My first thought is that I have been hearing that message for about ten years, maybe longer. The impetus has varied, but the “must change” message has been a constant. And I sometimes think there is a sort of inverse correlation at work – the more an organisation asserts the message, the less real change is actually happening.

“The urgency of greater co-ordination and collaboration between public sector institutions and agencies…”

This is interesting. An (enduring) influence on me a few years back was Jake Chapman’s 2002 Demos mini book “System Failure”. It addressed (among other things) the increased complexity brought about by the impact of communication technologies, and the resulting growth in interactions (email, meetings, calls, websites, documents etc) between organisations and agencies who have to work together.

With the coming big financial squeeze, organisations will indeed have to (really) change, but to cut costs, they may have to interact less, not more. The successful ones may be those who can shed the traditional cumbersome structures of public sector partnership working, instead adopting different approaches, maybe including “how would Google/Apple/your choice of innovator here do it?”.

Reading “System Failure” (and a follow up last year, “Connecting the Dots”) prompts a thought that others have also asked – how different things could have been since 1997, had the Labour administration not been so addicted to the top-down, command and control management approach that Chapman criticises in the books.

Both available free from Demos website:
http://www.demos.co.uk/people/jakechapman