strategies, they are deprived of funding – national policies invariably hit the local in a variety of ways – lost rates on empty properties, people moving out, retailers shuttering.

Web 2.0 and Government 2.0 both create the infrastructure for people to get involved in their places once more, which is an unquestionable good. But I want to raise the question – is place management adequately developed as a managerial discipline?

I saw three initiatives recently that made me think another theme in place identity is springing up – the virtualization of place.

Boston has set up a global Boston alumnus network, Boston World Partnership, casting the net of stakeholders across the world. Places are beginning the search for a new type of identity, embracing the world outside their walls as part of the concept of place. Ireland recently announced a “certificate of Irishness” for the 70 million people of Irish descent who do not qualify for citizenship. Detroit too is exploring the language and benefits of becoming a global city focused on the origins of its residents, using the Web to connect to distant economies where there are established relationships through immigration.

This unhinging of place from its physical roots is not just Web 2.0 or Government 2.0. I think it will lead to a more profound acknowledgment of how interconnected we are and it will lead to an interesting debate around how towns and cities compete with each other, a debate the enterprise has to be interested in because that competition is often the lever for relocation subsidies; and an exploration of how virtual clusters, such as those we see in software ecosystems like the Apps Store, connect to local economic development.

As they explore these areas I sense cities and towns will need more theory, more cases and more guidance for the decisions they make and need to justify. It’s the time for place right now.

Okay, it might. But for every story about people losing their jobs because of tweets (Octavia Nasr’s case got lots of coverage: http://tinyurl.com/ybc6y5s, http://tinyurl.com/38ctb9a), there must be hundreds of stories about how tweeting and blogging add to business, enhance corporate and individual reputations, improve customer relations, and generally produce positive results. In a report we published late last year (Success (and Failure) Factors for Web 2.0), I offered a few ideas for avoiding problems, starting with a very simple one that most people forget: everything you post is, or can easily be made, public and it’s virtually permanent.

So what happens when people make professionally damaging mistakes with social media? It seems they either are very emotional about a topic and simply forget the facts of public and permanent, or they forget that what they write can be interpreted differently than how they meant it. The process of getting what we mean to say – what we think we are thinking – into text or video is complex. Even the very best writers and speakers can forget to imagine how what they are writing or saying may sound to an audience that does not share the same context with them. In a time when there are more public words in audio, video, and text than at any time in history, and so many attentive readers, it becomes harder and harder not to make mistakes. And when made, mistakes grow the more they are chewed on.

What fascinates me is that pundits and talk-show folks and now even politicians who simply state their biases and bitterness and anger openly seem to get away with it while often well-intentioned people who misspeak or just screw up their writing or speaking are driven from their jobs and vilified with language and criticism that used to be addressed to the most vicious of criminals – people who meant to do harm.

The warning about the minefield of social media still stands but perhaps we should start accepting that mistakes will be made and that every mistake may not be a fatal character flaw. After all, that may be you – or me – who is thrown onto the Mel Gibson pile at any moment.

A world without the web is getting unimaginable. It is our access to the world. Already, we hate to be unplugged, like when we’re commuting on public transport–time we could use to read the news, update our twitter status and check the e-mails. While many people have mobile data on their cell phones, it’s often slow, so why not make busses internet hotspots? In addition to simply being useful, doing so would make public transportation more attractive. In a move to make wireless access ubiquitous, some cities in Ohio have done just this, and are making wireless available en-route on city busses.

The list of best-practice examples is long. It’s a good thing that some public transport providers react to that need. But my point is: we live in the year 2010, free accessible WiFi on public transportation and on public squares should be an expected standard. It is the job of local governments in cooperation with the transport authorities to ensure that.

In my home city of Linz in Austria—population of approximately 180,000—the local government is convinced that it is their responsibility to invest in public infrastructure that advances the free access to WiFi. The city provides the citizens with free WiFi on 120 hotspots in the public sphere. Recently, city councilor Christian Forsterleitner put forward a motion that the public transport authority of Linz should provide free accessible WiFi on the streetcars and in the most frequently used bus shelters. The public transport authority reacted positively.

This progressive move stands in stark contrast to what Toronto—my current city of residence—is doing: Toronto is getting new Street Cars from Bombardier in 2012. Linz has similar light rail and low floor streetcars since 2001. I think the TTC in Toronto should consider providing free WiFi for the new streetcars. A world metropolis must be able to offer the same service as a small city in Austria.

