Don’t Let Your Mind Die

Allstate has developed a programme that uses InSight, a video software package from Posit Science that’s designed to reverse age-related cognitive decline and improve visual processing skills needed for safe driving.

To say it in plain English, a game has been created to help the elderly drive more safely by stimulating visual processing in the brain. Posit claims the results illustrate a reduction of dangerous driving manoeuvres by up to 40%, an improvement in stopping distance by an average of 22 feet when travelling at 55 miles per hour and a reduction in crash risk of up to 50%. Allstate hope to offer insurance discounts to older drivers nationwide who use the software.

Brain-training has become increasingly popular with the release of numerous DS games endorsed by celebrities such as Nicole Kidman. Research has shown genuine effects on cognition psychology by ‘brain-training’. They work by challenging and invigorating the mind and making people step outside their well-trodden paths of thinking and routine.

A Japanese based architect has even designed a house which is difficult for the body and mind to manoeuvre around. They argue that by challenging yourself in this way you will delay death. I’m not suggesting we all go and live in crazy buildings that look more suitable for The Clangers than real people, but challenging the mind is vitally important especially as we start to age and routine sets into our lives. Innovation is based on fresh thinking “outside the box” and is needed to drive services and processes forward. Arguably routine challenge of the mind is beneficial to anyone and would do much to improve the way we think in our roles.

The Innovation Team is currently interested in ‘Serious Gaming’ and ‘Virtual Learning’ and would be especially interested in any examples around Kent.

Claire Matthews

• Thank you to swamysk for photo (top left) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.
• Thank you to SlipStreamJC for photo (middle left) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.
• Thank you to artethgray for photo (bottom right) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.

Make Your Ideas Heard

Innovators Council – Call for Ideas

There is a new mechanism to make your ideas heard and fast-tracked. The Innovators Council are currently calling for ideas from people who are closest to the frontline delivery of services. The cabinet office realises that those using, delivering or involved in public service will often have the clearest view of what needs to change. They want to reform from the bottom up to ensure the country comes out the recession fairer and stronger than ever.

This is not about minor change this is radical innovation, ideas will be fully supported, developed, tested and implemented with relevant experts on hand. You could be a champion of new creative, original services right at the centre of change.

A simple change can make a big difference as demonstrated by the pilot scheme Tell Us Once. This is an idea which developed around helping people cope with bereavement, as informing dozens of agencies about a loved ones death can be emotionally distressing. This is a perfect illustration of innovation at its best, creatively improving public services whilst making them more efficient.

If you have an idea please submit via email, post or online at www.publicexperience.com. You can also visit this address to view other ideas and comment on them.

Claire Matthews

• Thank you to theparadigmshifter for photo published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.

Powering Through I.T. Problems

When it comes to IT skills, people are diverse in their abilities and experience. It can become a nightmare to find a course which is suited to our own particular knowledge gaps at the right level. Numerous people either puzzle through or ask a colleague for help; but what about when this is not an option? Daunted by the prospect of joining a course, puzzled at types of training and unaware of their own needs many opt to stay stuck.

One to one training helps to dispel these fears by providing a personal, highly specific service. Learning and Development have evolved their own special version of this called IT Power Hours. Targeting needs in a personalised, efficient way these Power Hours are delivered at the comfort of the customers own desk at their own pace. The real icing on the cake is that time, expenses and environmental costs all spared thanks to the innovative manner in which they are delivered.

When Adam Fox from Learning and Development researched online meeting services he soon realised that this could be perfectly adapted to meet training needs. Using software called Netviewer and the aid of webcams and microphones training can be provided remotely. Features of this include the ability to use PowerPoints, remotely view trainee and trainer desktops, provide services to large groups in any location and check understanding. IT Power Hours have been a success and now Learning and Development are looking at developing a range of other programmes via this method.

Watch out for their Extramails to keep updated.

-C Matthews

With thanks to Adam Fox

• Thank you to mandyxclear for photo (top left) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.
• Thank you to hankword for photo (bottom right) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.

