Weeknotes #204

Admin on 26/06/2020

Some things I did this week:

Digital Safeguarding

I’ve been working on digital safeguarding, which like so many digital things, is a little about the technology and a lot about the attitudes, assumptions, behaviours and expectations of people. A big part of the shift in mindset is to understand that people behave differently online than they do in real life due to the online disinhibition effect and moving from ‘assumed safety’ which comes naturally to us when we’re in groups in real-life, to ‘assumed risk’ which helps put us on our guard when in digital spaces. Digital safeguarding needs technology, training, policy and practice as part of the solution but the mindset stuff underpins all of that, and can’t be successful without it. Wider than safeguarding, the digital mindset seems like the big gap in the digital transformation. Living in an online world but using the thinking we learned in the real world causes such a lack of awareness and understanding about how that online world operates.

And then The Catalyst launched DigiSafe, which has some really helpful guidance (and is cool because it’s in Gitbook). I don’t want to seem like I’m bashing it because I think it’s a really good resource for charities but I feel like it falls into the ‘digital is just another channel’ trap and implies that safeguarding on the web can be approached in the same way as safeguarding in real life without taking account of the behaviour change that happens online and the scale and complexity of it. I worry it would be easy for charities to become complacent because they have a policy in place and have had some training.  

Teams support

I’ve been doing some work to support teams and users new to Teams. It’s been really useful to see the challenges people have with using a new product so I hope I get to do more of it, and it was interesting to see where other organisations are in rolling out Teams. I think I’m starting to understand how Teams and all the infrastructure behind it is such a different product to the likes of Word and Excel, and is on a whole other level of complexity.

Defining product experience 

I’ve been working on a way to quickly and iteratively develop and capture the understanding of people from different teams with different skills and perspectives as we define new products. One of the problems I see is that people produce good work which if we could all absorb would help us understand the product better, but that work is scattered across different documents and folders and formats, which means we’re likely to look at it once and not fully absorb it.

Five levels of understanding of product experience

So, this process, and the single shared document that we work in, structures and records our understanding. It uses five layers with progressively finer fidelity of understanding. The first layer helps to paint the big picture about ‘why’ we should be building this new product. The second layer is ‘who’ we are building it for. That breaks down into ‘what’ those users want. The even more detailed level describes ‘how’ we are going to do it. And ‘when’ introduces an element of time and knits all the parts together to create the entire product experience.

We’ve had people from different teams working together in a single shared document, using calls to discuss things quickly, chat to discuss things together, and comments in the document to raise questions that we should answer later. People join in when they are available and drop out when they have other things to do but the work flows on. 

It’s an interesting way of working synchronously and asynchronously, and it provides an undercurrent of shifting the focus away from hierarchical decision-making structures towards collaborative decision-evolving. Where there is uncertainty we have lots of activity as people work through questions, and as certainty emerges the activity reduces to the point where no more changes are being made because everyone feels settled on their understanding and how it is expressed. This is what I mean by decision-evolving, rather than someone working in isolation to create a document that is reviewed and approved by a single decision-maker.

I’m going to blog about it at some point.

Joined YourStack

I’m on the waitlist for YourStack, where people post about what products they use. I’m not quite sure why it exists yet but I’m keen to see if it can be part of my thinking about opening my workflows so I guess I’ll see once the 17,193 people who are ahead of me on the waitlist have been given access.

This week I studied:

Revising previous lectures

No lecture this week, exams in a couple of weeks, and then I’ll have finished the first year of my masters. I’ve really enjoyed learning so much but I’m also looking forward to not having the added pressure of lectures, reading, assignments, etc. for a few months.

I thought about this week:

A platform business model for a charity

I realised where I’ve been going wrong in my thinking about platform business models for charities for the past couple of years. I’ve been trying to see it at the level of how products and services, or various functions like fundraising and volunteering, interact, but that is too close to the reality of an operating model in order to really understand how a platform business model would change how all those things work. The platform business model needed a deeper layer of abstraction.

