Can we make dustpans like the Americans?

Last Christmas my wife bought me a dustpan and brush. They were beautifully wrapped.

She had bought them from Labour and Wait – a well known shop off Brick Lane in the east end of London.

There weren’t too many interesting features of my present,  but one did catch my eye.  My dustpan was made in the USA.  It was of course, well made. Indeed the Labour and Wait website says that it’s a “great looking dustpan”, which is “lightweight and engineered to lay flat and flush with the floor making sweeping into it very satisfying”.  And I can testify to that.

So how is it that a dustpan and brush can be profitably made in the world’s most expensive labour market?  And why are we importing them?

Before answering that … which I will attempt in my next blog …. we should all applaud the fact that IT CAN BE DONE!  It’s possible to manufacture the most mundane of things in an advanced, high wage economy, and presumably do it at a profit.

We’ve been labouring under the illusion for a long time (well since Margaret Thatcher anyway) that manufacturing is something we can let others do.  We have largely forgotten that money is made in the long term only by making things.  The Americans still make brushes, polishes, plastic goods and so on, the manufacture of which we’ve largely outsourced.

Now, as we re-discover the importance of manufacturing and as it has just recorded its best performance in 16 years, we should reflect on our ignoring of it for so long and the devastating impact that this has had.

Perhaps one of the most unfortunate impacts is the low esteem in which manufacturing is held and the unattractiveness of it for our brightest graduates – particularly women.

As good as it is for our creative industries to be strong, we don’t grasp the fact that these are companies that serve other businesses.  I can’t help feeling that a brief to design a dustpan that is satisfying to sweep into wouldn’t create a
stampede to the drawing board.

So for what it’s worth, here’s my tribute to our manufacturing places (shown on the G-View map) and to the 2,358,400 men and women who work there.

But in particular, we should pay particular tribute to the 23,800 who manufacture ‘cutlery, tools and general hardware’. If you are one of these people, please remember, as you perhaps ponder the fact that you don’t make IPads or Ixuses, that all over America there are companies productively making products arguably more work-a-day than yours. I will come back to that!

Data grubbing is bad for us

In a previous life, I worked in human resource management, negotiating with trades unions. It was a management function outside finance where a LOT of numbers were thrown around. How much was being claimed? What would be the impact on the organisation today and into the future. And how do we communicate all of this to the union side so that we might make their ‘wholly unreasonable’ demands more palateable?

From this experience, I learned three things about numbers. Firstly, we argue about both SCALE and SIGNIFICANCE.  Bankers’ bonuses are offensive because of their scale; their significance for most of us is negligible.  Significance arises because £100 to me, is not £100 to you.  Usually, the difference is one of proportion – is the £100 a tiny percentage of something meaningful or a large one?  Telling us that a banker’s bonus would pay for 10,000 nurses is a way of describing its scale; for something to be meaningful, it really does have to be close to home.

Secondly, presentation is all. In negotiation, this was often about timing or the agreement small print but it could also be about the scale of the axes on a chart.

Finally, and most importantly, I learned that I had to go into a negotiation with some kind of view on what we were all there for and what governed our behaviour. Some of my manager colleagues believed that every trade unionist was after as much ££ as they could get and hang the consequences for the business. This was never the case in my experience and I came to understand that both management and employees accepted that the numbers we were arguing about were constrained by a system that we all agreed was stable and robust.  In other words, we all had a theoretical world view which tied us together.

These three lessons remain highly relevant.

Firstly, in too many walks of business life, the issue of number significance remains elusive. The recent crime map showed that. The steady drip, drip of ‘data’ from Government shows it. It’s all about scale; almost nothing about significance.

For ‘presentation’ we now read ‘visualisation’.  But visualising meaningless numbers just makes them look pretty; it does nothing to enhance their meaning.  And of course, ‘scale’ produces FAR better visualisations.

Take violent crime in London and Greater Manchester from the recent crime statistics. In London, there were nearly 12,000 violent crimes; in Greater Manchester there were 3,000. You can just ‘see’ the relative bubbles!  One FOUR TIMES the size of the other.

However, the violent crime rate in London is 15 per 10,000 people; in Greater Manchester, it is 11 per 10,000 people.