There was something of a “big deal” event in geek circles last week: StarCraft 2 was released, about 12 years after the release of the original. It’s a “real time strategy” game, which pits factions of aliens against each other in what is essentially a military situation where the goal is to crush your opponents. In gaming terms, it’s a AAA (top of the line, very high production values) title, but it had to be: the original StarCraft grew to be far more popular than anyone ever could have imagined, even becoming some sort of combination of chess and football in Korea, where being an all-star meant you were on the Wheaties box, and had your matches broadcasted on the video-game equivalent of ESPN–while playing in front of a live audience. It took the developers of the original StarCraft many years and iterations to finely balance the different gameplay dynamics, but once they did so, it set very high expectations for the sequel. So, how do you release a game after a 12 year wait to people with sky-high expectations, and deliver on all the hype? Start by giving your product away for free.

Sort of: once StarCraft 2 reached a stage where it was reasonably polished and playable, Blizzard-Activision moved it into a public beta, where anyone could download the multiplayer component of the game for free and play to their heart’s content. Based on usage and feedback, the strengths and abilities of various game pieces were tweaked and refined, and the beta saw continuous, iterative improvements. The beta wrapped up about a month before the official July 27th release of the game, but when the final product shipped, it did so having been vetted by countless thousands of players–players who not only had a chance to make the game better, but had a chance to get addicted to it and line up to buy a copy of the finished product. The game is great and would still have been great had Blizzard-Activision not had their open beta, but the extra time to polish the product made it that much better, and saved them post-release efforts in squashing bugs and tweaking dynamics.

In another smart gaming industry play, one that coincides with StarCraft 2 both in terms of timing and theme, Valve Software also recently released a “marines in space” style game, Alien Swarm–except that in Valve’s case, the game was released for free; not even as a beta, just as a free product. The closest thing to a catch with this is that in order to play Alien Swarm, players need to install Steam, Valve’s content delivery/social network/game storefront platform. Any player who installs Alien Swarm to play with their friends via Steam will see all of the games that their friends have, be updated when and where their friends are playing, and have a very easy to use purchase/upgrade path should they want to buy any games through the platform. By bringing gamers to a platform where purchasing, playing, and socializing take place, Valve has made a very clean and unified user experience, one that seems to resonate strongly and positively with users.

Video games, like movies and music, are readily susceptible to piracy. In a future post I’m going to explore how parts of the gaming industry have opted for a much different solution than the ones explored by movie studios and record labels (litigation): making “going legit” easier and superior to piracy. I’m convinced that across the board, businesses of any type can learn a lot from what innovating gaming firms are doing.

In “The Pants That Stalked Me on the Web,” Michael Learmonth, digital lead at Ad Age, writes that he found the recommendations for some shorts that he got while shopping (but not buying) at Zappos popped up at other sites he visited, such as CNN, MSNBC, Salon, and The Guardian. Because he’s an advertising professional who covers online advertising, he knows why this is happening. In this case, it’s because Criteo is being paid by Zappos/Amazon to “re-target” him. Criteo’s business is to “re-engage with lost prospects via personalized banners across the Internet.” At the stops he made, the Zappos recommendations for shorts (under the Zappos banner) showed up and scrolled through. “At this point,” Leadmonth says, “I’ve started to actually think I never really have to go back to Zappos to buy the shorts — no need, they’re following me.”

Learmonth wonders how this online stalking may affect the Zappos brand, which has great customer loyalty. He never loaded anything into a cart, but was just browsing, yet the recommendations followed up. He warns: “If the industry is truly worried about a federally mandated ‘do not track‘ list akin to ‘do not call’ for the internet, they’re not really showing it. As ads become more persistent and more customized, consumers are going to demand one place to opt out of everything, and not to have to check boxes at Criteo, Yahoo, Google, Blue Kai or whoever else is targeting them that day.”

Coincidentally, within this past week, Wall Street Journal writers Julia Angwin and Tom Mc Ginty began a series about the increased “spying on consumers” that’s happening on the internet. Example: the chief marketing officer at Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company, claims that via its software, which captures what people type on websites such as comments on movies or interest in parenting, it can “segment it all the way down to one person.” Lotame packages the data it collects into anonymous profiles of individuals and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers.

