Public sector skunkworks

Last week I had a meeting with a council chief officer to discuss innovation within his authority. He characterised the council as having a 1980's culture, being very risk adverse, with a hierarchical structure and a command and control approach to management. He repeatedly used football analogies to make his point. In the innovation league, this council was mid-table.

How does an organisation such as this set about becoming more innovative?

Another chief officer in the same council suggested an approach that she has now twice tried in two different councils. This is to set up an innovation incubator, a sort of research and development unit for public sector innovation. This incubator would operate in a different way to the rest of the council. It would be more entreprenural. It would have its own culture, distinct procedures and be empowered to experiment with new technologies to the council.

This is the skunkworks approach. The term was coined at Lockhead, the US aircraft manufacturer. In the 1940s, the main factory at Lockhead was assembling bombers for the British forces. They were approached by the US military to develop and build a jet fighter capable of combatting the perceived growing threat from Germany. A small team was put together, working in secret, separate from the main organisation, with the authority to take risks and make some decisions without referring to the line of command.

According to Wikipedia, skunkworks is "widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects".

The public sector skunkworks was an interesting organisational innovation to observe. In its three-year life it gained a number of national accolades for its technological innovations. But its distinct culture and private-sector approach caused many tensions within the council which eventually led to its demise. The Lockhead skunkworks has survived for many decades. Why did this public sector version fail so quickly?

No-one will be watching us, why don't we do it in the road

"We live in a surveillance society." states the Government's Information Commissioner.  He believes there has been a worrying rise in what he calls "dataveilance", by means of CCTV, credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card.

One "best practice" example of the surveillance society was recently identified by the Guardian newspaper.  It reported that operators in Westminister council's underground CCTV control room are able to watch any London street. The article continues:

"Using the latest remote technology, the cameras rotate 360 degrees, 365 days a year, providing a hi-tech version of what the 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived as the "Panopticon" - a space where people can be constantly monitored but never know when they are being watched."

Leeds-based sociologist  Zygmunt Bauman, in his book Liquid Modernity, suggests that the panopticon arrangement requires both the watched and the watchers to be tied to a physical space.  In Westminster case, the watched are on the streets of London and the watchers are housed in close proximity beneath the streets.  Bauman proposes that we are now entering a post-panopticon stage in history.  The watcher is " no longer bound, not even slowed down, by the resistance of space." 

Google has contributed to this post-panopticon future.   Through the medium of its new Street View product, we can all peek into other people's streets, initially in major UK cities.  For instance, it is possible for anyone using a computer or web-enabled mobile phone to obtain 360 degree views of some 22,000 miles of streets.  The mapping of Leeds Metropolitan University's Headingley campus, for example, took place in the summer as the graduation tent was being erected.  

Street View has proved controversial.  People caught on camera have complained.  Others, such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair are reported to have demanded that their property should be blanked out and hidden from view.  The post-panopticon camera it seems knows of no digital divide, it watches both  the citizen and the elite who would have previously inhabited the control-tower, overseeing the activity of the watched.

Footnote

In October 1968, on the White Album, the Beatles could tempt my generation to "do it in the road," because no-one would be watching.  If they were here today, in our liquid modernity, surrounded by dataveillance, this song would probably not have been written

I'm on the pavement thinking about the government

Once again today there is another story about the failure of public sector innovation.  This time it is the national offender management information system which was set up to provide 'end-to-end offender management'.  This aimed to share information between prisons and the probation service, replacing separate stand-alone systems.  At its inception in 2004, the estimated lifetime cost of the system was estimated to be £234M.  By 2008 the expected total cost had more than doubled.

The National Audit Office review, published today, highlights the following failures in this project

1.  Senior service management did not monitor the project sufficiently.

2.  There was no clear governance structure in place.  Roles and responsibilities were blurred.

3.  Poor programme management - the lack of an overall project plan;  poor change control and inadequate financial control

4. The need to perceive major projects as IT-enabled business change rather than technical IT projects.  The 42 probation services all had individual ways of working.  Trying to accommodate these led to requirements drift.  Processes should have been standardised and simplified.

