Dave

📄 Balancing ambition and caution in LGR

Chatting with Clare this morning about all things digital and local government reorganisation, I came to the conclusion that it really is all a balancing act. The risks of things going wrong are huge, and the importance of being ‘safe and legal’ is vital… but at the same time this is a generational opportunity for positive change and genuine transformation that must not be wasted.

So I think the answer for leaders going into this is: be ambitious, but be aware of the minefield you are working in. Be realistic about what can be achieved in what timescale, but absolutely make sure that at the right points in your roadmap (which ought to span a decade, if we are being honest) radical reform is on the agenda.

A couple of ideas on what that looks like. One of those inflection points is right at the beginning, when the business case is being put together and the design of the new organisation is being thought about. This is a moment for radicalism, for the new council to be infused with digital-age principles: responsive, user-centred, flexible, a positive actor within a wider system, preventative, relational, etc.

Do not, whatever you do, factor in any short term savings around digital and IT – it ain’t happening.

But when planning for day 1, I’d be cautious. Get everyone on the same Microsoft tenancy so you can at least all talk to each other. Having a single finance system will make managing budgets a hell of a lot easier. Make sure the basics of security are in the right place. A single website front end would be nice. I think that’s enough to be getting on with. Extend all the contracts that all the original councils had with existing suppliers – they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Beyond day 1, we can start being radical again. Set out a realistic roadmap for the next 5 years or so, identifying the major service areas for redesign. This cannot, must not, just involve aggregating everyone onto a single system, but is the opportunity for ground up, blank sheet of paper style transformation, with the right technology a key part of making it happen. Don’t take on too much – even with a big team, these could take multiple years to complete.

From that point, iteratively keep circling around, don’t take on too much, manage expectations that real transformation is hard work, takes time, but is worth it. Each service area will be reached, at the right point in time, and until then, services must do the best they can with what they have – it’s worked oki-ish for the last 20 years, it can keep going another 5. Best not to rush, take the time and do it properly.

As I said at the beginning, keep in mind: we have to be ambitious, but those landmines are everywhere. Think about where you are treading, don’t be hasty. This is an amazing opportunity, so let’s not cock it up.

This was originally posted on LinkedIn, saved here for posterity.

📅 Daily Note: June 5, 2025

Really helpful stuff from Jason Kitcat at the Department for Business and Trade on matrix working.

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My general take these days is that the local gov software market isn’t necessarily broken – it’s probably doing what it is supposed to do, i.e. behaving like a market. The issues are symptoms of wider problems, largely lack of capability and capacity on the buy side.

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Ben Unsworth points out that I haven’t installed the free and open source Caffeine on my Mac. How foolish of me.

Have rectified that and will amend the post at some point to include it.

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Ben Holliday on ‘networked responsibility’:

Digital transformation has to be a people movement. And it has to be ‘of the internet’ in the way that it’s networked, open, and has the potential to self-sustain how ideas and solutions work in joined-up ways across systems and layers of government – networked responsibility is the role we all have as individual leaders in making this happen.

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💻 New Mac, new setup (June 2025)

I’ve recently moved into an office in the garden – a fancy shed, in other words. Doing so exposed a weakness in my tech setup, based as it was on a Mac Mini. When I returned to the house, I couldn’t access my computer!

Now, wellness gurus would probably be yelling “GOOD!” at me at this stage, but, y’know, sometimes I don’t want to have to go outside to do some work, and I fancy doing my email over a lazy breakfast, or I just want to check something in the evening. It was really annoying not being able to. So, I switched the Mini for a new Macbook Air.

I went for the 15″ one, as I don’t travel much these days, and the extra screen real estate is good for my eyes. I also maxed out the specs, so got the new M4 model with the 512GB SSD and 32GB RAM in the Midnight colour (a sort of light black, if that makes any sense at all). I don’t want to be having to replace this thing any time soon.

In terms of hardware to make it work in the office/shed, I went for:

  • Logitech MX Master 35 mouse – this mouse is brilliant. I find the Apple Magic Mouse cumbersome and heavy, the lack of buttons annoying, and the ability to use it as a trackpad replacement useless. This mouse is regularly recommended on various trustworthy websites, and I have to say I love it. It’s pretty light for a wireless mouse, very ergonomic, and has loads of programmable buttons which both don’t get in the way and are really useful.
  • Spigen Urban Fit Laptop Case – fairly standard hard case to protect the outside of the laptop. Has a pleasing texture, but isn’t sticker friendly, I don’t think. It has however proved to be very adhesive when it comes to animal hair.
  • Rain Design mTower Vertical Laptop Stand – went for a vertical stand, because I’m happy to keep the laptop shut when I am at my desk and plugged into the monitor. Fits the laptop nicely.
  • WAVLINK Thunderbolt 4 Docking Station – this was the thing I probably did the most research and agonising over. Some of these things are ridiculously expensive, but at the same time i didn’t want to go too cheap, and find myself overloading the thing. This has worked with no problems since I got it.
  • Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad – i umm’d and ahh’d over the keyboard – was very tempted to go for something mechanical, but in the end stuck with the official Apple one, but went for the bigger size.

