Day 23 – 4 February 2014
An email that came in late in the afternoon yesterday has unsettled me. We let a customer down badly. I set out this year to enjoy every day at work which doesn’t mean that I can’t get angry or upset from time to time. I just need to work out what I am going to do and get over it but it is going to make today a bit of an uphill challenge.
The weather didn’t but the six meetings I had planned helped. I got stopped by the security people as I came in to County Hall. Apparently I should have had a car park pass – still I’ve only been here over four years and didn’t know I needed one.
Back in day twelve I mentioned that I chair the North East ICT Managers (NEICT). The next meeting is planned for the 13th and so I met with Graham who is an enormous help in arranging and sorting the group out to go through the agenda. I’ll cover this when I get round to the meeting itself but one of the main topics will be apprentices. Each of the seven authority ICT heads is keen that we take on more to contribute to the future of ICT in the region. Bob Payton from Dynamo, an organisation that represents all ICT workers in the region (I think there are 25,000 of us) will also be there and so it should be a good session.
Another Head of Service was next where we talked about big data followed by another tier 4 manager. This time it was Tom who works on performance management, corporate planning, a bit of scrutiny and equality. This was a rich vein of conversation and we managed to get through everything from the role of women in ICT (and why we don’t have more in senior positions) to systems thinking which turned out to be a mutual interest. Perhaps I should get a group together of people who are interested in pursuing this.
Tom said that he was motivated by taking things apart, finding why they don’t work and putting them back together again. This reminded me of a story I was told in which if presented with an unusual object a gorilla will stare at it and try to fathom it out, a chimpanzee will destroy it usually by biting it while an orang-utan will carefully take it apart and rebuild it. I don’t know if there is any truth in this but it’s a nice thought and is in no way supposed to cast aspersions on Tom.
My final meeting of the day was with the Newcastle and Northumberland digital programmes. Tony, the Digital Durham programme director came along to give our side of the story. Access to effective broadband is going to be a fundamental requirement for our future and so bringing the three programmes that will cover the whole of the North East has to be a good thing. We covered where each programme is up to, how we are addressing funding issues and what we are doing to encourage take up – or demand stimulation as it is called. Good first meeting and well worth doing it again.
Learning points for today: I need a car park pass; Some of our rules and regulations in ICT seem odd on the face of them and need further explanation; There are pockets of people who have similar interests to you all over the place, you just need to find them.
Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – I thought it was going to be rubbish but a play that I listened to in the car on the way up to Newcastle put it all in perspective and all the meetings turned out to be very good.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 
The worst thing we can do is guess or assume we know what a customer wants, or that they know what we are delivering. We need to talk to them and listen to them.
Most customers complain about problems long before they will take the decision to pull out, if we ignore those complaints then we don’t deserve their business, we have failed them.
If we put ourselves in out customers shoes and empathize with them and imagine how we would feel, maybe we would do a better job. But too often we only care about stats and figures and not people.
On a different note, as a women in ICT I also want to know why there are not more of us in senior positions and why I feel I will never get very far in ICT because I’m a woman.
Agree with you on the first point and as for the second, I would like to know too. I’ve been trying to get my colleagues interested for the last few months with little success. We have quite a few women in the service but they thin out higher up the grades. I don’t expect it to be an easy problem to fix.
Why do you think it is so?