Procurement – Lorne Mitchell's Thursday Thoughts

07/01/201508/01/2015

Measurement Madness

I met up recently with an old friend. She has decided to give up work in March. The hospital she has worked in for many years as a family therapist was transferred from the private sector to the public sector last year. She is giving up because the (UK) National Health Service (or NHS) that has now taken over the hospital has made the unit a “national asset” and patients are being referred to it from across the country. She can no longer practice as she used to because the patients are disconnected from the families that should support them when they leave hospital care. Costs have also gone up because of the additional remote support that need to be given to both patients and their supporting families. In addition, she finds the extra “meetings about meetings” and paperwork completely stifling.

It reminded of a similar problem that is embedded within the UK prison system. It has been proven that offenders are much more likely not to reoffend once they leave prison if they get family support during their term inside. Yet most prisoners are deliberately sent to another part of the country to do their time. Families (often poorer than most) cannot afford regular visits. So the likelihood of prisoners reoffending when leaving prison goes up.

In each of these cases, I suppose the patient or the prisoner could be seen as the “customer”. Yet these two state-run systems have been designed without the customer’s requirements (or real needs) in mind. They have been designed at the expense of other measures (such as top-down political targets, reduction in costs etc.)

The current business fads of rationalisation, outsourcing, off-shoring, cost-cutting and factory call-centres seem to have driven traditional sane local business practices and have allowed madness to prevail.

I can’t prove it, but I believe that local, common-sense sanity has to create more flexible, cost effective public services over the prevalent national (or international) managing-by-abstract-measures madness. But that is a very difficult case to prove when big egos, big technology, big politics and big finance have each, in their own way, presented measurement madness as the new religion.

Maybe measurement is, itself, the root cause of the problem. Maybe we should be suggesting a new way to educate the cohorts of ignorant managers and measurers.
Taiichi Ohno would have thought so. One of his great quotes fits well here:

“People who can’t understand numbers are useless.

The gemba (or real place) where numbers are not visible is also bad.

However, people who only look at the numbers are the worst of all.”

29/03/201229/03/2012

Lorne at the Lords

I gave evidence at the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications on Tuesday – all about the future of UK Internet Access.

There is a video of it here:

17/01/201218/01/2012

Bedrooms, Markets and Coffee Cups

Anthony kindly sent me this brilliant short video from Hans Rosling on why economies are made in bedrooms, not markets!

So, whatever you do, if you are European or American and want to grow your business, go seek out new markets in China or India….or start serving the over 60s!

Makes you think anyway!

01/12/201101/12/2011

Occupy Everywhere!

I had a meeting early yesterday morning at the Frontline Club in Paddington. As I was leaving, some NHS folk were outside the entrance to St Mary’s Hospital demonstrating and making a noise. I did not go up to them and chat – I just took a picture. The window in the top left corner is where Sir Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin. As I walked away, I wondered what Fleming would have thought of all the noise?

I headed off to have lunch with an old friend at a restaurant in Paternoster Square – just by St Paul’s. It was a good lunch – and surprisingly crowded (when I had been told that all the traders in Paternoster Square had nearly gone out of business). After lunch, I had a bit of time before my next appointment, so I decided to walk from St Paul’s down to Victoria.

I could only leave Paternoster Square by one exit – which was the one I came in on. Normally crowded with tourists and city folk, the square has been blockaded in by a squad of policemen and other less official-looking people who seem to be from the tented camp of the Occupy Movement.

I was surprised to see the tented camp still pitched around St Pauls. I wondered how long they will hang on out there (particularly now the weather is turning)? Still, give the Occupy St Paul’s encampment some credit, they were pretty well organised and all seemed quite peaceful.

As I walked down towards The Aldwich, the whole of Fleet Street had been blocked by police cars, police vans and trucks with large sandbags. It was a very strange atmosphere which I later realised was the end of the TUC march down the embankment.

A bit further on some folk were clearing barriers and a strange tent-like contraption came around the corner that posed for some TV cameras. The banner said “Occupy Everywhere” obscuring the sign for the Royal Courts of Justice. And it got me thinking.

With the world’s population recently increasing to over 7,000,000,000 people (or 7bn for short), in a strange way, we DO occupy everywhere already! That’s the problem! And we aren’t doing too well at organising ourselves to reduce the population size. And there are now so many people getting heated up about all the problems that the planet itself is heating up more than we anticipated a few years ago.

So what’s to be done? The politicians can’t seem to fix it. The international banks and muti-national companies can’t seem to fix it. The Occupy Movement doesn’t seem to be fixing it. Yet we continue with the old patterns of marching, demonstrating (for pensions that will never appear) – and thinking that someone else will fix it.

So whilst we surely do Occupy Everywhere already, we need better ways to occupy ourselves so we all feel a sense of purpose and usefulness – without having to rely on the consumer-centric values that have held the Western world together for the past 50 years.

Interesting times. Not sure anyone has the answer. But I am sure we will work it out somehow! After all, Fleming discovered Penicillin by going on holiday. The story goes that some tropical medicine folk were researching on the floor below and penicillin floated up to his labs whilst he was away. Strange things happen when you bring diverse ideas together and go on holiday. Can’t wait for the Christmas break!