The model describes how data, information and knowledge flow through an organisation so that value is added by turning data into information and information into knowledge, and how if any part of the system experiences an increase it drives an increase in the entire system. It utilises internet-era thinking including the law of increasing returns, network effects, and positive feedback loops. The opposite model of a pipeline drives value in one direction which makes it really difficult for a change in a later part of the pipeline to affect anything earlier (in fact there is maths to prove it).

Platform business model for charities

I started a blog post about it but I couldn’t figure how to structure the post in a way that would make sense. But I do intend to finish it some time soon and explain what I’m talking about in much more detail.

My workflow

I tried to hold daily standups with myself in order to be clear with myself what I’m focusing on but it didn’t go very well. I only remembered to do it once and even then I didn’t do the things I told myself I was going to.

I haven’t used my workflow Trello board very much this week because I haven’t had time to do very much of this kind of work.

My workflow trello board for 16th June 2020

I’m keen to keep trying to improve how I do this kind of work to achieve the right balance between inputs (reading books, listening to podcasts, etc.), processing (thinking and making notes about the inputs to improve my learning and understanding), and outputs (writing blog posts, improving my digital practice. And eventually to think more about a model for platform-ising my workflow.

Cybersecurity charity 

When bad stuff happens in the real world, things like bereavement, debt or mental health crisis there are charities to turn to for help. What about when bad stuff happens online? Stuff like identity theft, online reputation damage, fraud and financial theft, and inaccurate personal data affecting life opportunities like getting a mortgage. I wonder when we’ll see a digital–first charity that supports people affected by things that happen online?

How employers see digital skills

Perhaps now as never before it’s actually conceivable that a child could go through their entire education digitally; that is, never having sat in a classroom with other children, never having attended a lecture in person, and never having had any work experience outside of their home. But they could have still learned lots of very useful skills. I wonder how potential employers would look upon this person. Would they consider them as employable as someone who did go to school, go to university, and get experience in an actual workplace? 

Think global, act individually

I wondered what, as an individual, I could do to contribute to the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals? With things like ‘No poverty’ and ‘Clean water and sanitation’ the goals seem like such big things, which of course they need to be, but what if individuals could contribute to them? The GoodLifeGoals website and Pack of Actions include some suggestions around educating ourselves about the cause of poverty and buying from ethical companies, for example, which is a really useful start. I want to spend some time figuring out how I might align my life and the choices I make with the goals and perhaps how they can provide some kind of ‘framework’ (for want of a better word) for what a good life looks like in practice.

Some people tweeted:

The Good Service Scale

A few people tweeted about Lou Downe’s Good Service Scale, which looks like a really interesting way to assess services. I wonder if there is a way to rephrase and reframe the questions to be able to ask the service users what they think and compare to what the people from within the organisation 

Impactful books

Brianne Kimmel asked “What has been the most impactful book, blog post or podcast episode for your personal growth?” and received hundreds of answers, which one day I’ll add to my reading list.

Change is an air war and a ground war

Jason Yip tweeted about his preferred models and strategies for facilitating large-scale change. It contains a lot to think about.

Reduced hours not reduced value

Admin on 19/06/2020

When the lockdown started lots of organisations rapidly changed their working practices, and charities were no different. Charities recognised that the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic crash was going to drastically affect their ability to help people and to fundraise. The need for many charity’s services increased at the same time the money needed to pay for those services decreased. Charities responded to the massively reduced income by attempting to reduce one of their largest expenditures; salary. Some people were put on furlough, and others were offered reduced working hours along with the reduced salary to match.

Those who went to reduced working hours, of which I was one, accepted working four days a week for eighty percent of the original salary. And for a while I tried to stick to that. I’m not sure why, probably because that is what I was told to do and I hadn’t yet questioned the logic. And the logic is interesting, because at face value it makes perfect logical sense. You are going to be paid 20% less so you should work 20% fewer hours. But only makes sense if you are using an industrial mindset that associates value to time spent doing something. As if human beings are machines with a hours counter that clicks on as we are busy working and stops when we stop. This carries the underlying assumption that every hour has the same value as any other hour. But humans aren’t machines, and valuing human being by the time they spend doing something isn’t the only logic that can be applied here.