The rate bubbles would look far less exciting.  Measuring scale, one bubble is four times the size of the other. Measuring significance, the bubble of one is only half as big again as the other.  To explore this click here.

Finally, the absence of a reasonably common world view amongst us is manifest across many walks of life. One in particular interests me – as a Londoner, now living north.

We lack any agreed road map to enhance local economies. This impacts on those of us outside London because London and the South East are largely strong, and will get stronger at the expense of the rest.

Of course, many accept a number of ‘givens’, like the need for northern economies to have more businesses. But few understand WHY this is important except that more businesses = more jobs.  (In fact, there is far more to the issue of business density than this).

The consequence is that I have a lot of sympathy with those business people involved with local economies who have been frustrated, angered and put off by the avalanche of numbers produced about those economies over the last few years.

That frustration is born of those numbers being produced in the absence of ANY common world view about what makes a local economy tick and prosper.  Business people need a ‘model’ to explain local economic growth; they need numbers consistent with the model; they need a strategy which links the two.

Models exist. So do the numbers. So do the strategies.

We’ve had enough of numbers in bubbles, of grubbing around for data.

The crime map and 18 million visitors

“Crime maps are ‘worse than useless’, claim developers” cried one Guardian headline. “Police map of crime: the data is richer and more useful” cried another.

As with all of these things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

The criticism that makes the data ‘useless’ largely concerns data quality. The fact that some of the ‘crimes’  might not result in a conviction strikes me as a petty quibble.  The positioning of a load of crime at a central point is clearly misleading.

I think the site itself works well. However, the question is whether it delivers information rather than data (to use a cliched distinction).

Useful information on crime comes if users can compare their area of interest with others, on any identified crime and whether performance improves or declines over time. On these measures, the site falls short.

On comparison: the map should be thematic to show surrounding areas. A chart should show crime types.

Crucially, the data must control for population size.

The police site does have crime rates – but only for ‘neighbourhoods’ and these are used to classify those neighbourhoods as places with (for example) a ‘high’ rate. BUT, this rate is defined as those places that appear in the top 2% of places.

As a result, every month the goal posts will move and no-one will be able to assess performance over time.

Visitors to http://recessionmap.co.uk/ will find these problems addressed. We will hold historical data and from month 3, we will offer a timeline so visitors can accurately assess if performance is improving.

Finally, there is the rumoured cost of £300,000 and I presume there’s a maintenance charge – probably 20%.

How does this commissioning happen? Having observed this from a distance for a while, what seems to happen is the commissioners believe they want a ‘website’. And they commission a website developer.

What should be commissioned is the good analysis and presentation of data — online. We’re not website developers but we do have software that works online.

We acquired this data and got it online within 24 hours. Updates will take a few minutes from here – and although we’ll do it for the moment, the police could do it for themselves. In other words, a LOT cheaper.

Outsourcing R&D in government

Suffolk is going to outsource everything.  In other places, development proceeds.  Let’s consider a key possible area.  The research and intelligence that should be supporting local enterprise partnerships.

Just in the last few weeks we’ve heard that South Tyneside is going to be spending more on their local information system and Newcastle City is going to join in.  The same is apparently true for Gateshead with their Electronic Neighbourhood Information Engine (GENIE). Southend is developing apace – but it’s late.  St Helens is proposing to launch next year.

How much are these software developments costing and do they represent good value for money?

We can answer these questions by considering the evaluation of local information systems that DCLG produced earlier this year.

I thought that there were two stand out conclusions. Firstly, that ‘payback’ was possible with an average online time of 14 hours.  Secondly, that the more a user used the system the LESS they valued it.  Oh and that 14 hours was a user assessment – the technologies didn’t appear to generate REAL useage statistics.

The authors were surprised by the second conclusion and couldn’t explain it.  I’m not sure why.  There really is only one explanation – the more these people used the technology, the more they pushed it and the less it delivered.  And is 14 hours a YEAR, really worth the candle?

Other headlines:  development costs average £95,000;  annual license costs between £2,500 and £10,000.  Annual average total running costs: £63,000, 80% of which is people.

So, can the private sector deliver all of this for less than £150,000 in year one and less than £65,000 in subsequent years?  Oh .. and can it do it better?