This is in addition to the Dell 27″ monitor and Logitech webcam I already owned. Some of this may seem a little pricey (although by no means the most expensive kit out there) but I have to say, using higher quality gear genuinely makes a difference to my productivity (honest).

Software wise, I’ll break this down into categories to make life easier! There’s a lot and quite of a few of these are utilities that start up on login – hence why I maxed out the RAM, I guess.

Setapp

Setapp is a neat subscription that gives you access to a mighty range of Mac apps for a single monthly price. You do have to make it work for you, but luckily some of these apps are properly best in class, and the others are good enough to replace first choices which otherwise would cost extra dosh.

  • Canary Mail – I have an email address that runs on Fastmail rather than Gmail, and I like to have a desktop client for it (I use Apple Mail for my iCloud account. I have too many email addresses!). Canary was available in Setapp, so I use it. It’s fine.
  • Ulysses – one of the better writing apps for longer documents out there. I tried using it for an ‘everything bucket’ for a while but that didn’t work out.
  • Commander One – a Finder replacement, with a lot more options but most importantly a twin pane display, which makes organising stuff much easier. I could live without it, but it’s included, so what the hell?
  • Bartender – when you run as many apps as I do, the menu bar at the top of the Mac desktop gets very cluttered. Bartender helps me keep it neat and tidy.
  • Rocket Typist – this allows me to create various little abbreviations that automatically expand into words or phrases. For example, I can type my telephone number with just 2 characters – and I don’t have to remember what it is! Text Expander is probably the number 1 app in this space, but Rocket Typist works fine for me.
  • Dato – the Mac shows the date in the menu bar, but it doesn’t do anything. Dato makes it clickable, so it shows what meetings I have coming up. Inessential but neat.
  • Paste – a clipboard manager. It remembers everything cut, copy, and paste, so I can go back and use them again. This is one of those tools that once you’ve used it, you wonder how you ever managed before.
  • Yoink – rarely used but helpful when needed. When dragging and dropping stuff (files, folders, text, photos etc) around the screen, Yoink lets you temporarily leave it in a dropzone on the desktop, then come back for it later
  • CleanShot X – makes taking screenshots a breeze, a significant improvement on the built in Mac method
  • Soulver – I used this purely as a sort of conversational calculator. I’m not great with figures, and so I can type calculations in words to get the response I am after – usually working out percentages!
  • Nitro PDF Pro – a PDF editing tool that saves me having to shell out for Acrobat Pro. It’s fine.
  • CleanMyMac – a handy set of tools to keep the Mac working as it should
  • Coherence X – can turn websites into desktop apps. I don’t use it much, other than for Google Tasks, which I use to log daily to dos, and having it lingering in a browser tab is not something I enjoy (this is very niche, I get it)
  • Mindnode Classic – a really easy to use mind mapping tool. Been using this for planning and organising thoughts for years
  • MarsEdit – my desktop blog editor of choice. Venerable but brilliant. I don’t use it quite as often as I used to, because of the micropost system now in place on this blog, but I still prefer using MarsEdit to blog when I can.
  • Gemini – not something I use all that often, but Gemini hunts out duplicate copies of files, and lets me tidy them up.
  • Permute – really good little app for converting all sorts of media files to different formats. Not a problem many people have, but when you do, it can be really annoying.
  • Sip – a really simple tool for picking colours from anywhere on the screen
  • TextSniper – pulls text out of images
  • Diagrams – makes a certain type of diagram very prettily. Doesn’t work for everything though.

Fair to say I get my money’s worth from Setapp.

Free as in speech and/or beer

There’s a bunch of things I use that don’t cost money – not all of them proper open source though.

  • NewNewsWire – an old school feed reader for people like me who need such things. It’s free and open source, and brilliant.
  • AltTab – I find the Mac version of the Alt-Tab shortcut annoying – it scrolls through open applications, not windows. This fixes that – and does a load of other stuff I haven’t really looked into.
  • Rectangle – makes resizing windows, tiling them just how you want them etc easy peasey.
  • iTerm – a general improvement on the basic Terminal app. To be honest, I install this out of habit more than anything. Likewise the first thing I do with it is install Homebrew – also for no good reason.
  • Alfred – again, an improvement on the built in Spotlight tool. Means I can do more from the keyboard.
  • BBEdit – when I need to edit some bog basic text, BBEdit is my go to, especially as it now had a free version.
  • Google Drive – Localise runs on Google WorkSpace, and I usually happily use the browser. Sometimes though moving files around on the desktop is easier.