Instead of rewarding someone for the hours they spend at work, we could reward them because they bring value to the organisation. Not, and this is an important point, for the individual units of value they deliver, but more generally because them being a part of the organisation makes it better in all of the hard-to-define ways that people do. People bring ideas, and personalities, and jokes, and smiles, and a listening ear, and knowledge, and experience, and something they read in a book, and their ability to form relationships with other people that make it possible to communicate and collaborate. These are the things we actually value in people so these are the things our organisations should pay for. Divorcing units of work (be that hours spent or widgets made) from reward confines the industrial mindset to a previous point in history where perhaps it made sense for a little while, and elevates new thinking about rewarding people in ways that better fits the knowledge economy that we all increasingly operating in.

The charity I work for is a knowledge organisation. It takes the knowledge that one group of people hold and gives it to another group of people for them to utilise to improve their opportunities and make their lives better. We’re not a service organisation or a product organisation, they are just the means with which we deliver that knowledge. Tesco doesn’t call itself a van company just because that’s the means with which they deliver groceries. In the reward-by-hours-spent way, its easy to see why so few people spend time learning and developing their knowledge, because why would they if they are being paid for their time rather than their knowledge. But in the reward-by-value future, the knowledge worker is going to be measured by the all the characteristics that they hold as a person that are worth something to the organisation, and being able to learn new things will be an important one. Charities understanding that they are knowledge organisations might be the first step to creating a platform business model for charities, but that’s a thought for another time. For now, we’re talking about how we should break the connection between work and reward and instead establish a connection between reward and human characteristics like knowledge, ethics, personality, etc.

Personally, separating the reward I receive from the time I spend is easy, but that’s because I’m a bit weird. I am intrinsically motivated to achieve things, hopefully good things. I am not motivated by extrinsic things like pay or peer pressure. I take the pay because I need it to live, but if I didn’t I would do the work for free. I get to spend my time thinking about how to solve complex problems for people that need help. I think that is awesome.

So, if the reward I get from the organisation I work for is no longer tied to the time I spend doing that work, either because of my particular motivations or because in some alternate-reality organisations see sense in what I’m suggesting, then working reduced hours for reduced salary makes no sense. I should continue to contribute the value I can to the organisation, which will be different each day and will change over time as I learn more, and the organisation will continue to reward me based on the overall value I bring and with the monetary amount that equals being based on the realities of the situation we find ourselves in. I’m not suggesting I should be paid the full amount of my salary just because I am contributing my full value. I want my reduced salary to be part of the greater good, following from the many examples of solidarity we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, if we all take a hit we can all get through it together.

Weeknotes #203

Admin on 19/06/2020

This week I did:

Changing the rules of the game for charities

Reuben Turner from Good Innovation wrote an article about the need for a change in how charities approach fundraising to think more about engagement over efficiency and flourishing over formulas, and I wrote a response about how Friedman’s ‘rules of game’ for an organisation (including a charity) being to maximise profit is a narrow view that doesn’t take into account of human behaviour, and that profit, whilst a good measure, might not be the best target.

Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix – but for charities

Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix classifies services by the amount of in-person support is required from employees to enable the service to function, and by the amount of customer contact and/or customisation the service requires. I looked at a way to apply the model to identifying the type of service a charity might develop based on its available resources and the needs of its users.

Charities need better digital technology for communicating with their service users

I wrote about the things I’ve learned recently about digital communication technologies used by charities based on The Catalyst’s article ‘The top ten digital challenges facing the charity sector‘ which showed how a number of charities were struggling with identifying and using the right platforms for communicating and providing digital services with their service users (number 2). I think charities are facing this struggle because the products on the market are not designed to meet their needs. They need a different kind of digital communication technology, one that is built with privacy and security in mind that allows people from within the organisation to talk to people outside.

How the COVID-19 crisis is changing the debate on digital transformation strategies

I watched the online seminar from Birkbeck about the effects of a crisis on the digital transformation of businesses. It concluded with the obvious, that there will be winner and loser businesses and industries, and that the crisis will accelerate the transformation (not just digital transformation) of businesses that do survive.

