<\/a><\/p>\n

The Economist has an interesting piece<\/a> on why government web services tend to suck, especially when compared with the best corporate services. Their take is that a significant part of it is that isn’t any kind of competition, so there isn’t much fall out if government web tools are wretched:<\/p>\n

\nWhen Britain’s Inland Revenue website crashed on January 31st\u2014the busiest day of its year\u2014the authorities grudgingly gave taxpayers one day’s grace before imposing penalties. They did not offer the chance to pay tax in Sweden instead.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I suspect there’s significant truth in this, but I’m not convinced it’s the whole story. It’s amazing, for example, how many university web sites\/tools are pretty wretched, including those in the computer science departments<\/em>. You’d think that would drive away prospective students in ways that, in this very competitive environment, would have the kind of direct consequences that purportedly drive Amazon and Google. I certainly know that the U of M’s growing adoption\/creation of on-line tools has hardly been without its trials and travails; many of their web tools are really nice, while others totally make me want to cry. Sometimes the problems are lack of infrastructure supporting the development and maintenance of the tools (a problem that’s clearly plagued many business making the transition from bricks and morter to on-line). Sometimes the problem is infighting and bureaucratic silliness that would be cut off at the knees in a well managed company (but isn’t always – not all companies are well managed).<\/p>\n

I think, however, that one of the chronic problems (for the U of M, for governments, and for many companies) stems from the fact that the key decision makers just don’t use the internet much, so they’re not well positioned to judge the success and failure of their organization’s efforts. They often don’t use their own tools, so they don’t know how painfully awful they are, and when they do use them they don’t have the rich frame of reference needed to see what could be<\/em> instead of just what is<\/em>. And thus we get embarrassingly precambrian web tools. Compare this to Google, for example, where it’s clear that (a) their people are using<\/em> their tools at all levels and (b) they’re very aware of what other people are doing on the web (and not just in the area of search tools).<\/p>\n

Tip of the cap to Naughton once again for the pointer<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Economist has an interesting piece on why government web services tend to suck, especially when compared with the best corporate services. Their take is that a significant part of it is that isn’t any kind of competition, so there isn’t much fall out if government web tools are wretched: When Britain’s Inland Revenue website … Continue reading “Anyone want to pay their taxes in Sweden?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,5],"tags":[859,253,75,192,157,860],"class_list":["post-795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-education","category-web-development","tag-computing","tag-government","tag-internet","tag-on-line-communities","tag-university-of-minnesota","tag-web-development"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-cP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":651,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/09\/17\/a-different-kind-of-computing-curriculum-thoughts-on-an-interview-with-smalltalk-dave\/","url_meta":{"origin":795,"position":0},"title":"A different kind of computing curriculum? – Thoughts on an interview with Smalltalk Dave","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"17 Sep 07","format":false,"excerpt":"I finally got around to listening to this interview with Smalltalk Dave Thomas (as opposed to Ruby's Dave Thomas) from the Agile Toolkit Podcast. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this puppy, and curriculum design would be a totally different animal if more academics were listening to people like\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1807,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2013\/09\/26\/cucumber-et-al-do-have-a-role-me-thinks\/","url_meta":{"origin":795,"position":1},"title":"Cucumber, et al, do have a role, me thinks","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"26 Sep 13","format":false,"excerpt":"While there may be issues with how acceptance testing\/behavior driven development tools like Cucumber have developed and been used, I continue to find them very useful, especially in circumstances where it's important to decouple the tests from the design of the solution.","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":233,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/09\/11\/wikis-four-years-on-some-thoughts\/","url_meta":{"origin":795,"position":2},"title":"Wikis four years on: Some thoughts","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"11 Sep 05","format":false,"excerpt":"In a comment on a previous post, DesertDonkey asked my opinion on the feasibility of a wiki for the development of an internal knowledge base. I started my reply as a comment, but it grew beyond all sensible proportions and I decided that it really needed to be a post\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":715,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/11\/21\/if-microsoft-had-designed-gmail\/","url_meta":{"origin":795,"position":3},"title":"If Microsoft had designed GMail","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"21 Nov 07","format":false,"excerpt":"This is hilarious. They walk you through the stepwise changes if Redmond had designed GMail. Thanks to John Naughton for the pointer.","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":721,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/11\/27\/what-actually-base-web-design-on-data\/","url_meta":{"origin":795,"position":4},"title":"What?!? Actually base web design on data?!?","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"27 Nov 07","format":false,"excerpt":"Yup, crazy as it sounds. Eyetrack has collected some nice user data, which they summarize in \"What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes\", which is then reorganized in \"Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies\" over at VirtualHosting.com. At some point I should go through these\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1012,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2009\/06\/20\/looking-for-textbook-recommendations-os-networking-sysadmin-fuzzy-logic-and-refactoring\/","url_meta":{"origin":795,"position":5},"title":"Looking for (text)book recommendations: OS, Networking, Sysadmin; Fuzzy logic; and Refactoring","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"20 Jun 09","format":false,"excerpt":"Some deluded people believe that textbook orders for Fall Semester were due a month ago, but I'm never, ever close to on-time on these things, and am just now getting to it in a serious way. I'm teaching three courses in the fall: Models of Computing Systems Fuzzy logic and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books"","block_context":{"text":"Books","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/writing\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Foundations of Genetic Programming by Langdon and Poli","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/22\/97150393_42a89de26c_m.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}