Random reactions

Government Agenda Going Forward

I work for a company called Kable. We spend a lot of time and money trying to understand how government uses technology. Most of it is nuts and bolts data collection, practicing good hygiene with the data, and looking strictly at what the data suggests. That's why I'm publishing this off campus.

I'm firmly in the camp of those who think that demography is pretty much destiny. I think understanding the forces that drive government is vital to understanding how and why government will use technology to achieve its policy objectives. I wrote about the subject at nauseating length while I was living in Italy, but I guess those articles didn't travel well.

Here in the UK, demography has defined the political agenda, albeit under different names. Immigration is just mobile demographics--immigrants (mostly) work and pay taxes, but they are a visible scapegoat for other societal problems. The destruction of Britain's pension system was done to take money from a very large group of citizens who weren't paying attention (to politics, at any rate) and put this money towards providing services to the same citizens in areas like health and transportation, where these citizens were paying attention, basically so elected politicians could claim credit. The point is that all of the top issues of the day are demographic in origin.

This is important because demographics is a statistical science with some measure of predictability. So if demography drives policy, which in turn determines technology adoption, then we can figure it out.

Demography tells us that UK spending on technology in health will only increase. Older people require more healthcare, and are willing to spend (and force their children to spend) so they can live longer and healthier lives. As the UK is behind the curve on health matters, a path to success is definable, and UK spend as a percentage of GDP is actually quite predictable. As the number of older Brits is increasing, both in actual numbers and as a percentage of the population, this spending will grow.

Demography will require the creation of a policy solution called remote living (a combination of remote working, telecare and distance learning, about which I will write a separate post), as transportation proves increasingly intractable as a policy solution and other issues (environmental policies, home schooling and lower costs of remote access) combine to make remote living a solution to a number of problems. I'd like to claim credit for advancing this, but the number of companies doggedly pursuing technology tools in this arena makes this highly unlikely.

Demography also tells us that UK education needs a lot of money, but that the money it needs will be in areas (facilities management, feeding students and human resources) that are low tech. Put simply, the number of students is decreasing -- Demographics again.

Immigration is more of a demographic solution than a problem, but scare tactics about immigrants who are criminal or abuse social services will not go away, especially as the UK needs more immigrants to assist the economic growth that all political parties claim they want. This prefigures technology spending on monitoring entry and exit, consumption of public goods and services, and identification on demand.

I guess I'll stop here, with the observation that innovation in technology is independent of demographics, politics, etc. However, the choice of what technologies are advocated, financed and used is an intensely political issue, and an issue where demography could be used to inform the debate. Demography drives technology usage. Say it again three times.

Blogging a Product to Market Part II

In a post below, I asked for expressions of interest and potential user requirements for an invention, a line of ergonomic computer workstations. So far, I have received nothing back. I'd like to repeat the request here.

At my audition for the BBC, I was asked for any people who had committed or even expressed interest in my products as a customer. I had to confess that I didn't have anything to show.

Part of the normal process of bringing a new product to market is getting feedback from potential customers. If you're sitting in front of a computer, you're a potential customer of mine.

I would appreciate honest answers to the following questions:

1. Does vSpace look like a product that would benefit you?
2. Which of the nine models of the ergonomic computer workstation would be most appropriate for you?
3. Would the product solve any problems for you?
4. Are there any parts of what you see on the website that you don't like?
5. Are there any features you would suggest including in the product?
6. If the product worked well, was reasonably priced and was attractive, would you consider purchasing one for yourself?
7. How would you expect to buy this product? From the website, from eBay, in a store, some other way?
8. What would you expect to pay for an ergonomic computer workstation?

I would greatly appreciate answers to any/all of these questions. I would also appreciate my readers 'recruiting' other people to answer them.

Many thanks in advance.

Blog Assessment

Time for a first week review of activity. I posted about Creative Commons, bureaucratic hurdles in gettng a prescription, my contract with you the audience and twice about my audition with the BBC about my invention. I've had a number of comments, all about the BBC deal.

There have been 175 visitors to the blog--although my visits count amongst that total. Almost all went straight to my post about the Dragon's Den audition and did not look at the other posts.

My plans for posting this weekend (Happy Easter, all) will include a follow-up on the audition, more about my invention, and another ambitious idea regarding Creative Commons.

Can we blog a product to market?

Okay everybody—here's the deal. One way investors judge the worth of a new business or product is by assessing the level of interest people have in it. Normally they would look for an order from a large customer, or at least a letter of interest. I auditioned for the BBC programme Dragon's Den, and during the audition a production assistant asked me off camera if I had any orders for my product—after I told her I didn't yet have a product.

I have an invention. Actually I have nine inventions. Does one of them suit you? If so, let me know. I don't want money. I don't even want a blood oath that you will buy a product the day it is on the market. What I would like to see are honest expressions of interest. Something similar to, 'If this came on the market, and if it worked as advertised, and if it were priced reasonably, I would certainly look at it carefully and might indeed buy it.' Tell me what you think a reasonable price might be. Tell me what features it needs to have. Tell me how I should sell it to you (my website? eBay? Door to door?)