The steps of a service

I applied some of the thinking I learned from Good Services to helping us articulate the steps we were putting into a service and the language we used to describe and refer to those parts of the service. I put the ten steps that we settled on into a single document and all of the people involved inputted their knowledge about each of the steps so that we could be clear about what happens for each. It was a really good example of collaborative working that progressed us towards the next step in designing the service. I would what we’d see if we had a separate service design team investigating how we go about developing services?

This week I studied:

Digital enterprise

“How digital technologies have changed the way organisations collaborate and network. It explains how digital social platforms have enabled new ways of organising and building relational networks. Based in industry research, the lecture shows how different corporate departments are benefiting from the advance in digital technologies for collaboration and communication, becoming networked enterprises. It also discusses how to engage the workforce and customers in these transformations, and how to explore new forms of organising (such as open innovation and crowdsourcing).”

The most interesting idea we discussed was that these social platform technologies have enabled the creation of organic networks and social ties in contrast and in addition to the hierarchies of an organisation. The weak ties between people in different teams become channels of information and innovation in ways that fixed structural information flows never can.

This week I thoughts about:

Working in the open

Following on from Oikos Digital’s building in the open approach, I’ve been thinking about my workflow for learning and writing, and making it more open. My public Trello board includes a column for what I intend to do this week, which gets filled with things from the other columns such as books to read, lectures to listen to, blog posts to write, etc., and then are moved to the Done column. It occurred to me that my three objectives map quite nicely to a pipeline of inputting, processing, and outputting. ‘Getting an effective education’ brings information into me, ‘Live an intentional life’ fits what I do with the information, how I learn from it, being focused, etc., and ‘Have an impactful career in digital charity’ fits the outputting of the knowledge I develop. Next I want to think about how I turn my workflow from a pipeline into a platform, and why I would/should do that.

Good Service

I’ve been reading Lou Downe’s Good Services – How to design services that work. It’s a fantastic book and I’ve learned things that I’ve been able to apply successfully at work the next day. To me, that’s a sign of a good book. It has so many good ideas, even if your job isn’t building services (good or otherwise) like mine. The idea that I’ve been thinking most recently is about how a team is only as strong as the weakest link, and it seems to me that specialists create more risk of weak links and generalists reduce the weaknesses. So maybe delivering something that relies on a chain of specialists probably has less chance of being successful than generalists who can overlap their skills and abilities.

How products and services work together

I’m still thinking a lot about how products and services fit together. My latest idea is that they should fit together like a zip, with the customer journey coming together and running through the middle. This means that we can still define differences between what a product is and what a service is, that they can be separate things, but that they rely on each other in order for the customer to be successful. I think maybe that the parts in the customer journey where the user has to stop and do something they use the product, and that when the user has to move onto the next step, to know where to go and how to get there, then they are using the service. This means that product and service need each other to succeed. Still struggling to explain the difference between them though.

This week people tweeted about:

Working in public

Nadia tweeted about her book ‘Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software’. The open source movement is interesting to me, a little bit because I’ve studied it (and feel a little frustrated with the irony of a university teaching about open source with copyrighted lecture materials that I would get in trouble if I made publicly available) but also because I think of it as a model for more than just developing software. So, this book is on my list.

New to digital ways of working

What would you recommend someone reads if they are new to digital ways of working? Steve recommended the Product Management learning list for government and The UX Coach suggested Books Vs People and What does being digital actually mean?

The cozy web

Maggie Appleton tweeted about the dark forest and the cozy web which makes so much sense. It explains many experiences of using the web, with the dark forest being the big public bits of the web like Twitter and ads on websites, and the cozy web emerging in response to that, which we see with the rise of enclaved communities of like-minded people writing email newsletters and communicating in WhatsApp groups.

Changing the rules of the game for charities

Admin on 14/06/2020

Reuben‘s call to change how charities approach fundraising to think more about engagement over efficiency and flourishing over formulas must strike a chord with so many people who work in charities and feel torn between wanting to do good work and wanting to do good for the cause. We might like to think that these two are one and the same but more often than not they feel like very different things.

