A common refrain we get when talking to organisations is "we really struggle to get anything done": this article explores this in more detail. 

There are plenty of reasons for organisational inertia: most people do not like change, for a start.  However, one that rarely g...

We have recently completed a tender process for a client which threw up some interesting things.  The Client, a big national charity, engaged us last year in a survey project to update their old Case Management System, which resulted in our recommendation to spin up something in one of the worl...

It is difficult to overestimate the revolution wrought on the world of freight by Malcolm McLean in the 1950s as he realised the benefits of a single, standardised container infrastructure for the movement of stuff (broadly) regardless of the nature of that stuff and the mode of transport. The world...

With the bruhaha around the status of the government's WhatsApp messages to the Covid Inquiry, we thought it would be good to write another piece about the way organisations manage their information and come to decisions.  Whilst the Government is in the spotlight here, in our experience the bl...

Let us be clear: there are plenty of times when experience is vital, and valuable.  No matter how much theory is digested, there is often no substitute for having actually done something for a while to optimise an outcome.  Or at least make sure that complete disaster is averted: looking u...

A few things have caught my eye over the past few weeks.  First, the publication of The Big Con by Mariana Mazzucato, where she makes the point that public authorities have become infantilised by dependence on consultants, leaving them unable to innovate (or even operate) on their own.  S...

Recent news that we have, simultaneously, both high numbers of workforce vacancies and low workforce participation reminded me of what is going on in my little corner of the world.  Clearly there are many reasons for this combination outside the world of enterprise cloud computing.  The sh...

We are all so used to phrases like “critical mass”, “scale up”, or ”volume benefits” that we don’t really question the underlying assumption that bigger is better.  Ever since the days of Henry Ford we have grown up with the belief that more is merrier.  Of course, in a world full of scale...