Angwin and Mc Ginty say online tracking files placed on individuals’ computers “represent the leading edge of a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers who are in effect establishing a new business model for the Internet: one based on intensive surveillance of people to sell data about, and predictions of, their interests and activities, in real time.” They acknowledge that the Journal site itself installs some 60 tracking files. “Some tracking files can record a person’s keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.”

Tracking is almost universally declared in privacy policies, but tracking companies can develop profiles on individuals that are nearly “anonymous in name only”: personal profiles can include “age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.”

Angwin and Mc Ginty may not exactly be breaking new ground in the series, at least about the spying in general, and I’m sure some people are happy to get personalized ads and recommendations as they move across the internet, but, to me, they do raise an important issue: the amount of data about individuals that’s necessary to provide this “service” is growing. Let’s face it, the vast majority of people do not know much about this process or seem to care about it – yet.

My question is: Is it necessary to spy on customers to help them? Why can’t the spying companies or, better, the sites they serve disclose up front what’s going on and offer it as a service rather than do it essentially surreptitiously (hyperbole warning: find me 5 people who read or even have read, word for word, any privacy policy on any web site ever)? I think there are plenty of people who would still opt in, albeit selectively, to help them make decisions or perhaps be directed to sites that can provide information, product ratings, etc. They might even volunteer more information if they thought it would produce more accurate recommendations, etc. I have a CVS loyalty card, which I volunteered for, which tracks my purchases there and provide discounts on things I regularly buy and also accumulates discount bucks. I know what CVS knows about me, but I choose to participate. If I found they sold my data to some other companies, I might change my mind.

To paraphrase something attributed to Abraham Lincoln, you can sneak up on some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Companies that would like to spy on all of the people all of the time in the name of commerce would be wise to beware of what they are wishing for: no one likes to feel duped, even if you can offer them shorts for $5 less.

In my first blog post, I wrote about different examples of Government 2.0. I also mentioned Manorlabs, the City of Manor’s idea generation and innovation platform. Manorlabs uses game mechanics to keep the people engaged. The CIO of the City of Manor, Dustin Haisler, told me in an interview: “Innovation can actually be fun and citizens can actually have fun helping the government do progressive things.” This statement brings to light two key questions that every community must address:

1. How do we get the attention from the people for our platform? The noise on the information highway is loud and it makes signal difficult to hear. As Clay Shirky analyses, the 80/20 Rule is also applicable to the web: roughly speaking, 20 % of all blogs account for 80 % of all the traffic. The web is a system where people have the free choice to read anything they want. To find the information that is useful for them, they look what are the preferences of people they trust – friends, family, colleagues or other important persons.
2. How do we get the users continuously engaged?

The answer for the first question is a combination of a deliberate social media strategy and advertising. For answering the second one I feel that more and more platforms use game mechanics to tackle the problem. There are numerous examples who use badges, reputation points or prediction markets: Manorlabs, Microsoft’s Townhall, Vencorps, the location based service Foursquare and many more.

Empire Avenue

I recently stumbled onto another site that uses game mechanics: Empire Avenue (EA). This site determines the social influence of a person in a web. The EA nuance is a virtual stock exchange market. People can buy and sell share of users, earn badges and dividends from their virtual investments. The price of your shares is mostly determined by your activity on twitter, facebook, flickr and blogs. Therefore you have to connect your social media accounts with EA. The higher the social media activity, the higher the prices of your shares will rise.

I tried the site out and it sparked my interest. My share price is now 12.864 eaves (the name of the virtual money), which indicates according to the EA blog, that I am an average social media user. Adriel Hampton, who dedicated a blog to game mechanics writes, that people use the site for “networking, for fun, to make money or a combination of those.” This statement makes sense and I will use Malone’s Genome Model to qualify it.

First, it is fun. I love the being active on the site. I am curious if my share prices rise. Which leads to the next motivation: Glory. I want to achieve a high share price, to gain the reputation as an “exceptional social media user.” And of course, money is a motivation. On the one hand, users can earn virtual money and buy upgrades. On the other hand, users and businesses can monetize their network (for example by better targeted advertising or connecting to key influencers).

Should EA gain a critical mass of users (If Obama joins EA they probably have a breakthrough), it will add another feature to the advertising market. Businesses and persons can “buy and sell advertisements with the cost of those advertisements likely based on a players influence.” As we look for the preferences of other people to determine our buying decisions, this seems like a powerful tool.