Future Proofing Your Best Asset

The Talent Management Programme:

There is an imminent problem facing many organisations across the UK, a shadow is looming bearing a new kind of loss. A wave of retiring workers is going to hit us within the next five years. Large numbers of these retirees will be highly skilled and will hold priceless experience, information and knowledge critical to their organisations. Innovative solutions are needed to manage these potential losses and avoid vulnerability. Mention the ‘R’ word, however, and often Training and Innovation departments suddenly find the funding pulled out from under their feet. Recession may mean tightened belts but as Kent County Council knows, this is no time to bury heads into sand. Creativity will be the only thing that separates the winners from the losers in not just this economic climate but the difficulties that lay ahead.

Kent County Council is piloting the first programme of its kind within the UK in preparation for the mass retirement of the baby boomer generation and thereby avoiding vast losses. So who exactly is going to plug this void? Well perhaps it could be those who grew up when the world was technologically changing the fastest: those who learnt to use the internet before they could read. The Google generation eat breath and sleep knowledge management without even realising it and are perfectly adapted to a changing workplace. This may come as a culture shock to some but tools like Facebook and Google have revolutionised the way the next generation thinks and works. Collaborative working, knowledge sharing and networking are now performed with such ease and agility thanks to the Internet. The young will replace the retired, defeating our knowledge and skills monsters with new technological tools and fresh, innovative approaches.

So lets talk talent management, how is Kent County Council going to take our county’s bright sparks and

develop them into the workforce of the future? Greenhouse was the first to conceptualise the ‘Younger Person Talent Management Programme’. This was then taken forward by Learning and Development to produce a new nationally recognised programme. This is a first for KCC, a first for Kent and a first for the UK, there is no other programme like this anywhere! The young, high potential employee may be seen as a rough diamond which can be polished up into a truly valuable asset with a course which tackles highly specific key issues. Take your candidate add a dash of networking skills, confidence, self worth, assertiveness, awareness of organisational politics, communications skills and a push in the right direction and you have made a jolly good investment. Greenhouse and Learning & Development’s message is clear: Save on your recruitment costs, avoid culture shock and retain your talent.

As they say actions speak louder than words, and the L&D team are not short on action. After a year of development the first workshop will be running on Friday the 31^st to be followed by other programmes which will be bespoke to the current issues and participants needs. Any further changes to the economic climate will be hard pressed to damage this programme. Workshops are flexible, responsive and able to meet new issues as they arise.

It doesn’t stop here. This is only the beginning. On completion of the Talent Management Programme young people should be encouraged towards other programmes supporting qualifications such as Leadership and Management. It is important to realise that Training and Development never stops and the Talent Management Programme provides the first step of many.

C Matthews

With thanks to Nick Smead from Learning and Development and Holly Strang,Chair of Greenhouse.

For more information on Greenhouse please visit: http://knet2/staff-zone/staff-support-and-well-being/staff-groups/greenhouse/?searchterm=greenhouse

• Thank you to Genevy Madeline for photo (top left) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.
• Thank you to PhotoGraham for photo (bottom right) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.

What do you get if you cross Social networking with Training?

What do you get if you cross Social networking with Training?…Ishare.
***UPDATE: FULLY LIVE 1st of JUNE!***

Ishare is an exciting new training and development website for Kent and Medway.

It is the first joint collaboration of its kind between all 14 councils, boroughs and districts across Kent and users will be able to search courses from any of these organisations. Essentially Ishare aims to make the most of opportunities offered though other authorities in order to upskill the public sector workforce in preparation for a challenging future.

The website boasts features inline with the latest trend of social networking. This allows users to create a profile, build up contacts, share career ideas, ask questions and post answers. It is hoped this will promote joined up thinking across Kent and bring some consistency and efficiency in training. The site places the user in control of their training and consequently their career. This empowerment to the individual will heighten self worth, confidence and retention to the organisation.

The creators of Ishare are already thinking about the future with plans to include secondment and mentoring across authorities as well as the ability to share policies and procedures. Ishare is live not so visit www.i-share.org.uk to register.

-C Matthews

With thanks to Tricia Palmer and Angela Rowe from Medway Council.