I'm looking for angel investors. Have been for more than a year. So here is my plea to the blogosphere—give me something to show them.

Dragons Den audition

Hello all,

Just back from the audition--many thanks to all who commented, either here or via email. I took a lot of your comments on board, and I think the presentation was dramatically improved as a result. Of course, I now forget completely what it was I said, which may prove bothersome if they invite me back for an encore. They said it was a strong presentation, but of course there was no commitment to invite me on the show. Just a thought--comments please--how effective do you think a weblog could be in driving a product to market? Or, shall I say, pulling it? Does anyone think a weblog full of comments endorsing my invention would have any influence in the real world? Is it worth trying to find out?

Entering the Dragon's Den

Some of my friends and associates know that I am working on an invention in the five minutes of free time I have on a weekly basis. As a bit of a lark, I submitted an application to appear before angel investors on Dragon's Den, a BBC 2 weekly television show.

Amazingly enough, I have been offered an audition. It will be Tuesday, March 22nd. I am taking some graphic mock-ups of my invention and will be making a three minute pitch that, if successful, will lead to a second audition and perhaps an appearance on the show.

Here is my pitch. Anybody who would care to comment on it can do so today or tomorrow. I'll let you know how it comes out.

"My name is Tom Fuller. I am managing director for The Light Within, a design studio in London. I am here to ask for 375,000 pounds from one or all of the panel on Dragon's Den. The Light Within has a portfolio of a dozen innovative concepts, and I am searching for funding for one of these concepts.

This would be zero stage funding. My company is not trading, and I do not have a product to put on anyone's shelf. Investment would give equity in the design studio and the entire intellectual property portfolio, but the funds would be exclusively for bringing this particular product line to market.

The product line is a series of ergonomic computer workstations, and will be called vSpace. Although we plan to bring nine models to the market, we are focusing on two for the initial launch.

Designers have spent thousands of hours and millions of pounds creating comfortable seating environments for drivers, airplane pilots and other specific users. Sadly, that level of energy has not been spent on creating comfortable seating for normal computer users. vSpace addresses that lack.

(Show poster 1) As you can see, vSpace puts typical computer users in an ergonomically safe postion, with feet off the ground, head and neck and lower back supported by the chair. Monitor and keyboard are brough to the user using flexible arms mounted on poles. This model is designed for productivity workers in call centres.

(Show poster 2) This model is designed for wheelchair users, and is called RoRo (Roll on, Roll off). It essentially removes the chair from the previous model and allows wheelchair users to move on to the platform and pull the monitor and keyboard to a comfortable position.

I have conducted extensive market research in support of this proposition and firmly believe that there is a large market and very little credible competition for the product line. If I receive funding, I will be able to bring the wheelchair model to market in a very short period of time, and the first chaired model shortly thereafter.

Several furniture manufacturers and distributors have indicated a willingness to build and distribute the product line. One manufacturer of monitors and computer peripherals has indicated an interest in bundling their hardware into sales of vSpace.

I hope this short presentation is enough to interest you in learning more about an opportunity that I consider very exciting. Thank you

Mystery shopping for meds

One of the projects we are undertaking at work is evaluating how well public services are delivered. The project is captured at the group weblog Ideal Government. In a fiendishly clever ploy to get my boss to link to my weblog, I am posting this modest contribution to the debate here.

I am one of countless thousands who benefit from atorvastatin, a drug used to treat my (formerly) elevated cholesterol count. I have been using the medicine for 8 years, and it and modest dietary changes have left me with a healthy level of cholesterol in my system.

Here in the UK, as I am on NHS, I pay little out of pocket when I pick up my medicine. Of course, I pay quite a bit more when I look at what has been deducted from my pay packet.

Getting the medicine is an interesting exercise in wasting the time and efforts of a number of people, including myself. Bear in mind while reading this that I will probably be using this medicine for the rest of my life.

The first absurdity is the prescription, which is only valid for 3 months. I have been in the UK for two years, and nobody has measured my blood or tracked the progress of my cholesterol levels. But the receptionist merely says that's the longest they can write the scrip for. Why not a year? Why not five? Now, lower strength packages of statins are on sale at the chemist—it's not as if they are monitoring Lipitor's safety. And it's not as if they are monitoring my progress.

So I pay a quarterly visit to the GP. So what? Well, it involves almost a half day off work, essentially. Well, actually more. I cannot pick up my prescription during my official visit. I have to come back the next day, another half day off. Then, finally, I get to go to the chemist. So I pay 8 visits a year to the surgery to process one piece of information.

I admit, it's not much more than a minor annoyance for me, and probably the receptionist at the GP feels the same. But it does waste my time and the time of the NHS. I can safely assume that the government does not care a fig about wasting my time. But how much of its own time and money does it waste on this?

The Prescription Pricing Authority, part of the Department of Health, has this to say about costs and prescription volumes:

"Prescription volume has increased by 5.9% per annum, to over 667 million items in the year to September 2004. The main increases in volume have been for drugs used in cardiovascular (11.6% growth, 195 million items) and endocrine diseases (7.3% growth, 53 million items). Net ingredient cost increased by 8.1% per annum (£7,786 million) in the year to September 2004. The therapeutic areas contributing most to the increase in prescribing cost in the year to September 2004 were cardiovascular (9.1% growth, £2,131 million)." You can do the math, figuring between five and eight pounds per transaction now, and using about 27 pence per transaction if it were done electronically. When you do the math, remember that not all prescriptions could or should be automated.