As I scan articles about the impact of social media on marketing, I commonly come some variant of the statement “the customer is now in control.” But the more I research and think about this statement, the less I believe it – and the underlying message being sent to marketers – is. So today I thought I’d explain why.

My first issue is with the word now. From my perspective, the customer has always been in control – the fate of companies providing products and services in a capitalist economy is ultimately determined by what customers choose to buy. In turn, the analysis shifts towards social media somehow giving customers slightly more control than they had before – a small, but important, distinction.

The typical argument is that as customers have connected with each other through platforms like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, the opinions they share amongst themselves have increased in importance, while the typical “broadcast marketing” approaches have decreased in effectiveness. While I do believe there is some truth to this, there is another way to look at what’s happening.

For starters, if customers only wanted to hear each other’s opinions, they could do so without engaging companies at all – either in somewhat self-organizing fashion through Facebook and Twitter, or “neutral” services like Yelp. But many, many customers are also opting to directly connect with companies – liking, following, lurking in communities, etc. – through these very same platforms. In doing so, many are effectively asking companies to engage with them.

Second, being “in control” takes time and effort. I would argue that many customers may want to “take control” in relation to certain product and service decisions, for many others they are happy to be passive recipients of messages (and offers) from their preferred brands. For example, the #2 reason given for becoming a Facebook fan (based on a survey earlier this year) was to receive coupons. And while I don’t have time to go into it here, one of the consistent findings from my research is that customers like being “broadcast” to on social media more than many people think.

On a related point, I believe that many customers are being overwhelmed by all the brand-related conversations taking place. For example, many brands on Twitter now commonly send 30+ messages a day, responding to specific people. Many consider this to be engaging. But if you follow (say) 30 such brands, that’s over 900 messages a day – most of which will be of absolutely no interest to you. Perhaps the method will persist for many more years, but perhaps not.

Finally (at least for today), as “word of mouth” marketing has moved online, and more and more data is generated, it’s becoming ever easier for brands to monitor exactly what people are saying, thinking and feeling about various things. I personally believe that all this information points towards a world where many brands can be far more “in control” than they’ve ever been before.

Tying it all together, I’ve taken to asking what someone like Don Draper – the lead character on Mad Men – would think about the rise of social media if he was ported into 2010. Would he look at all the new tools and behaviors and say “wow, I can’t control anything here!” Or would he say “wow, I can influence, monitor and control things more than ever before!”

My sense is that it would be the latter – and many companies would be well served by taking a similar line of thinking. After all, to be in control implies having power; it is commonly said that knowledge is power; and all this information is giving companies more knowledge than ever before.

Given the proliferation of digital information about ourselves and our online interactions (and the prospect of more to follow), I find it fascinating when companies put out tools that help reflect our digital personas and social graphs so that we may better understand them. I’ve written on Wikinomics before about SONAR from Trampoline Systems and MIT Personas. Recently I came across Digital Mirror from Cataphora—a company I’ve been following for some time and wrote a case study about last year. Cataphora began as a digital sleuthing company that did e-discovery in a legal, governance, risk management, and compliance context to reduce liability. In many cases, they would discover information from subpoenaed databases for trial purposes. They were digital spies.

Now, Cataphora is in the business of modeling “informal networks” within the enterprise for HR and operational efficiencies, as well as to monitor compliance with internal policies and external regulations. By analyzing the relationship between e-mail data, documents that are shared, calendar information, call logs, and people, Cataphora can assess employee productivity, uncover shadow networks, and map collaborative behavior. Digital Mirror offers some of these capabilities to the public for free by analyzing your archived data from Microsoft Outlook.

I ran Digital Mirror on my own Outlook data and came up with some pretty interesting results. A caveat I would add is that you need to have a lot of archived data for this to work well—several outputs such as “Blow-Off Scorecard,” “Buck-Passing,” “Temperature Gauge,” and “Loud Talking” didn’t work for me due to lack of sufficient data. Some of the other interesting outputs that did work are shown below:

Who have you spent quality time with?

Who have you talked with, about what, and when?

Who has been stressed out, and about what?

The goal of Digital Mirror in its current incarnation is to illuminate relationships, topics of interest, tensions, and hidden processes in the workplace. I think over time, digital reflections and analytics such as these will become increasingly important and, in many cases, baked into our both our personal computing as well as corporate processes.

