Practical transformation: start by making things a bit less rubbish

Stephen Gill – Medium

Making things a bit less rubbish may sound a pale and uninspiring ambition. Set against the grand rhetoric of strategic change, it is certainly unassuming. But this post shouldn’t be overlooked because of its asserted modesty, for at least two important reasons.

The first is that making things a bit less rubbish is no small thing. Continuous attention to making things a bit less rubbish starts to make them a lot less rubbish and ultimately perhaps not rubbish at all. The second is that this is a wonderfully clear account of why mapping services from the perspective of users, rather than providers, is so powerful and so important. The ambition has been there for a long time, but the reality of actually doing it has lagged years behind, so it’s good to see real progress being made.

A few years ago, it looked as though joined up information might be as far as we would get: joined up information wouldn’t and couldn’t deliver a joined up government. With hindsight, that looks a little pessimistic in terms of the possibility of delivering better and more joined up services. But the thirty parts of government described in the post as being relevant to exports are all still there, and the question of how far service design can reality transcend those boundaries is still a very real one.

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