We’ve started to use Yammer!

Colleagues from around KCC have started to use Yammer to find out what other people are working on and get involved.

www.yammer.com is a micro-blogging site, a little like Twitter, for internal staff only. When you sign up to use the site, it takes the suffix of your email address (@kent.gov.uk) to add you to the KCC network.

Only people with an @kent.gov.uk email address can then join or see the group.

The site works on the premise of asking one simple question, what are you working on? By answering this question, other people across the organisation can find out what is going on in other areas and whether there is anything they would be interested in or has a cross over with their own work.

Hollie Snelson, Internal Communication Manager, said, “A few people across the authority have started to use Yammer to see if it could be a useful tool. Already it has proved a handy way of getting some informal feedback on projects people are working on. There aren’t that many users yet but as more people sign up it could be a great way of sharing information and knowledge informally.”

To try Yammer for yourself go to www.yammer.com and register using your KCC email address.

Hollie Snelson, Internal Communication Manager.

• Thank you to avlxyz for photo published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.

Have a Happy Unconference

Can you imagine arriving to an event to find out there is no set agenda, no booked speakers, and no set aim? There is just a location, a name and a large bunch of people who are motivated by social change.

The event described is an Innovation Camp and there are a few of these that occur regularly within the UK: Social Innovation Camp, LocalGov Camp and 2gether08 which is the largest UK digital festival.

Those people who manage to secure themselves 1 out of only 100 invitations turn up at Social Innovation Camp with no idea of what might be ahead.

Everyone must be prepared to actively lead or participate in the sessions. This style of event is called an unconference where the topics are not decided until the actual day and only by the participants.

Event in this format are unpredictable, volatile and hugely successful. Anna from SICamp told me that the first day is always the most stressful and only after this can she can tell whether the event will be a success or not.

Graphic Designers, Web developers, Campaigners, NGOs, Politicians and entrepreneurs are some of the attendees who aim to use social technology for the greater social good. This, however, is not without a price, in SICamp six bare boned concepts are radically transformed into prototype web-based tools in a minuscule 48 hours! These intense weekends have produced hugely successful concepts and websites such as ‘Good Gym’ and ‘Enabled by Design’. Viewing these, it is hard to believe they were matured in such a short space of time.

These are inspiring examples of how people are brought together to share knowledge, ideas, skills and networks to tackle pressing social needs. Much can be learned from the fearless organisers of such events, in that sometimes in order to gain the most from audiences they need be engaged in a way which is uninhibited. SI camp believes that the event creates excitement by getting people face to face and talking about things which they feel passionate about. Even if organisations such as Kent County Council decide against holding their own unconferences there is still much to be learn behind the style of these events.

SI camp run miniature meet-ups, which anyone is free to sign up to (limited places of course!), a smaller group turn ideas around in an even smaller timeframe. It is worth contemplating whether some meetings should evolve into intense, uninhibited, unconference styles to quickly target social problems with a fast turnaround of ideas and solutions.

The Innovation team are currently researching Social Innovation events like these. For more information contact claire.matthews@kent.gov.uk or please see:

http://localgovcamp.com/
http://www.sicamp.org/
http://open2gether.com/

Thank you SICamp for the photos published under Creative Commons

Claire Matthews

The Art of Stealing Fingerprints

FingerPrint Theft

Wouldn’t you love to be able to sign into your personal accounts with a simple swipe of your finger? Well now you can. Fingerprint powered USB sticks, Car locks and passwords will be seen in all major shops within 2009.

So what’s the problem?

People worry about the security. Once some one has stolen your fingerprint you can’t replace it like you can a credit card, although this kindtheft is difficult to do. In the extreme scenario there has been a news report of a criminal chopping off a car owners finger to gain entry to his expensive car!

So good or not? Its up for you to decide.

More info here.