As more data (beyond simply data from Outlook) is incorporated, I can imagine much richer, higher-definition mirrors. Aspects of our rich digital selves that are open for analysis include things like education; employment, and resumes; health records and government documents; search history; profiles on social networks; comments and posts on forums and blogs; and location information from cell phone signals and GPS-enabled devices. They could include aspects that we actively update like registrations for groups, associations, and publications, or aspects that we are not aware of like un-tagged photos of us on other people’s Facebook or Flickr profiles and images from closed-loop IP-enabled surveillance cameras.

Today most of this information is disassociated, residing in many different databases and in many different organizations. More often than not, the information is not under the control of the individual. In the future, we can envision a composite digital picture of the individual that will augment and accompany each human from cradle to grave. As the world becomes more instrumented, multiple machines—some under our control and others not—will be slicing our data and making observations about our activities billions of times each minute, in parallel.

Beyond optimizing processes and sparking what is likely to be heated debate about privacy and data ownership, digital reflections will also help people understand how they are perceived by others. With this knowledge in hand, we can go forth in the online (and offline) world making conscious decisions about how we want to represent ourselves in different contexts. Most people don’t step out into the real world in the morning without—at least briefly—consulting a mirror. Why should the online world be any different?

For this post I will do no more than point you RSA Animate’s remarkable adaptation of Daniel Pink’s presentation to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) on motivation.

I was taken by this video for a couple of reasons:

1. For what it says about the science behind motivation – both for routine, repetitive types of work, and for more cognitive types of work.
2. For the animation technique and how it enriches the (beautifully) spoken messages.

Learn, be enlightened and enjoy!

Graphic courtesy of SDisbury.com

Time for a small gripe.  I’m a huge Apple fan!  But unfortunately, it’s not all good news!  (Duh!)  My wife bought a 20 inch iMac in late 2006.  I bought the new iMac 27 inch earlier this year, and love it!  I just added a MacBook Pro to my arsenal.  And, of course, there’s the series of iPod’s I’ve bought over the years – with my current workhorse being a 5th generation iPod Nano.  I love the products, I love the Apple Stores.  I love Apple’s website.  I’ve taken advantage of their Personal Shopping (to review the options before I purchased my iMac 27 inch), their Genius Bar (more on that in a moment) and their web store.

Wonderful, but Imperfect?

My wife’s iMac started playing up a few months back.  Symptoms were thin purple lines appearing on the screen as if rows of pixels were dropping out.  Sometimes, the screen distorted, as if the image was melting or being torn.  The more serious problem was the machine crashing!  This was quite distressing as the occasional MS Windows “blue screen of death” was one of the (many) reasons I’d moved my wife to the Mac, then me to that platform.  The crashing took the form of the little spinning color wheel icon appearing and staying on – forever!  The only way out was to hold in the power button, forcing the machine to quit.  The good news here is that a reboot on a Mac is dramatically faster than on Windows.  (My Windows point of reference is Windows XP.)  The crashing was especially frequent when I was using her machine to do processor intensive things such as video editing.  (Fortunately, I now do that on my 27 inch iMac – which has – touch wood – been totally fault free!)

So, How Smart Are the Geniuses at the Genius Bar?

First, the good news.  The whole process of making an appointment – whether with the Genius Bar, Personal Shopping Assistant, or One-on-One is excellent!  In fact, I still find everything about the Apple Retail Store experience to be mostly superb!  Anyway, I took the iMac along to the store and met with our Genius at the appointed time.  He did a quick check, and concluded they would need to take the machine out back and run some diagnostics.  I filled in some paperwork, and left the store.   A couple of hours later, he called and said they could not replicate either of the problems I’d described and the diagnostics revealed no problems.  He suggested they reinstall the Mac OS (I was on the latest release) and that I could recover all my files and applications using the Time Machine back up.

I was fine with this – I’ve been using an external hard disk with Time Machine since it became available.  My only concern was that when I tested Time Machine recovery before I took the machine to the Apple Store, the Mac crashed!  So I had never proven I could recover.  I did, however, make a copy of my wife’s critical digital assets – mainly a 7,000 photo iPhoto library, a nearly 2,000 song iTunes library, and our Quicken data.  So, I figured we were relatively safe.

I picked up the machine later the same day – no charge to me, which was great.  I got the machine home, turned it on and immediately had the lines of purple pixels, and within minutes, the dreaded spinning color wheel icon.  I soldiered on and tried Time Machine to restore my wife’s applications and data, and – miracle of miracles – that worked superbly!

