All the new things just provide an excuse for real challenges

This post is really a little moan – so feel free to ignore….As many of you will know I love gadgets and new technologies, it is after all what I speak to people about most of the time and how they can help change or transform services. It really does fascinate me.

But sometimes and this is happening more and more, the new shiny stuff or new technologies are simply distracting people from admitting that they can’t be bothered nor do they want to really change the way they do things – regardless of whether you can make something easier, quicker, better and cheaper – To say it another way – people are increasingly becoming more and more stubborn.

This isn’t new to say and it certainly isn’t groundbreaking for someone to say that culture and behaviours are getting in the way of real transformational change in services.

Now to a certain level I can understand why people are doing it – the increasing pace of change and the inevitable outcome of fewer jobs all round mean that people are becoming scared so are digging their heels in and creating excuses and I’ve started to witness more and more people using technology as the excuse when it simply isn’t – there are of course times when it is but generally those people involved in those situations are keen to remove those technical barriers and change the way things are done.

This partly links to a previous post about the private sector as I created and stated an excuse which was that if you gave 1200 statutory responsibilities to the private sector they wouldn’t be seen or certainly labelled as agile, responsive or even innovative. But this was really a legitimate challenge that faces local government…I’m not making an excuse i’m stating that we have a number of complications which need to be considered but we should also be questioning why we have so many….anyway I digress a little…..

What I’m really saying is that we need to find ways to help people get past the fear, the natural stubborn response to say “we tried that it didn’t work” or “Not sure that technology will work here” and start to focus beyond those questions and get to solving problems and get those people focusing on problems as well and get past the methods, technologies, tools and resources etc which can actually help solve the problem.

Filed under: Local Government

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