Robert Bromley

• Thank you to piddaz for photo (top right) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved
• Thank you to Crys for photo (bottom right) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved

The Award Winning Pic & Mix

“Around the world, the first phase of Government use of the internet is coming to an end with public services and information largely online. We are now at the start of a new era, where Government starts to learn how to support citizens’ own ways of making, finding and re–using information online”

So says Tom Steinberg, founder and Director of mySociety on the publication of The Power of Information, a report by him and Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of the National Consumer Council, commissioned by Cabinet Office Minister Hilary Armstrong to ensure Government acted as a leader in understanding changes in communication and information technology. The report argues that government could now grasp the opportunities that are emerging in terms of the creation, consumption and re-use of information. Current policy and action is not yet adequate to grasp these opportunities.

Extract from: http://www.binarylaw.co.uk/index.php/2007/06/14/gov-20-power-to-the-people/

What did we do about it?

It was with this backdrop that in September 2008 the Change Through Innovation team entered the PIC ‘n’ MIX (latterly called Pic & Mix) concept into the Innovate08 competition. We won! Following this success the Pic & Mix project was born. As part of the prize Kent County Council receives a number of days top consultancy from Microsoft. We also won several copies of Microsoft Office, which have been shared out to charity.

What is Pic & Mix?

Wrapped up within KCC business databases is a lot of publicly available information, though not necessarily in a re-usable format. To address this Pic & Mix has three primary objectives: 1. allow information to be published in a re-usable format – e.g. RSS feeds 2. provide mashup tools to “play” with this and other external information 3. provide guidance and self-help using this Web2.0 services through wiki and forums

What’s a mashup?

Using a Web 2.0 service Wikipedia, it has an entry for mashup which says:

“In web development, a mashup is a Web application that combines data from one or more sources into a single integrated tool.“

By using KCC provided re-usable data, such as an address list of schools, this could be mashed up with other data, say Google Maps to make something more useful to the mashup creator. Pic & Mix will enable ordinary users, not just computer programmers, to re-use publicly published data in a new and creative way, probably not even considered when the data was first gathered or published. Great!

If you are interested in a future application for this project, then please contact us now at innovation@kent.gov.uk.

Glyn Davies

Thank you to nataliej for photo published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved

ABOUT: Knowledge Management

What do we mean?

Knowledge management involves creating the conditions for people to make

the best use of knowledge and nurture innovation.

Why are we researching this?

The most useful information we find is contacting someone we trust will know
the answer or someone who does. We rarely quantify how much time and
money this can save. This doesn’t just mean we find the answer, we can also
learn from colleagues’ experience and even avoid making the same mistakes
and adapt practices that have worked before. To nurture knowledge with
external organisations, like universities, who can provide the expertise we
need within KCC and collectively across the public sector family in Kent .

How are we going to research this?

We want to review and test new platforms for information & knowledge
transference. Because of the complexity of the tools, we will focus on those
which are the easiest for people to interact with the content, search and
manage their knowledge in a way that suits them. We will build on our
collaboration with the CLG/IDeA Knowledge Hub, Warwick Business School
on knowledge networks and the internal review of Information Management.

What are we going to research?

We will research how knowledge is currently managed, shared and created.
We will look at innovative ways of doing this, like filtering
knowledge/recommendations on a specific issue, visualising data to show
patterns of working or discovering the “unknown unknowns”. From this, we will
look at the applications that can be used in practice.

What does the analysis show us?

From existing practice such as the Medway Children Portal & LAA Data Room,
we can see that given that more and more issues cross services and
organisations, there is a risk that councils will make decisions without making
the best use of their collective intelligence.

What do we want to achieve?

If we are to effectively re-use ideas, we want to make sure we can connect the
processes, people and technology to manage this knowledge.

How can you be involved?

If you are researchers/consultants , we would like to explore how we could
capture together how effective these techniques are on managing knowledge
on a specific issue.

If you are innovators, we would like to explore how we could pilot your tools
with a group of staff or citizens on a particular issue.

If you are organisations in sectors who have used these tools, we would like to
share the learning and explore opportunities for collaboration

Noel Hatch

• Thank you to takomabibelot for photo (top right) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.
• Thank you to killermonkeys for photo (bottom left) published on Flickr under Creative Commons licence, some rights reserved.