The Wonders of the Web

Some days later, frustrated that my trip to the genius bar had not resolved anything, I did some online research – yes, I know.  I should have done that in the first place!  I quickly found several Mac forums that indicated that both my symptoms with this iMac were very common on the older machines.  So, Apple disappointment numbers 1 and 2!  There clearly was a real issue with these machines:

1. Why didn’t the ‘Genius’ know that, or have access to a knowledge base (e.g., the Mac forums I quickly found)?

2. Why doesn’t Apple acknowledge these well known problems and provide fixes beyond the warranty period? (I’m assuming that if I’d hit these problems during the initial warranty, or if I’d taken the extended warranty, it would have been fixed at no additional cost to me.)

On more scanning through the Mac forums, I came across a potential fix for the problems I was experiencing. This involved resetting the parameter random access memory (PRAM) and nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM), with a link to instructions for this on the Support section at Apple’s website .  This was trivially simple to do – essentially shutting down the computer and restarting it while holding down 4 keys – Command, Option, P and R.  (Actually, pressing these keys together requires some dexterity!)  Anyway, this simple fix seems to have totally eliminated the two problems we were experiencing on my wife’s iMac!

So, Apple disappointment numbers 3 and 4!

3. Why didn’t the ‘Genius’ try this at the store?  (I assume he didn’t as the computer came back with exactly the same problems it had when I took it in!)

4. Why didn’t Apple suggest I try this when I made my Genius appointment, given that I explained why I needed the appointment in the first place!

Again, I’m still a big Apple fan.  Perhaps, one lesson from this is that when you create an exceptional customer experience, expectations rise, and your customers want every interaction with them and your products to be exceptional.  Regrettably, they are not.  I guess the good news is, there’s still room for Apple to become even better at what it does!

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Tags:

• customer experience
• Apple (AAPL)
• Apple Retail Store
• Apple Stores
• Genius Bar
• IMac
• Macintosh
• Windows XP
• Vaughan Merlyn

First off, let me make myself clear.  I firmly believe that Cloud Computing, in its various forms, is real, absolutely inevitable and will completely revolutionize the form and role of the IT Organization.  Some readers will look at that sentence and laugh – it’s like saying “day will pass into night.”  Obvious, beyond dispute, devoid of insight.  Others will also laugh at my opening proclamation – only in their case, because my assertion is completely ridiculous to them – beyond belief.  Of course, to many businesses, especially smaller and medium sized, Cloud Computing is already real, and has been for some time.  So, feel free to debate me (comments and opposing views highly welcome!) but I will stick with my beliefs on this.

For IT Leaders, the Cloud Changes Everything!

For me, the big question is, what does the migration to Cloud Computing mean for today’s IT organization?  What structural changes are necessary to successfully leverage Cloud Computing capabilities?  How quickly should you be moving IT services to the Cloud?  How does the Cloud impact the IT Service Portfolio and the capabilities needed to deliver those services?  What are the implications for IT competencies?  How does business-IT governance change in a Cloud Computing world?

I think these are important questions whose answers are not yet totally clear.  As I reflect back on the shift from mainframe to client-server computing, many IT organizations were less than stellar at anticipating needed changes.  As a result, they experienced more bumps and potholes in that journey than was necessary.  For example, for all that had been learned about back-up and recovery in a mainframe world, the onset of client-server computing created gaping holes in the IT organization’s ability to cope with data protection and loss at the Personal Computer level.  The same was true for the evolution from client-server to the web – many of the controls put in place for client-server computing were ineffective (and some even counter-productive) as more work moved to the Internet.

Which Aspects of Cloud Computing Could Bite Your IT Organization?

In the next few posts I will explore some of IT organizational implications of Cloud Computing.  Aspects we will examine will include:

• Mobility implications – both for the business user and the IT professional charged with enabling that user.
• The distinctions between Infrastructure as a Service, Applications as a Service, Platform as a Service, Development as a Service and Business Process Services and how these impact IT organizations.
• The distinctions between Public, Private and Community Clouds and their implications for IT.
• Accounting implications, including funding and budgeting.
• Implications for Business-IT Governance.
• Security and Privacy.
• Implications for the work teams and flow of work involved in requirements analysis to solutioning.
• Impact on Enterprise Architecture.
• Implications for IT Services and Service Management.

