Wednesday, 4 March, 2026

As an experiment, relating to some work I’m doing for a customer, I asked Google’s Gemini to do some deep research and write a report about the market for revenues and benefits systems for UK local government.

You can read and comment on what it produced on Google Docs, if you want to. It’s certainly a comprehensive document, although it’s very hard for me to decide what in there is correct or way off beam.

Is this helpful – especially for those councils approaching LGR? I have no idea.

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This is neat:

Gazette is a lightweight Gmail-to-RSS bridge designed specifically for reading newsletters in standard RSS readers.

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Diane Coyle, David Eaves, and Beatriz Vasconcellos – Digital Infrastructure:

A government wouldn’t build a dozen roads connecting the same two places. But this happens often with digital services. Countries allocate billions to IT spending without realizing the need to treat these systems as shared infrastructure. This siloed approach fragments systems, making it harder to share or leverage data among public agencies and with the private sector.

What if we treated a set of core digital systems—such as digital IDs, payments, data exchange platforms, credentials, and other shared services that drive core functions across government and the economy—the same way we treat roads or power grids? As essential, long-term, shared systems designed for repeated use.

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Monday, 2 March, 2026

The Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales has published some service patterns, exploring the ‘Book’ and ‘Apply’ patterns.

It’s good stuff and to make it really useful, more needs to be done, to embed these ‘patterns’ as steps in a service design – also linking them to technical capabilities at the right level of abstraction.

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Friday, 27 February, 2026

There was a time when MacOS was lauded for the quality of its design and user experience.

CleanShot 2026-02-27 at 15.34.29@2x.

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Doug Belshaw – The (AI) Lottery Is Already Running:

AI tools arrived as things you could choose to try: chatbots, image generators, and the like. Pretty quickly, though, they’ve become things employers expect to be used, positioned as ‘things your competitors are already using’, and of course embedded in platforms on which we all depend.

That shift from you can use this to you can’t afford not to happened quickly and without anyone holding a vote.

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Thursday, 26 February, 2026

Jerry Fishenden – A farewell to forms:

Citizens routinely suffer the consequences. Multiple services require us to complete near identical steps — finding and photocopying or scanning documents like passports and utility bills, filling out forms (online and offline) that ask for the same personal information, and waiting days or even weeks while an overstretched public employee cross-references and shares data across various systems before reaching a decision about our eligibility…

…But what if we could invert this model? What if we could implement a genuinely citizen-centred approach to service design, one built around the principle of instant proof of eligibility and not centralised and repetitive data collection and processing?

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Ben Carpenter shares some recent updates to the service standard (LinkedIn warning):

We’ve made it extra clear in ‘Solve a whole problem for users’ and ‘Choose the right tools and technology’ that existing principles to design around users and not technology, and to reuse existing solutions, apply to AI technologies as they do to traditional digital technologies. This is the case throughout the Service Standard, but we have called it out specifically in those points.

There are also new requirements in ‘Have a multidisciplinary team’ for service teams using AI in a service to have someone on or available to the team who fully understands how it works and the impact of using it.

And ‘Choose the right tools and technology’ now requires teams to assess the impact of technologies on user experience, inclusion, and the reliability of information and decisions.

We have also specified that quality assurance testing must not be left to automated tools and that service teams must monitor outcomes for users and ethical issues such as bias.

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Interesting writing project from Ben Welby – The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe Coded World:

Public service teams are at a kairos moment: a time when a new technical capability invites us to rethink almost everything about how we build and deliver services. But our centre of gravity isn’t swayed by “AI magic”. It rests on civic values we already know to be true: start from user needs; follow evidence over hunches; prize outcomes over outputs; prefer pragmatism to hype; fix the basics; and above all, put human worth and inclusion at the core. These are the ground we stand on when anything new arrives.

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