Reuben talks about how fundraising is approached in a mechanistic way with a focus on maximising efficiency and the outputting of fundraising collateral, and suggests a better approach:

My view is that engagement, for want of a better word, isn’t just a more palatable word for acquisition, but an opportunity to prize human flourishing. It’s an opportunity for us, as agents of change, to bring more of our selves to work. To think beyond the optimised formulas of fundraising and access our empathy, our ingenuity, our humanity.

Reuben Turner

I’ve seen a similar situation in Product Management. The product-isation of production of product. What John Cutler calls the feature factory. Developing new features knowing that they will not make any difference to the success of the product, not increase the value the customer gets out of the product, and not increase the revenue the organisation gets from the product, all continued and repeated because that’s the way its always been done.

It is that way because every organisation, whether a commercial business or a charity, is built on the same paradigm. If Taylor is the grandfather of maximising efficient production, Friedman is the father of maximising profit.

Friedman said “there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Friedman’s opinion has been a guiding principle for almost every organisation, whether for-profit or not-for-profit since he expressed it more than fifty years ago. The leaders of the organisation believe that their purpose is to maximum profit for shareholders in the case of a business and for the cause in the case of charities.

It’s hard to argue with that. If you’re a charity, why wouldn’t you want to increase profits for the cause?

The answer is, that you would and should, but of course there is a bigger picture. That question does not exist in isolation. There are lots of other things to consider, lines not to be crossed, decisions to be made about how, moral choices about the right and wrong way to increase profits. These are the ‘rules of game’, as Friedman put it. And those rules affect our thinking without us even being aware of them. Standard business logic says that profit is maximised by increasing revenue and reducing costs, often through efficiency measures (back to Reuben’s point about approaching fundraising as though it was manufacturing).

The profit a charity makes; how much money is left over for the cause after costs, should be a measure of success for a charity. But following Goodhart’s law, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” we realise where we went wrong. Profit has become the target. Targets drive behaviours, and often those behaviours have unintended consequences. The Taylor & Friedman -inspired mechanistic mindset drives organisational behaviours that cause people to feel like feel like “a cog in a fundraising machine designed for optimisation”, to quote Reuben again, rather than human beings doing good work that makes them feel like they are bringing value to those who engage with the charity.

Perhaps more ‘charitable’ targets are human-centred things like ‘how many lives touched’, and ‘how deeply affected’ over financial targets like ‘cost-to-serve’ and ‘revenue-per-visitor’. Of course charities will have to have uncomfortable discussions with themselves about the value of their impact on a human life, and how many human lives affected is sufficient for them to justify their size, funding and even existence. Such is nature of changing the rules of the game.

Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix – but for charities

Admin on 14/06/2020

Introduction

Developing services for charities is no easy task, especially as the need for their services increases and the available funding reduces. What approach can charities use to help select the most appropriate type of service? Perhaps we can learn from research from the commercial services sector, with some adaption for the charity sector, to better understand how to make strategic choices about service types.

Service Process Matrix

Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix (Schmenner, 1986) classifies services by the amount of in-person support is required from employees to enable the service to function, and by the amount of customer contact and/or customisation the service requires.

Source: Verma & Boyer, 2000

We could apply the same thinking to charity services, but change the language to help us move away from the commercial mindset and towards a greater focus on the needs of the beneficiaries of the charity services.

‘Customer contact/Customization’ refers to whether the service is offered in the same way to all customers or is customised for each customer. It could be renamed ‘Service-user’s need’ in our charity adaption of the model with more complex needs in the right hand column of the diagram and less complex needs to the left. This axis tells us that there is a notional threshold point at which a charity designing a service needs to decide whether the complexity of the service-user’s needs are sufficient to suggest the service should use a model in the right hand column, or simple enough for a model in the left hand column to apply.

