Perspectives on Business – serie

Ever felt that lurking sense of Sunday night dread?In this warm and empathetic guide to the modern workplace, Helen Holmes tackles precisely what's going wrong in your workplace - and how you can improve your working week. Drawing upon expert research and employee interviews, she answers questions such as: Why does that difficult colleague refuse to take ownership of anything? What can I do about the constant data overload of email and meetings? Why am I still not being paid fairly?Holmes proposes that fear, a lack of focus, and a lack of fairness are at the core of workplace challenges, and outlines how goodwill, purpose and trust can overcome them.Written for you as an employee, this book offers empathy and pragmatism for anyone who's ever contemplated quitting their job and running for the hills. Instead, Holmes gives inspiring case studies and practical tips for crafting a better working week, one step at a time.

This book is for people worrying about their sinking ship. Based on experience, it is a guide for navigating the blockers, buzzwords and bloody-mindedness that doom any analogue organisation trapped into thinking that while the internet has changed the world, it won't change their world.Companies that grew up on the web have changed our expectations of the services we rely on. We demand simplicity, speed and low cost. Organizations founded before the Internet aren't keeping up - despite spending millions on IT, marketing and 'innovation'.This revised, expanded second edition of Digital Transformation at Scale is a guide to building a digital institution. It explains how a growing band of reformers in businesses and governments around the world have helped their organizations pivot to this new way of working, and what lessons others can learn from their experience.It is based on the authors' experience designing and helping to deliver the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS). The GDS was a new institution made responsible for the digital transformation of government, designing public services for the Internet era. It snipped £4 billion off the government's technology bill, opened up public sector contracts to thousands of new suppliers, and delivered online services so good that citizens chose to use them over the offline alternatives, without a big marketing campaign. Other countries and companies noticed, with the GDS model now being copied around the world.

All organizations are becoming service organizations. But most weren't built to deliver services successfully end-to-end, and the human, operational and financial impacts are abundantly clear. In the digital era the stakes are even higher, given how rapidly services change. Yet default working practices (governance, planning, funding, leadership, reporting, programme and team structures) inside large organizations haven't changed. Rather than modernize just one service at a time, it's the underlying organizational conditions that need to be transformed - anything less is futile.The Service Organization is the result of years of research and consulting, as well as dozens of interviews with executives. It explores significant challenges that leaders will recognize, and turns them into solvable puzzles by providing practical advice and tools that reimagine what the organization does from the perspective of its customers - and it organizes the activity needed to deliver the best outcomes. This book is for everyone involved, from designers to technologists and from operational staff to policymakers and leaders. It includes surprisingly simple and doable, but non-obvious, steps that don't depend on seniority or pay band and that are typically overlooked by even the most progressive professions, teams and companies.Kate Tarling sets a bold, ambitious and practical agenda for all service organizations. Her book is full of behind-the-scenes examples from the global companies, public sector bodies and non-profits that are now delivering and leading successful services. It shows how to reinvent organizations so they rely not just on 'transforming technology' but on putting the success of their services at the heart of how they operate.

The Metaverse - built from virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality - is arriving via wearable headsets that have cameras, microphones, speakers, sensors and communications built in. These spatial computing technologies create new social and economic connections, and while some of these connections are virtual, the business implications are very real.The authors set out the potential for financial services in metaverses and the 'always-on' immersive future internet, beginning with a look at the key technologies needed to make these metaverses useful for businesses. They then go on to explore the emerging realities in which new markets will function and the digital assets that will be exchanged in transactions between online identities.The book develops a comprehensive and practical model of the Metaverse and the nature of those new transactions in a business environment. It has a clear view of virtual worlds and it provides both a simple taxonomy for digital assets and a tried-and-tested model of digital identity that will provide a better understanding of the opportunities that exist in the many metaverses where we will work, rest and play in the near future.