2008 May

The free monthly resource on business change and technology using Agile techniques for the wider business community.

Agile Business Change for May 2008 by Marcus Price, Agilier Ltd

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1) Book Review: "Systems Thinking in the Public Sector" by John Seddon

2) Homepages

3) Templates Section

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1) Book Review: "Systems Thinking in the Public Sector" by John Seddon

This new book by John Seddon continues his theme from his previous work which dealt with the application of “systems” thinking to organisations. In this new book he turns his attention toward recent UK public sector reforms, which have seen some of the biggest failures in service delivery in the last few years.

One of the things I like is that Seddon puts these new reforms in the economic context of the emergence of the monetarist ideas of Milton Friedman in the Seventies. In the UK, these supplanted the Keynesian policies that had held sway for sixty years beforehand. Seddon argues that the extension of Friedman’s ideas to create quasi-markets (for example in the UK’s National Health Service and rail system), with their focus on achieving targets, is the root-cause of the service delivery failure. Read more...

2) Homepages

You may well be familiar with the homepage of the BBC or Google but how often have you looked at the homepages of the giants of the IT world, such as Oracle, Microsoft or IBM? Read more...

3) Templates Section

At Agilier, we find that we have a number of simple, time-saving templates that we use on a regular basis. Read more...

All best wishes for the month ahead.

Kind regards,

Marcus Price

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