Please weigh in – let us know your experiences, issues and concerns about the shift to the Cloud.  Do you agree with my assessment that this shift is inevitable?  How fast do you see it happening?  What does it mean for you personally, and for your career?

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Among my most popular topics, week after week, is Portfolio Management.  It’s a key discipline, especially crucial in driving Business-IT Maturity past the tricky mid-point where many IT organizations tend to get stuck.

IT Business Edge has just published a short slideshow on “Four Common Mistakes in IT Portfolio Management“, re-purposing a post of mine from January 2008.  I think they did a great job simplifying and bringing to life some of the key points in the original post.  Enjoy!

Early in this blog’s life, I posted quite a bit on ‘sticking points‘ that IT organizations find about mid-way through the journey to high Business-IT Maturity.  Process discipline can be one of the quintessential such sticking points.  Process management can get you out of the mess of Low business-IT maturity to a mid-level, but simply cranking up the degree of rigor and discipline will prevent you from getting to high maturity.

Three Ways to Abuse Process Discipline

1. Forgetting that the heart and soul of process thinking is Process Improvement.
2. Process becomes a substitute for thinking, rather than an aid to it.
3. Not everything lends itself to detailed work processes.

Let’s examine these.

Come Back Deming – All Is Forgiven!

When the likes of Deming and Juran began spreading the gospel of Process Thinking, they weren’t talking about creating a process and freezing it in concrete!  The ‘Deming Cycle‘ – Plan, Do, Check, Out – was all about continuous (and sometimes, discontinuous, as in process re-engineering) process improvement.  And yet many IT organizations somehow leave this aspect behind as they institutionalize worksteps, activities, deliverables and milestones.  People are encouraged (forced”) to follow the project management methodology or systems development life cycle, and punished for violations.  For a while, things improve – some process is generally better than no process!

But then people begin to realize that the process seems to get in the way – inhibits agility.  Intelligent choices are held victim to the process, and bureaucracy reigns.  To get past this sticking point, people need to understand, believe in and be passionate about process improvement.  Be it incremental, stepwise improvement or breakthrough re-engineering, the missing ingredient of continuous improvement is essential to getting the intelligence back into the work and non-value-adding activities out of the work – especially if these inhibit speed, agility or quality.  The trick is to throw out the ‘bathwater’ of blind rigor without throwing out the ‘baby’ of process management discipline.

Three Ways to ‘Standardize’ for Repeatability and Predictability

Many years ago, my esteemed colleague Roy Youngman was co-authoring a book with me (Development Effectiveness: Strategies for IS Organizational Transition) and pointed me to this great work by Henry Mintzberg.  If a goal is to make work consistent, repeatable, predictable and of high quality, there are three ‘degrees of freedom‘ that can be tackled – the tasks, the deliverables, or the people.  The degree to which you ‘standardize’ within this mix is a function of the nature and complexity of the work you are trying to achieve.

For highly complex work (think brain surgery) the emphasis is on the people, which is why surgeons go through years of training, board certification, residencies, and so forth.  It’s no use handing them a detailed process to follow and expecting an untrained person to achieve a quality result.

For work such as bridge building, the emphasis will be on the deliverables – various types of blueprint, work breakdown structures and so on.

For routine, sequential work, the emphasis will be on defining the tasks to be followed and the sequence in which to follow them.  Ideally, the work can be so ‘routinized’ that it can be automated.  (Think data center operations and the shift over the years to ‘lights out’ data centers.)

The graphic below tries to capture this concept.  Detailed processes are great at helping manage work that is routine and sequential in nature (which is one of the reasons why ITIL has gained so much traction in the last few years.)  For work that is inherently collaborative, and may require more visual enablement, standardizing on deliverables may be more apparent (think discovery and solution delivery).  For work that is more complex and exploratory, think training and performance support.

Some Process Management Questions To Ponder

• Are your IT processes holding you back – or setting you free?
• Are they an aid to thinking, or a substitute for it?
• Is it time to move past the blind discipline of mindless processes to a more context-sensitive and effective approach?
• How often to your processes improve, and where is the impetus and insight for those improvements coming from?
• How are process improvements recognized and rewarded?
• Is it clear who owns ‘improvement’ for any given process?
• Is it clear who owns the ‘services’ that are delivered by given processes?

Answers on a postcard, please!