An online notebook
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An online notebook
Light blogging recently – partly due to starting a new contract, and partly due to the fact that I am just back from a lovely week by the seaside. Didn’t venture too far, just an hour and a bit down…
Coined a new (to me!) phrase today: “performative project management”. Can see myself using it a lot from now on!
I love stories like this. Luton’s Hazel Lunn shares the low down on her career in local government, from working in the contact centre to now heading up technology and infrastructure for the Council: When I first joined local government…
This looks quite interesting: London Productivity Library. A productivity tool from LOTI, for any organisation to deploy. A curated collection of prompts, workflows, productivity tips, and AI assistant how-tos that work with whatever stack your organisation uses. There is a…
Another great update on the low code platform rollout at Luton, from Kev Rowe: A key principle of our low code platform approach is to build reusable components that can support multiple services. Over the last two sprints, James Coleman,…
Sucharitha Revanuru from the Essex Digital Service team writes From Bananas to Better Outcomes: Taking Product Thinking to the LGD Community: Like many digital teams, one of our biggest lessons has been learning to balance stakeholder requests with genuine user…
I don’t know why I enjoy aggressively sceptical posts about AI so much, but I do. Here’s a doozy: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making: There have been several occasions where I have seen someone, apropos of nothing, blurt out…
Matt Cain – The Architecture of Effective Digital Government Centres: Over the last eighteen months a distinct cohort of governments has produced fast measurable gains in digital government. These aren’t “just” against international rankings (the biennial UN Index will be…
Ronan Fitzgerald on the Justice Digital, Data and Science blog writes How user research transformed GOV.UK guidance for separating families: Thousands of people use guidance on child arrangements every month, often at some of the most stressful moments in their…
TPX Impact have published a “Market-shaping playbook for policymakers”: Market-shaping is the practice of designing and delivering interventions that make a public service market produce better outcomes. Services like planning, housing management, social care and education are powered by markets,…
Via Jukesie – the Department for Education’s Product management principles.
Kailani Knight – The Certainty Principles: Accessibility work often feels chaotic. Every new project seems to start from scratch. Every person who flags a barrier is treated like a unique puzzle to solve. The result is slow, expensive, exhausting –…
On the MHCLG Digital blog – Building Local Transcribe for local government: Local Transcribe is a new AI-powered tool designed to change that by capturing conversations, transcribing and summarising them, and producing a draft set of case notes for officers…
Ben Welby helpfully summarises a lot of the chatter about where all the digital stuff in government is going following the decision to break up DSIT.
Johnny Williams – No Ivory Towers Here Please (LinkedIn warning): What DSIT hasn’t done is build sovereign and resilient digital infrastructure below that GOV.UK front door. Standardising the citizen-facing layer is a different achievement from owning the plumbing underneath it,…
MySociety asks Robots and councils: how is AI being used by local government – and what can we find out about it? Artificial Intelligence, as we know, is everywhere. For governments and public bodies, the possibilities for policy-making seem endless.…
James Plunkett publishes a long read on approaches to education (Medium warning). It’s well worth your time. Really like this in the concluding paragraphs: The challenges facing public services can feel demoralising; there is such a mismatch between the complexity…
Richard Pope: On waiting, digital and where the state chooses to operate (LinkedIn warning): The post-war digitisation of the UK’s tax and benefits system, the creation of automated institutions like Girobank, and teaching children programming with the BBC Micro (ironically,…
Matt Wood-Hill continues to blog his thoughts on his time in government working on digital planning. This is a useful reflection on how central government best works with local: ODP starts from the premise that those working at the coalface…
More new content on the LGR digital playbook! This time, it’s quite a long read on commercial, contract and supplier considerations during reorganisation. This quote from a local gov person interviewed for the piece is perceptive and as a sector…