Schmenner talks about ‘Labor intensity’ as a ratio between people and machinery, so a low-intensive labor business uses more technology than people in delivering its services (the top row of the diagram) whilst the opposite is true for a high-intensive labor business (the bottom row of the diagram). For our charity adaption we should keep this definition of labor intensity as it gives us a sense of the balance between people and their time and the technology used, but expand it to include other available resources such as funding and skills as these greatly affect a charity’s ability to deliver services. We can rename it ‘Available resources’. This axis tells us that there is a decision to be made about whether to use a model from the top or bottom row based on an understanding of the resources the charity has to implement the service.

Service Factory

Schmenner gives the examples of airlines and hotels as Service Factory services because of the low customer contact & customization – everyone gets the same service, and low labor intensity – the ratio of effort by people in delivering the service is less than the equipment, buildings and aeroplanes in this example.

An example for a charity might be a website with information about self-examination for testicular cancer or self-service web portal that allows the booking of a counselling session. These require little human effort and utilise a greater degree of technology to deliver the service.

This type of service works well where the service-user’s needs are less complex, such as needing to source simple information, and where technology can be implemented to meet that need.

Service Shop

Services with low labor intensity / resource needs but high customer customization / service-user’s need are classified as Service Shops. Service Shops can provide various types of customized services for the service-users but rely on more technology/capital resources than human effort to deliver the service.

Charities might use a Service Shop model to deliver individualised support pathways for young people getting into training. Each young person using the service receives support, mentoring and training that meets their needs, and the majority of the service is provided through technology such as a Learning Management System for training courses and video calls for mentoring.

Mass Service

Mass Services have low customer contact/customization in combination with high labor intensity, meaning that everyone gets the same service but it requires people to provide the majority of it. Schools use this model, providing every student with the same curriculum which is predominantly delivered by lots of in-person contact with the teacher delivering the service.

Charities use the Mass Service model to deliver services that are difficult to deliver using technology but don’t require a great deal of customisation in order to meet the needs of the service-user. Charity shops fit this model (although existing to generate income rather than meet the needs of service-users) as they require employees and volunteers to sort stock, serve customers, etc., all tasks that could not easily be automated. Charity shops offer the same service to all customers – buying stuff – and don’t change that based on the customer’s needs.

The Mass Service model is often used where a service needs to grow through replication, that is, in our charity shop example, opening another charity shop that works in the same way as every other charity shop. This is because recruiting more people to run the same service in a different location.

Professional Service

These services have both high customer contact/customization and a high degree of labor intensity, and tend to be highly customized according to the particular situation/need of each customer.

Charities providing expert legal advice for people experiencing domestic abuse or facing homelessness are utilising the Professional Services model. The high degree of education, skill and time required to deliver the service explain why this is high in ‘Available Resources’, and the high complexity of the need, including dealing with landlords, benefits system, courts, etc., explain why this service requires greater customisation in order to met the specific needs of each individual.

How to use this in designing a charity service

Choosing an appropriate service model

When initially designing a service the most appropriate model should be selected from the four types. To design and attempt to deliver a service that uses the Professional Service model when a charity doesn’t have the necessary resources will result in the service only meeting the needs of a few. And to provide a service built on a Service Factory or Mass Service model when the needs of those using the service are highly complex will result in the needs of those service users not being fully met by the service.

Multiple service models to make up a service

The complete service doesn’t have of only use one type, in fact a service could be designed with different parts of the service using different models where the complexity of need differs throughout the entirety of the service and where some parts could use technology to a greater degree than others.

Trading off needs and resources

In reality, there is always a trade off. The service user needs might be highly complex, for example a family dealing with a parent with terminal cancer, and requiring a high degree of resourcing, for example many hours of one-to-one care by a specialist nurse, but the charity simply does not have enough nurses to meet the needs of patient and family members. The charity then needs to decide whether to continue to offer the Professional Service model of support, either to fewer people or for fewer hours, or to redesign the service using a different model. Or sometimes, the difficult decision to decide that they are not the right charity to be providing the service.

Shifting service type with changing needs and resources

Designing a service of one type doesn’t necessarily mean that it should continue to use that type. If there is a change in the needs of the service users (becoming more or less complex over time), or a change in the available resources (introduction of better technology, more time and funding, improved skills) then charities should be able to shift the service to a different model.