5.  Poor supplier management.  This is an outsourced development, but it was not tendered for.  The development progressed on a time and materials basis, racking up the costs as requirements grew.  

a working class hero is something to be

Who would you say is the most new-media savvy politician in the UK?  My money is on John Prescott (JP) the former deputy leader of New Labour, who retired from the House of Commons in 2007.  He may no longer occupy a  central place in the physical political sphere, but he is leading the way in showing others how to maintain an involvement and influence in the virtual political space.

He is an active contributor to Facebook, claiming 1800 friends on the site, and is using it as a campaigning device.  It is here that he is petitioning against the bonuses being paid out to senior employees by the Royal Bank of Scotland.  He is also a founder member of the campaign to get New Labout re-elected for the forth time and has a Facebook group supporting this.  

But it was on Friday last week that I was most impressed by his use of new media.  His quick reaction to a breaking story gave him national coverage in the traditional media.  An environmental campaigner had thrown green coloured custard at Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, as he set off for a low-carbon conference in London.   This was reported on the Today programme on BBC Radio Four on Friday morning and it featured a comment about this incident from JP.  The programme had not contacted him.  He had posted this on YouTube and their editors had picked it up. 

Perhaps they are among the 1300 people who follow him on Twitter.  He announced at 5.11 AM (just about the time the Today editors were finalising the stories for the programme?):

"I've just posted a vlog on Peter and today's attack - they should arrest her"

So there we have it.  He might be retired and drawing a pension.  But by actively using Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, he is able to retain an influence in politics.  An influence noticed by the Today programme and the much-sought-after younger voters.

If you think another UK politician is a worthy contender for the tile of most new-media savvy politician, I would like to hear from you.

Note
The  image is courtesy of  Steve Punter on Flickr at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/spunter/639740500/sizes/m/

Spotify - You don't know what you've got til it's gone

I only registered with Spotify on Monday.  Since then I've become hooked.  Records that have been boxed under the stairs for a couple of decades are being played again courtesy of this virtual jukebox. How could I live without the Faces' A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse or Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the canyon?

Then today it was reported this record streaming site had been hacked, with personal data of thousands of its users being stolen.

A Spotify spokesman explained the extent of the data taken.

"Along with passwords, registration information such as your email address, birth date, gender, postal code and billing receipt details were potentially exposed," Spotify said. "Credit card numbers are not stored by us and were not at risk."

According to John Lister:

"The attack affects the estimated 10,000 accounts which were created on or before December 19 last year. Spotify found and fixed a security bug on that date, but has only just discovered people were able to exploit it."

This story highlights the importance of website users being aware of the potential for hacking of their data and the need for them to avoid using the same password on every site they use.  However, we should also expect companies, and particularly those that only operate online, to make appropriate information security arrangements.

According to the latest UK Government Information Security Breaches Survey (2008), companies still have a way to go in taking information security seriously. For instance, 52% do not undertake formal security risk assessments; 48% of disaster recovery plans are not regularly tested and 21% of companies spend less that 1% of their IT budget on information security.

Of course, users should be careful in their selection of usernames and passwords, but we should be able to expect better than this from digital media companies.

A few years ago now, the UK bank Smile was able to boast that it was "the first UK online bank to be accredited with the ISO27001 Information Security certification. That means we have an extremely secure Internet Banking service."  

It is about time that all online businesses woke up to the importance of information security and put in place the safeguards required to gain ISO27001 accreditation.

Spotify - the business model for recorded music?

Once upon a time, computer software companies developed software packages (such as Microsoft Word) and made their money be selling copies of their software to users to run on their own computers.  Then along came companies like Google who changed the underlying business model.  As we are all aware, Google doesn't charge for use of its products.  And users don't download them to their personal machines.  The applications (such as the Google search engine and Google docs) are run on Google servers.  Google's income comes from the selling of advertising space to organisations.  In 2008 quarter 4, it reported income of approximately $6 billion, up 18% on the previous year.

