I had the thought the other day that an awful lot of time gets wasted in local government digital because of the constant cycle of probably unnecessary change.

Here’s an example: new chief digital person comes in, and the first thing they want to do is to impose themselves, so new strategy, often new tech, new approaches and ways of working etc.

Now obviously everyone feels justified in doing this. Frankly, if I were to get a new job running digital in a council, it’s the first thing I would do!

But it is usually a waste of time. I heard the other day about a council who have brought in a new interim CDO type person and the first thing they are doing is to get rid of one digital platform to replace it with another. It just so happens to be the one that was previously canned to make way for the current one!

Put like that, it seems very silly, and a lot of work and time for no real obvious improvement. After all, a team might spend 18 months or 2 years migrating from one platform to another, to be in basically the same position as before, only on different tech.

Trying to put a stop to it, though, is really challenging. Perhaps this is, again, an argument for a bit less local autonomy in individual councils when it comes to choosing technology. If all the time, energy and money spent on cycling through different options every 5 years was instead invested in improving shared platforms, we probably would make a lot more progress.