If a service is delivered using a Service Factory model because that was appropriate at the time of initially building the service, but then the needs of the service-users become more complex then the service could be moved to utilising a Service Shop model to achieve better outcomes. Similarly, if a charity was providing a service using the Professional Services model but then experienced a reduction in funding that meant they no longer had the resources available to deliver the service in that way, then they should be able to redesign the service using a Service Shop model to ensure a service can still be delivered.

Conclusion

Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix, with some adaption, offers an interesting model to conceptualise the types of services designed and delivered by charities. It provides some practical direction in choosing a service type based on the resources the charity has available and the complexity of needs of the service-users, and guidance on responding the changing needs, both within the charity and from the people who benefit from the service.

Perhaps the important realisation here is that increasing the capacity of an existing service is not the only way to respond to changing needs, and reducing the capacity of a existing service is not the only way to respond to a reduction in funding, and/or employee and volunteer availability. Charities can respond to change by shifting service model.

References

Verma, R., & Boyer, K. K. (2000). Service classification and management challenges. Journal of Business Strategies, 17(1), 5-24. Cornell University, School of Hospitality Administration site: http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/59/

Schmenner, Roger W., How Can Service Businesses Survive and Prosper?, Sloan Management Review, 27:3 (1986:Spring) p.21

Four Stories of Systems Change

Admin on 14/06/2020

I spent August — December 2019 working with The Children’s Society to prototype how they might operate differently to better achieve their strategy, which includes being systems-led. I have struggled with the academic nature of a lot of systems change writing. Like everyone, I’ve personally experienced broken systems, but I haven’t seen (or perhaps haven’t noticed) many examples of tangible systems change and how it was implemented. Until I worked with The Children’s Society.

Charities need better digital technology for communicating with their service users

Admin on 13/06/2020

The Catalyst article ‘The top ten digital challenges facing the charity sector‘ showed how a number of charities were struggling with identifying and using the right platforms for communicating and providing digital services with their service users (number 2). Charities are facing this struggle because the products on the market are not designed to meet their needs. They need a different kind of digital communication technology, one that is built with privacy and security in mind that allows people from within the organisation to talk to people outside.

Charities delivering their services online need different types digital products and platforms to do so. They might need to implement an email service to send information to people, or social media tools to facilitate a shift in how they advocate for change, or as many charities are doing during times of social distancing, using communication technologies to support their service-users. Often the choice of technology is informed by what they currently have available and the cost, but it’s important to understand the different types products and what impacts the choices might have.

When we talk about digital communication technologies we mean synchronous methods such as video, audio and chat, and not asynchronous like email. There are three well established ‘product spaces’ for communication technologies.

  1. Products managed by an organisation used by its staff within an organisation.
  2. Products managed by organisations to communicate (one way) with people outside the organisation.
  3. Products managed by the third-party owners and used by people socially.

We could understand how they compare to each other by placing them in a grid which shows that products can be grouped by the type of users, whether they are consumer users or business users, and by usage, that is whether they are used within an organisation or out in public internet.

Matrix of product types
Communication products matrix

So, for example, digital communication technologies like Whatsapp are designed to be used by consumers on the public internet. Companies often add ‘business’ features to their products in an attempt to increase their market share but the product is usually still fundamentally designed as a consumer product for use on the public internet.

We’re seeing a need for products in a fourth space; that of communication products that allow people within an organisation to communicate with those outside the organisation in secure and private ways, but lets understand the other three a bit better first.

Products managed by a charity and used by its staff for communication within the organisation.

These kinds of products, such as Microsoft Teams, are typically manged by internal IT teams or third party agencies. They are designed from the point of view that security is established by the (digital) walls of the organisation and that it will only be used by people who work for the charity, who will all have managed user accounts.

Why charities might use this type of product

Products like MS Teams are built for collaborative working and are great for communicating between colleagues. They can be suitable for communicating with service-users in some cases, but it’s important to understand that they are built on the assumption that everyone using the product belongs to the same organisation and so should know who each other is. Because of this, these products are not built with the privacy of users in mind, which can cause problems if how they are used to communicate with service-users is not thought through clearly and carefully. MS Teams can allow external users to join video and audio calls without having access to the other features in Teams, which could be used for supporting individual service-users. And it allows guest users to be added, giving them access to more features and might be used to allow volunteers to work collaboratively with employees.

