Am back from a wonderful week with the family in Suffolk. Some lovely days by the sea in Southwold and Aldeburgh, and a trip to the castle in Framlingham too.
Holibobs
đź“… Daily Note: August 7, 2025
AI in Adult Social Care – guidance for adult care providers on the use of AI.
Giles shares “examples and links about working in the open and agile communication”.
Service mapping: building transparency, trust and transformation together on the Public Digital blog.
Service maps aren’t just tools – they’re catalysts for transformation. They clarify complexity, foster collaboration and enable informed decision-making. They help organisations navigate the challenges of transforming and continuously improving their services. We worked with Defra’s Farming and Countryside Programme (FCP) to develop a service map and a set of service outcomes.
Blood, Sweat and Roadmaps by Maarten Dalmijn:
Your roadmap is like an indicator species that reveals all the organizational dysfunctions in your organization. The roadmap is where business and tech meet, where your vision and strategy collide with your execution and teams. The roadmap is where departments and business units compete with your teams and other organizational priorities.
Steve Messer: Don’t just keep the lights on, shine bright:
Platform products, built by government for public sector organisations, are intended to be better, cheaper and preferable to competitors. If an arms-length body or small government organisation has to choose between a private-sector platform or a platform built by government, both of those platforms are in a market. The arms-length body will choose which platform to use based on the features offered, the price, the complexity of integration, design, accessibility, and loads of other factors.
Alan Wright – Jobs to be Done surveys:
As a product manager, one of my favourite ways to prioritise problems to solve for users is to understand their Jobs to be Done (JTBD). The best way to get this data is by having conversations with many users, but this is not always something users have time for. Surveys are a great complimentary method to gather this data quantitatively and quickly. In this post, I share the thinking behind the Jobs to be Done survey I have been running with users in my current role.
đź“… Daily Note: July 25, 2025
I *thought* I had settled on Devonthink as my everything bucket, but now I am falling down an Obsidian shaped rabbit hole thanks to Steve Messer linking to this monster:
Every few months I set aside time for a “random revisit”. I use the random note hotkey to quickly travel randomly through my vault. I often use the local graph at shallow depth to see related notes. This helps me revisit old ideas, create missing links, and find inspiration in past thoughts. It’s also an opportunity to do maintenance, like fix formatting based on new rules in my personal style guide.
Local Government Association Cyber Incident Grab Bag for Local Authorities – Public Digital.
Along with other public services and businesses, cyber threats pose a significant risk for local authorities. The LGA wanted to provide practical support that could assist councils needing to respond to a serious cyber incident. They also wanted to make sure that the product clearly articulates how cyber security is a team sport, emphasising how a strong response hinges on collective strength.
Is it just me or are other people still putting ‘please’ in their AI prompts?
On user groups for local government software
Have had a few conversations lately with local gov folk which bemoaned the lack of active user groups for most software systems. This is a problem! What could we do about it?
It seems like vendors are keen to say they have user groups, but then once the sale is made, less keen on convening them.
There’s real advantages in the people actually using software to get together to share insight, issues, collectivise around requests, and so on.
Is there a space, I wonder, for an independent user group as a service offering? Someone to provide a safe place for online discussions, organise regular meet-ups, do a bit of the admin, and maybe engage with the vendors to get them to turn up and so on. Question is probably ‘who pays?’.
Another little LinkedIn post / rant, which I am saving for posterity here.
đź“… Daily Note: July 15, 2025
Harry Metcalfe: Governance happens in foggy weather
We need to reclaim human judgement, subjectivity and the primacy of direct experience as vital skills for leadership
Brilliantly interesting stuff from Bill Thompson: Writing the Public Internet.