Posts Tagged: innovation

What Innovating Acquisition Should Mean – And Should Not

Talk of innovating Federal acquisition is widespread. Change is needed, and many smart people are hard at work on it. Confusion accompanies the conversation, however, and clarification is needed. If you’re involved in an acquisition innovation effort, ask yourself the following questions. What do we mean by innovating acquisition? Broadly, it seems the government canRead… Read more »

Some Tools of the Trade: Part 1

My team helps support creative practice in the Scottish Government: encouraging and equipping staff to come forward with, and implement, ideas that will improve our corporate systems and our policy making. Sometimes what we do can seem a bit like magic. We come in, sprinkle a bit of fairy dust over a problem and ‘hey presto’,Read… Read more »

What Links Customer Experience And Innovation? The Right Question

Chris Dorobek’s March 18, 2015 program, “The Lowdown on Digital Services,” didn’t focus on innovation, but his guests’ ideas were all about it. Martha Doris, Rick Parrish, and Hannah Moss described Federal Government efforts to improve customer experience. Their comments about value as the point of a good customer experience are what innovation is supposedRead… Read more »

What You DON’T Need to Know, to Innovate

Shortly into a new job, my newly minted college graduate daughter was asked to help plan an IT requirements identification and definition meeting. Her degree was in human growth and development. She had researched what she could about requirements, but was disoriented and didn’t know where to start. Being Da-aad (yes, pronounce that as aRead… Read more »

The Digital Transformation of Organizational Functions

No one would argue with the notion that social and digital technologies are having a significant – and sometimes dramatic – impact on societies and economies. And though most people may not yet refer to this as the Digital Age or Era, they would likely concede that we are indeed transitioning away from a worldRead… Read more »

Law and Order: Big Data Edition

Any fan of crime drama TV shows can tell you that serial murderers tend to have specific modus operandi’s (MO’s, as the detectives refer to them) – meaning they operate systematically, within a pattern. How better to look at patterns and cycles than with data? In fighting crime, using data analytics to examine information onRead… Read more »

Can Innovation Chase the Wrong Things?

Organizations innovate for customers, but customers don’t think about innovation. In a digital world, customers think about ease and convenience, speed, security. Citizens care about receiving what they were promised. And in government, that means many things to many people. So if innovation means doing something different to add value for customers, what does itRead… Read more »

Leadership in Action

With each edition of The Business of Government magazine, my goal is straightforward: to introduce readers to the works, insights, and advice from some of today’s key government executives, who are tackling significant management challenges and seizing opportunities to lead. To complement these examples of leadership in action, I also highlight the practical, actionable research… Read more »

Innovation and Adaptibility in Organizational Culture

Have you ever heard of buzzword bingo? Where you and your co-workers make a bingo card of words or phrases like “touch base” and “data driven” and “Scalable” and “Proactive” and “Paradigm,” then head into a meeting and see who can hit a bingo? Well, it’s a real thing. I mention it because buzzword bingoRead… Read more »