In the good old days (around 1995), choosing a display resolution for a website was easy. Everyone had 640×480 monitors, so that’s what we designed for. By 1998 it was a little harder – many, but not all, people had upgraded to 800×600 screens. So if you wanted to target early adopters you could aim…
I’ve just been directed to Jeremiah Owyang’s post, A complete list of the many forms of web marketing for 2008. It’s quite a useful resource to draw on for innovative ways to use the online channel. It’s made me think on the communications approaches my agency has used in the last year – based on…
These days the majority of postal mail people in Australia receive is either advertising material or bill. In the future, this may be cut even further to only ads. In the European Union there’s a major project underway to create a whole-of-government standard for all EU government invoicing, that can also be propagated across the…
I’ve met people who consider their online communities and online friends as significant and real influences on their lives. I’ve met others who regard online communities as some kind of crutch for a few lonely people with limited social skills. This is often characterised as a generational gap, shaped by how people see themselves in…
A constant theme I hear from friends, family and peers is that, while government agencies do put a lot of time and effort into listening to their customers, they don’t often hear what is said correctly (any do not even appear to put much effort into listening to staff at all). This issue is not…
Over in the US, Nextgov has released an online tool explicitly for US public sector website administrators can use to check the security of their website versus the stipulations of the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act. As hackers do not restrict themselves to national boundaries – or to government legislation – this tool is…
Yesterday I attended the ATO showcase – a day-long event demonstrating some of the ATO’s vision for the future for enabling technologies across customer service, information management, collaboration and personalisation. As part of the day, ATO employees demonstrated a series of working prototypes from business intelligence dashboard through facebook-style intranet applications to virtual customer service…
Public sector blogging is becoming established in the UK, US and even New Zealand – although there is still very little being written by Australian public servants (‘government’ isn’t even a category in Australian blog indexes such as The Australia Index). Situations such as Civil Serf in the UK and Washingtonienne in the US raised…
I’ve set myself a personal challenge this financial year to support innovation within my agency at all levels. There have always been innovative people throughout organisations. Their challenge has been distribution and access – promoting their ideas to the people that could champion and introduce them. Being the custodian (not the owner) of our website…
Paul Budde (former journalist and Australia’s leading telecommunications researcher) has published a fantastic piece on how mass media – which anyone born since the 1960s takes for granted – is really an anomaly, titled The anomaly of the mass media. Niche-based media is more reflective of human communications activity in the longer-term. The piece also…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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