Zoli Erdos has a hilarious piece about public sector waste in California. Vinnie Marchandani takes this into passport control and the immigration line. Passport control sounds oh so familiar – and that’s just thinking about Gatwick Airport.
I can think of a few silly examples from ‘over there’ – like the questions they ask on the green immigration visa document every non-US citizen has to complete. Like…are you a convicted drug dealer/pervert/war criminal? How I’ve been tempted…But the more important point is that waste costs us all money and is often the result of defective or inappropriate processes.
Vinnie calls the cure ‘process angioplasty’ but I’m not sure I agree on every occasion. Maybe we should be thinking about process from a different perspective. For instance, I was particularly drawn to John Stokdyk’s remarks about how the entry level accounting package vendors have pretty much failed their constituents. The reality is you can’t turn clients into book-keepers simply by making a package easy to use. The concepts take time to understand. In the same way, putting public terminals in local libraries and thinking that provides open citizen access doesn’t cut it when you recall that the aging population doesn’t find computers that intuitive to use.
That’s why I particularly like More Software’s approach where they use a series of videos to explain concepts and require their users to take responsibility for their record keeping. It’s innovative because it takes a difficult problem and turns it on its head, looking at it from the customer perspective but bearing in mind the differing needs of the professional.
Technorati Tags: innovation, proccess_angioplasty