Stuff I have bought

I do shell out for individual bits of software occasionally, although it is relatively rare. One of the things I love about the Mac though is the time and care taken by those developing apps for it – and that makes spending the money a little bit less painful than it would be otherwise.

  • Mimestream – I like having email in a native app rather than a browser tab, and Mimestream – despite the terrible name – seems to be the best at working with Google accounts.
  • DEVONthink 3 – my new everything bucket, and it’s working great for me. Having tried loads, I just decided to splash the cash and buy the behemoth. I use about 2.5% of its features, admittedly, but I like them. Main uses are storing PDFs and archives of webpages in a library, keeping notes from all my meetings in one place, and maintaining a work journal of what I am doing and who I am talking to.
  • Transmit – bit of an indulgence, but I find every other FTP client annoying, so am happy to shell out for Transmit’s ease of use.
  • Sketch – a recent addition. I had been using Figma’s free version on the web for my very basic needs, but was reaching the point where I would have to start paying, and so I went for the native desktop option instead. It feels solid, although as with much of the software I use, I barely scratch the surface of its capabilities.
  • Screen Studio – a new one for me, but this seems to be the top choice for screen recording – something I intend to do a lot more of in the near future.
  • OmniOutliner – I bought this on the App Store years ago, and so always download it, although it rarely gets used these days, unless I am really struggling to get my thoughts in order about something
  • Pixelmator Pro – been using this, and the non-pro version before it, for years. My image editing needs are very basic and Pixelmator just works
  • BetterMouse – way better than the standard Logitech software for customising my mouse. Well worth the £7 or however much it was!
  • Microsoft Office – grumble, grumble. A necessary evil.

Native apps for web services

Most of these are just Electron or similar wrappers around websites, that give an ersatz sense of the solidity one gets from a proper native app. Still, at least they don’t take up valuable tab space.

  • Trello – still one of the best ways to throw together a collaborative to do list / lightweight project plan
  • Slack – a customer uses it heavily, and i am a member of a couple of community focused groups
  • Miro – no idea whether Miro is the best app for the online workshopping thing, but it continues to serve my needs just fine
  • Whatsapp – seems to be the default comms method for an awful lot of people these days. Being able to type on a full size keyboard speeds things up, even if it doesn’t reduce the typos!
  • Zoom – still my preferred way of doing online meetings. Google Meet is quick and easy, but feels flakey still. Teams is a royal pain in the backside, although sadly it seems to now be the default for most of the people I talk to regularly.

So, quite a lot of stuff. It’s taken me an age to put this together, so hopefully there’s something useful in there for everyone. My question: have I missed anything?!

📅 Daily Note: June 3, 2025

Nice, insightful set of principles around how Martin Wright writes his weeknotes:

I write about what’s stuck with me when I sit down to write my weeknote. I don’t want to assume what’s important, or interesting enough to weeknote while it’s happening, so I don’t take notes during the week to feature in my weeknote. If I’ve forgotten it by the time of writing then it wasn’t worthy of inclusion in a weeknote.

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I haven’t done brilliantly at coming back to blogging, but at least I am thinking about it a bit more often.

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Emily Webber’s new course on building communities of practice looks good.

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Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of the right things to do. This from dxw is a good example of that.

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As part of my accidental blogging break this year, I also didn’t open my news reader (yes I am old school). This means I currently have over 8,000 unread articles in NetNewsWire (I told you I was old school). I probably ought to mark all as read and start over, but there’s bound to be some good stuff in there that I don’t want to miss.

So I will scan it all a bit every day and pick out some gems, and post them here for posterity.

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📅 Daily Note: May 21, 2025

Eddie Copeland writes helpfully and convincingly on the future of local government digital leadership following the mention of it in the government digital blueprint. Tried to pull out a bit for a quote but couldn’t it was all good.

In all the research work I have done in the last year or so, leadership comes up time and time again as being one of the biggest things holding local government back from making the most of the digital opportunity.

 

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The Somerset Council target operating model is quite nice, I think.

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Phil ‘The Rumenator’ Rumens on service patterns:

A lack of common service patterns can prove costly within a single organisation too. We’ve all read reports of spiralling costs and lengthy delays in pubic sector IT projects, and in part this can be attributed to the desire for bespoke functionality resulting in tweaks or even wholesale redesign of how a platform functions to meet the unique service designs of that organisation.

He isn’t wrong to flag this. I’ve been noodling around with this idea a bit in the last few months, which I need to blog about at some point.

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