20/10/201120/10/2011

What Makes a “Smart” Service

I was fortunate enough to be asked to facilitate a discussion on Tuesday evening at the Savoy on Smart Services. Everything seems to be “Smart” nowadays. Smart Metres, Smart Grids, Smart Cities….. so what about Smart Services?

The debate centred around the rise and rise of multiple devices within the so-called Digital Home and what the implications are on the traditional support channels that phone companies, cable companies, ISPs and device manufacturers provide for their customers.

When asked to wrap-up, I was reminded of the acronym for SMART Objectives which I am sure most readers will have come across some version of:

According to Wikipedia, this acronym was originally coined in the November 1981 issue of Management Review by George T. Doran.

Anyway, I tried to create a simple reminder of the main points of discussion about smart services and put together the following thoughts:

Most are self-explanatory – but the last one was all about creating a service as excellent as the one you might expect from the concierge at the Savoy. Can you match that kind of service with what you do? Makes you think anyway!

27/07/201127/07/2011

Reasons for the Crisis: Designing for Obsolescence

In a week where the Murdoch media empire appeared to lose its power, I came across this video “The Story of Stuff”- perhaps the most important “News of the World” that Murdoch’s empire was at the heart of ignoring.

Even if you have seen it, watch it again: it will make you think again about how the world works.

It is interesting how, with the launch of Apple’s Lion operating system we are still seeing “Design for Obsolescence” as one of the main design principles from what many say is the best design company in the world. It’s time for Apple (and the rest of us) to re-think design for the 21st century so that we can close the circle, not keep pushing the 99% waste down the pipe. Designing for Pull has to be a major factor in this redesign philosophy – and something I will come back to in future posts.

30/05/201101/06/2011

Innovation at the Edge of Elecricity

Although this is almost exactly a year old and quite US-centric, the video below “Innovation at the Edge of Electricity” was made. It has some great stories that may well make the minds of anyone living in the US or Europe boggle at how true innovation is happening in the developing world without any “help” from regulators or lawmakers.

As technology is forcing industry convergence, it is not just the Western-style Telecoms regulation that is getting in the way, but the rules and regulations from the Electricity and Banking Industries too. For instance, look to Africa, not Europe or the US if you want to see what true innovation is on mobile payments.

Many of the stories are particularly helpful when we think at how we should rollout faster broadband to the so-called “Final Third”. Innovation has always happened on the edge of the network. Surely it is time for us to include some of these new ideas from the “edge of electricity” and adapt them to our own requirements. Or will we let the regulators carry on regulating our service industries to die a slow, painful death?

Well worth watching to the end.

12/07/201017/07/2010

The Second Herculean Task: The Nine-Headed Hydra of National Procurement Schemes

On looking at the challenges the UK faces on reducing spending, I am reminded of the second Labour of Hercules:

——–

There was a beast living in the swamps of Lerna that ravaged the countryside devouring cattle. It was known as the Hydra. For his second labour, Eurystheus ordered Hercules to rid the world of this predatory monster. Taking his nephew, Iolaus (who was a surviving son of Hercules’ brother Iphicles), as his charioteer, Hercules set out to destroy the famed monster – which had nine heads, one of which was immortal.

Of course Hercules couldn’t simply shoot an arrow at the beast or club him to death. There had to be something special about the beast that made normal mortals unable to control it. If ever one of the mortal heads were cut, from the stump would immediately spring forth two new heads! Wrestling with the beast proved difficult because while trying to attack one head, another would use its fangs to bite Hercules’ leg.

Ignoring the nipping at his heels and calling upon Iolaus for help, Hercules arranged to have Iolaus burn the neck as soon as Hercules had chopped a head off. In this way the stump could not regenerate. When all eight mortal necks were headless and cauterised, Hercules sliced off the immortal head and buried it underground with a stone on top to hold it down. Having dispatched with the head, Hercules dipped his arrows in the gall of the beast, and in this way, as he would soon learn, he made his arrows lethal.

Upon returning to the outskirts of Tiryns, Eurystheus denied Hercules credit for the labor because Iolaus had helped out.

——–

As I see it, the coalition government has a Herculean task of slaying the nine-headed monster of Government Procurement. What is required is that all existing mega-procurement national contracts are isolated and cauterised before two new heads can grow. Savings are seldom made through encouraging this kind of national monster to feed on the fragile local economies that keep the country serviced. The more contracts that can be given to local businesses the better. It will take a lot of courage to ignore the heel-biting that will appear as this particular Hydra is systematically de-capitated and destroyed.

With the abolition of the RDAs and with a solid plan coming out of DCLG last week, along with other cuts in other national spending programmes, the signs so far are promising that the government has a systematic plan, like Hercules, to slay the monster.

It will considerable time to kill the other heads of the Nine-Headed Hydra of National Procurement – as well as some courage not to allow new heads to emerge in the before the monster is dead. I already see new heads in BIG BUSINESS emerging under other guises wanting to keep the monster alive for as long as it can.

In the end, even if, as in Hercules’ case, David Cameron and his team do not get all the credit because they have been helped by the Lib-Dems, then the battle will have been worth it just to have slayed the monster. Even so, some would say there are still ten Herculean tasks to go before we get the country back on track!