Planet of the Apps

Greetings.

Cicero is still here and has come back for yet another week to share education, enlightenment and enjoyment. It is pleasing to note that many seem to have missed your weekly dose of such sentiments. Again my profound apologies but hopefully you will over the coming weeks see and receive the benefits arising from the previous long absence of this page.

And to satisfy those of you still complaining let us see if we can be a wee bit more controversial this week. And in doing so hopefully too these words will not be too cerebral for many of you. Another oft repeated complaint from last week.

In previous weeks Cicero has not been averse to complaining about the pointlessness Of Apple apps. We even held a competition to identify the most useful and useless.
On further reflection Cicero was wrong and after prolonged consideration through the summer recess, and having himself acquired an iThingymybob, it is clear that the Apple model has much to offer to the Apparatchiks Class as they struggle to come to terms with the spending dictats of the Two Caesars. Indeed it might also point a way forward for those of us toiling away generating the wealth required to keep the Apparatchiks in the style to which they have become accustomed and to pay for the spending priorities of the Two Caesars.

Get this right and we can change the way we generate wealth and deliver public services in this country forever. Now there’s an incentive.

Now let us be clear, Cicero has absolutely no idea what makes an iThingymybob work in the way it does but he does greatly admire the model whereby a cottage industry has grown up cheaply developing a range of useful and useless apps for use on said device based on open access to the knowledge, information and codes required for said apps to work.

Why can’t this thinking be applied to the Apparatchik sector?

Let me give you an example. Why does government need to use taxpayer for expensive and glossy ‘quit smoking’ advertising? If we apply the Apple model the government would open up to anyone who wanted to know, all the data and insight it had on people who smoke, why they smoke, what stops them from stopping smoking, and letting others use the insight to develop strategies, programmes or ‘apps’ to encourage smokers to quit. We could easily envisage companies that make patches and nicotine replacement products picking up the baton and developing effective programmes and products for this market. Everyone a winner. Charities and other self help support mechanisms could also be developed to fill this space. And so we begat the Big Society.

A similar approach is already being applied in education. Why does the State have to run schools? Where is this decreed? What is wrong with the State providing open access to the all the information, standards and protocols they require from schools and letting anyone who wants to set up and run a school? How is this so vastly different from the Apple model?

And on we go. Surely this thinking can be applied to all the nooks and crannies of our Apparatchik run bureaucracy to work out where it is more cost effective, efficient and viable to provide the services on the Apple app model and where it can only be done by the State, with examples of this being minimised and limited? All it takes is imaginative and creative thinking and a willingness to let go of State-sponsored, taxpayer-funded sacred cows and contrary to popular belief such attitudes and capabilities do exist in the VTSSBs.

And why stop there?

Such thinking can also be applied to those creating wealth. Too often those of us working in business think we have to come up with the next great idea, the next best selling product, the next fantastic idea to reduce costs.

Why?

Sure we employ consultants and agencies and other third parties from time to time to do our thinking for us but why not change the model. Make our data, our insight, our problems and challenges more freely available and encourage anyone out there to develop income generating or cost reduction apps which can be applied in our businesses. Why do we think that only those who work in the business have the ideas and the brains? Let’s use the virtually combined brain power of the world population to come up with the next great idea. Surely it will be possible to create a community of interested people to generate money spinning or cost reducing apps for our business.

It might be a batty idea and it might require more thinking to be done, but it might just be a brilliant idea.

They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away but thinking like Apple could well keep the Chancellor or our business banking manager away too.

Is it only me..........but we are not made of money.

As you will no doubt have gleaned if you are addicted to and follow avidly all the latest news, the time is fast approaching when the Two Caesars will announce how they are going to spend a lot less of our money. And for the record it is worth pointing that the terminology used by the media is constantly wrong. It is not about ‘cuts’ which is what everyone bangs on and on and on about but reducing the amount of our money they spend on our behalf. Surely far less emotive than the C word which is henceforth banned from these pages.

And are you equally fed up with the whining and moaning and groaning from Apparatchiks fearful about jobs? We could fill these pages with comment on Apparatchiks whining about the indispensability of their jobs. Maybe we might have more sympathy if said whining Apparatchiks focused more on outcomes affected than their own employment situation. We do not pay our taxes to keep Apparatchiks in jobs. Get over it. We pay our taxes for services which deliver meaningful and substantive service outcomes and this is where the debate should be focused.
But this is not the main gripe this week though this is surely a topic to which we will return in the coming weeks as the Apparatchiks become ever more whining the closer we get to the two Caesars announcing how they are going to reduce the amount of our money, and that of international lenders, they think it prudent to spend.
Earlier in week Cicero had the great pleasure of attending a business dinner to celebrate examples of successful capitalism in ‘The City of a Thousands Trades’. The dinner was a joyous and pleasant enough event but something struck Cicero when there and it niggled.

The dinner was sponsored as is the wont of these occasions and the venue was festooned with the logos of those businesses that had paid to have their names in lights. In total there must have been about 10 logos prominently displayed, 8 of whom were from the public sector. In other words there were only three real sponsors-two real businesses and us, the taxpayer.

Now is it only me but quite frankly we do not pay our hard earned taxes to subsidise the troughing of well fed business folk, do we? What in God’s name motivated a collection of taxpayer funder Apparatchiks to think it was a bright idea, when we are on cusp of a re-balancing of the levels of money sneaked from our pay packets, to think this was a good idea?

Ideas and thoughts please on this most welcome.

Was that controversial enough for you this week?

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.