Dave

Dave

The worst council website I have ever seen

I’ve been doing this job now for what feels like an awfully long time. As I’ve said before, sometimes I get cranky having to have the same conversations with people about issues I really thought we had all resolved in…

Stephen Mounsey on standards: That matters because some constraints are good constraints. They protect the basics. They stop us reinventing things we do not need to reinvent. They make it easier to reuse what already works. They can create pace,…

A new book from Public Digital: The Intelligence Era Organisation – Creating the Conditions to Thrive in the Age of AI. If you are a senior leader responsible for transformation and AI adoption in an established organisation, you’ll undoubtedly recognise…

Something has changed recently with the algorithm on LinkedIn, and I have to say I don’t like it much. Am suddenly getting these posts – mostly written by men of a certain age, who have jobs that have things to…

I really like the framing of digital leadership as a form of gardening in this post: I think of digital capabilities as the plants that we are trying to grow throughout our organisation’s digital garden, its culture. Sometimes we need…

In a conversation this morning it struck me how useful the Local Government Digital Standard might be to those councils going through LGR, trying to get agreement amongst a bunch of different colleagues about priorities, principles, and so on. The…

The National Audit Office have published a Good practice guide for organisations using AI: This guide highlights key considerations for audit and risk assurance committees when overseeing the planning, deployment and scaling of artificial intelligence (AI) within public sector organisations.…

Another update from the Luton low code team on building out a system for managing complaints and other feedback. Have seen this in action and it is really impressive. More impressive, in fact, than Kev’s joke. Part of the difficulty…

The Local Government Digital Standard website

I have finally finished putting all the material for the LGDS onto a website to make it a bit easier to get to grips with. Am still working through a couple of bits of feedback, but everything you need to…

Finally got round to re-hosting localgov.blog onto a beefier slice of cloud. Also reworked how emails get sent out of the various blogs etc for new accounts, password resets and so on, which will make things a bit smoother for…

Giles points to a bunch of interesting things, including: Moments – a very bare bones photo sharing thing Lettera – yet another Mac Markdown editor

The Luton team show you can blog about anything, including the rollout of new printers. Over the last few months, the DDaT team have been working on the refresh of the council’s fleet of printers with Ricoh being the new…

This looks useful: Guidance and tools for digital accessibility on GOV.UK.

Following my linkage yesterday to the AI innovation in planning, Tom Loosemore weighs in on the unintended consequences: One worry? Were I to put my mind to the grift, I could easily build a subscription service that would allow anyone…

The BBC reports on Dorset Council testing AI to speed up planning applications: Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are being trialled in Dorset to help combat planning application delays. The team of agents is helping Dorset Council planning officers with minor…

Jo Carter – “Your survey is lying to you: uncovering the pitfalls”: A survey is a tempting thing. It looks inviting, it’s free to pick up, yet it can do a surprising amount of damage, especially when people don’t realise…

ERP in local government

There is a lot of ERP talk at the moment, particularly in the light of LGR, and so I thought I would ask one of my robot friends to do some research into the state of things at the moment…

I have officially given up on fighting GoDaddy’s customer support and accepted that, for the time being, my locali.se domain is lost to me 😢 So the Localise website is now – and for the foreseeable future – found at…

Great notes on transformation network building from Matt Wood-Hill: Tangible products and artefacts helped build traction. Starting out as a product team gave us a big advantage. In order to co-design digital planning products at scale we had to collaborate…

Jerry Fishenden shares a useful batch of thinking about AI, etc.