Of course, the other scenario where products like MS Teams would be used to do video calls with service-users is where there is no alternative product. In the real world, where a charity doesn’t have sufficient funds to procure an alternative tool, it is better to do something rather than nothing, and it is better to use a product that has a high degree of security than one that doesn’t.

When not to use this type of product

Products like MS Teams aren’t suitable for working with groups of service-users where privacy and safeguarding are concerns. This is because MS Teams reveals the identity of users by default, so any situation where groups of service-users interact in a digital space provided by the charity, they all become known to each other and, depending on the product settings, can contact each other without anyone from the charity knowing. Revealing personally identifiable information about a service-user to other people is a data breach, and putting vulnerable people in situations where they can be contacted by someone they don’t know could create safeguarding concerns.

Users can be made pseudo-anonymous by creating false accounts but this creates a potential information security risk for the organisation as they are then considered part of organisation (from the system point-of-view) and so could have access to documents that contain sensitive and private information, and further adds to the potential safeguarding concern as even though no individual knows the name of any other individual they can still have un-monitored contact with them.

A charity set on using MS Teams could go a step further by creating a separate instance of Teams for service-users and implementing monitoring tools and processes, but it isn’t a quick or easy solution and requires considerable expertise and investment.

Products managed by a charity to communication one-way with people outside the organisation.

A charity’s website is a good example of this type of product. It offers one way communication from the charity to it’s website visitors. There are still security concerns with websites, but as this type of product isn’t used for digital service delivery via video calls we don’t need to discuss it any further.

Products managed by the third-party owners and used by people socially.

This type of digital communication products are available on the public internet and are used by people for social means. Products like Whatsapp and Zoom typically prioiritise adoption and ease-of-use over security and privacy, which might be fine if you’re using it to chat with your mates (still questionable) but raises concerns for charities using the products to work with service-users.

Why charities might use this type of product

Charities might choose to use products like these if the people they work with are already using these apps, and importantly, they have judged that not using them to support people would be more detrimental to those people than the security and privacy risk that the tools present. This balancing of risks of one type against risks of another type is difficult so its important to have sufficient knowledge of both to inform making the decision.

When not to use this type of product

If these products don’t meet the needs of the service-users, then charities should think very carefully about using them because they are convenient for the charity. For people with limited access to the internet (perhaps because they use a pay-as-you-go mobile) video calls will use a lot of their available internet, so perhaps a phone call (which is far more secure) might be more appropriate. For people suffering domestic violence, being able to delete the record of the video call in the app might be really important for their safety. These things aren’t considerations for the companies like Zoom and Whatsapp, but they need to be very carefully considered by charities in choosing not to adopt a particular product.

Products managed by the organisation and used to communicate with those outside the organisation

Aside from dealing with the current needs in the best way possible, charities needing to deliver services using video has revealed a need for a different type of product, one that allows for the boundaries between the organisation and it’s service-users to be more permeable. It needs to consider privacy and security in design, understand different types of users and the ways they might interact, and that they have different needs in account management and privacy. It needs to be accessible, simple, easy to use. It needs to work in a browser, including mobile browsers, not require the users to download an app. It needs to meet so many use cases that the current tools that are available are just not designed to meet.

But until that product is built…

What alternatives are there to a technology that doesn’t exist yet?

Digital isn’t always the best solution. Using the telephone (which is more secure than video and audio calls over the internet), and sending letters/care packages to people can be simple cost-effective ways of staying touch, and talking to service-users.

Whether charities are using internal products (like MS Teams) or consumer products (such as Zoom) to deliver their services, the technology needs careful consideration. Understanding the security and privacy risks, the barriers to use, and how the technology changes the service being received (it’s never the same service, just delivered digitally), are all important considerations. Aside from the system side, people need to be trained in safe and effective use and how to respond if issues arise.

Its easy to see why choosing a digital communication technology is such a challenge for many charities.