The essential issue here is that the NHS sets up its arrangements without thinking of me, or of the surgery I visit. I would imagine that they set a quarterly limit for duration of prescriptions sixty years ago for reasons that are not applicable today. Now, it would appear to me that savings would be significant if this process were automated. Regular information exchanges are exactly the type of transaction that IT is designed to cope with, and using alerts and emails would probably wring about 99% of the costs out of the NHS investment in this particular procedure. Honestly, they could bring about dramatic improvement without IT investment—they could just change my prescription frequency from quarterly to annual. But the true problem with the NHS is that they are blindly following a guideline, slavishly propitiating the forms of bureaucracy without remembering why they are in business. The NPfIT may or may not cause them to wake up and examine why they do what they do. I suspect that if it doesn't awaken them, the project will fail. I also suspect that had they awakened 10 years ago, the NpfIT would scarcely have been necessary.

Blogger/Reader Contract

This is my second attempt at blogging. The first is located here. I abandoned the first blog because it was too ambitious, given my availability to post. I cannot post on a daily basis. The problem is I still want people to read what I write. My solution is to set forth my publishing schedule as a contract with visitors.

I intend to publish something substantive on a weekly basis. My availability is currently limited to weekends. For those readers who (like me) have a pattern of blog viewing, I hope this helps you program your visits to my site.

I regularly visit about 10 blogs, although I follow links to dozens of others. Some I visit almost daily, such as Tapped and Instapundit. Others I hit weekly. Two examples of sites I visit weekly are Brad DeLong and Max Sawicky.

Most of my posting will be reactions to what I am encountering in the real world on a professional basis, something I will explain more fully in another post. If this is your cup of tea, I hope to have something for you to look at for 5 or 10 minutes on a Sunday or (more probably) a Monday morning.

Creative Commons License

My boss, William Heath, invited me to attend the kickoff of the UK version of the Creative Commons License (see here, here, and especially Wikipedia's entry here for background). The party was held in the October Gallery in London, up the street from the glamorous Holborn Tube Station and near many plaques on homes honoring writers from the Bloomsbury days (and pioneering physicians from a century earlier).

If you didn't click through above, the Creative Commons License is essentially a mechanism that creates different levels of rights and access to created art, with the quaint notion that the content creators should set the rules under which people can access and use their creation.

I met Perry Barlow at the event--very nice, seemed a bit jet lagged. I talked through an idea with him, which he suggested I send to Larry Lessig. I did, but here it is for all of you to read/comment on.

Creative Commons Fundraising Possibility

Although the Creative Commons License was developed largely as a reaction to the restrictions placed on original works of art by large organisations, the simple fact is that those same organisations are likely to benefit hugely from the Creative Commons License. They therefore should be approached to be educated on the potential benefits, and then asked to help fund further development and implementation of the programme.

Large organisations have historically been unable to sustain innovation and artistic excellence. They have recognised this, and typically ‘outsource’ innovation. The clearest example of this is in advertising, where much of the industry’s consolidation has consisted of large agencies buying smaller ones to gain access to creative people who cannot thrive in a large corporate environment. Other examples include similar waves of consolidation in the video game industry and the multiple producer model for feature films.

The Creative Commons approach to intellectual property offers these large organisations an alternative and potentially cheaper method of outsourcing innovation. This new model is likely to increase the quality and quantity of innovative creations. This will happen because large companies can place previous creations core to their identity into a modified or ring-fenced public domain explicitly for the purpose of allowing independent artists and creators to incorporate previous work into their own efforts, probably with the proviso that work containing previously created elements can only be sold to the company providing the Creative Commons license. This will allow companies to farm out creative work ‘on spec’ to independents who will pursue development activities in hopes of selling pilot programmes, video games, animated features, etc. to the company upon reaching a viable stage of development in return for a royalty.

Many elements of this process already exist and are being used. However, most of these elements don’t include prior art. One exception involves ‘machinima,’ a concept for animated features created using video game development tools that can be downloaded from game developers’ websites at little or no charge. Some artists have begun creating short animated films using these tools, and there are even machinima film festivals springing up.

An example of how this could work going forward would involve Sony. The company has a staggering amount of intellectual property, a good portion recently acquired with their purchase (with private equity partners) of the MGM film library. Sony could make the library available to advertising agencies, game developers, documentary film producers, commercial film and television companies and experimental artists with the proviso that Sony has the first option to purchase finished works and can limit distribution of unpurchased work by agreement. The availability of such a large body of work would make Sony the first (or second, following the BBC archives) point of call for independent artists, and would give Sony right of first review to innovative work that would normally be available to Sony only via expensive corporate merger and acquisition activity.

Should members of the Creative Commons team offer to work with Sony to create Creative Commons licensing schemes, it should be able to either be paid for such work or to leverage funding in return.