The music industry has been in need of a new business model for some time.  The British Phonograph Industry (BPI) and the major record labels have suffered loss of income in recent years as many music consumers have used peer-to-peer networks to obtain copies of songs rather than purchase them from record shops. The BPI estimates the industry has lost £1 billion of income in the past three years.  The online record stores, such as i-tunes, have had some success but these are still based upon the 'outdated' business model.

Now we are starting to see in the music industry a similar development to that which occurred in the software industry several years ago.  Sites such as LastFM and Spotify are streaming music for free and making money from onsite advertising.  A proportion of Spotify's income is distributed to the music companies.  It is currently experiencing a dramatic growth.  In just six months since it launched, Spotify now has more than one million users.

Will this new model work?  Will it provide sufficient income for the music providers and will it tempt customers to convert from illegal downloading to streaming instead?

The SCAMPER creativity technique

At i-camp, the problem we will be trying to solve is:

How might I commercialise our final year project?  

You will be looking at your projects from the enterprise perspective.  There are a wide range of projects in the final year group: games, animations, compositions, computer systems, strategies, etc.  Your mission in this module (starting at i-camp) will be to come up with ideas about how to develop it, change it, pitch it at a particular market as a means of making a living from this activity.

One technique that you might use to generate ideas for this is SCAMPER.  This technique allows a group of people to brainstorm alternatives and decide on potential answers.  In its way, I suppose, it is the problem solving equivalent to a group of musicians jamming their way to a new composition.

"Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:

S = Substitute
C = Combine
A = Adapt
M = Magnify
P = Put to Other Uses
E = Eliminate 
R = Rearrange (or Reverse)"(2)

If you would like to give this approach a try, the site LiteMind has a SCAMPER random question tool, which is fun to use.

Let's run through an example and explore how SCAMPER provides triggers to get our ides flowing.  Take one of last year's projects.  This project was to produce a social networking site for university students.   Let's use a few SCAMPER questions, chosen using the random generator, to help us to brainstorm ideas.

(Substitute) Can I use this idea in a different place?

The project was aimed at UK university students.  Could we target an overseas market?  This might be young people living abroad - one of the group was from Hong Kong and keen to apply it to that market.  

(Adapt) Whom could I emulate?

My favourite musician, Sir Paul McCartney, sometimes uses this to begin writing a new song. For instance, on Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, he tried to emulate the late George Harrison on  Friends to Go  and on Anyway he composed the piece trying to sound like Randy Newman.  It seems that thinking about how someone else might carry out the task can be a spur to even the most creative of individuals!

(Magnify) What can be magnified or made larger?

One student in this group was from the International faculty, taking Spanish.  He had the idea that the 'budying' aspect of this could be amplified.  This led him to explore how it could be turned into a system for foreign students at Leeds Met to buddy up with home students who are studying their language.

(Put to other use) What else can it be used for?

The project brief was to develop a social networking system for university students.  One of the students was very interested in fashion in Hong Kong and had the idea of putting the project to this use.  He evetually settled on the idea of a social networking system for those planning a wedding in HK.

(Eliminate) What features could I understate or omit?

Under this heading the students might have discussed whether removing some of the features might have altered the project and made it more saleable or usable in a particular market.

(Rearrange) What if I try doing the eact opposite of what I intended?

What if they turned the project on its head and instead made it a system that was a networking system about students but not for students' use?  Perhaps it could be a means for tutors to contribute to an online reference for students.

I trust you now can see how one group might have used SCAMPER to generate ideas for  turning your final year project into an enterprsie.

There will be plenty of time for this verbal jamming(3) with your project team and a range of different people at i-camp.  

Notes

(1) The image of the drummer in the band Scamper is taken from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike-burns/129226539/sizes/m/

(2) Source: Passuellio J (2008) Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER http://litemind.com/scamper/ [Accessed 5th February, 2008]

(3) I hope your jamming  is more tuneful than this rare footage of the Beatles jamming!