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LINK: “The Bill Gates Line”
‘A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.’ Original:
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave
LINK: “Ignore the hype over big tech. Its products are mostly useless”
The endless noise emanating from Silicon Valley essentially has two complementary elements. One is all about dreams so unlikely that they beggar belief: the idea that the Tesla CEO Elon Musk will one day set up a colony on Mars;…
LINK: “Why Local Government must share the driving to accelerate transformation benefits”
There is a huge opportunity for local authorities to share common digital service patterns for highly defined, commoditised services that are repeated across multiple organisations. For services like reporting missed bins, FOI requests and complaints for example, how fundamentally different…
Two pieces on low code
The low code debate seems to have really kicked off. Matt Skinner off of FutureGov blogs a critical piece: The low code platforms we’ve tried place a big emphasis on making the lives of developers simpler (or redundant). Unfortunately, we…
LINK: “And for His Next Act, Ev Williams Will Fix the Internet”
As a co-founder of Blogger and Twitter and, more recently, as the chief executive of the digital publishing platform Medium, Mr. Williams transformed the way millions of people publish and consume information online. But as his empire grew, he started…
LINK: “Fail by design: Banking′s legacy of dark code”
Is it modernize or die? Or modernize and die? For banks updating their computer systems with secure mobile features it can be both. Many run mainframes on legacy code that’s gone dark — no one understands it anymore. Original:
There are no digital silver bullets
In a fairly complex world, everyone yearns for a simple solution. The one thing they should do to make things better. The single solution to all their problems. Digital transformation is no different, and many of the marketers working in…
LINK: “From service design to systems change”
Systems analysis at the ‘front end’ of service design can help us to better understand complex social problems and identify opportunities to respond more effectively and profoundly. Equally, systems thinking provides tools and mindsets to understand the power structures and…
LINK: “Out of the shadows [on low code in local gov]”
At Adur & Worthing, our use of low code is core to our service design programme and the main tool used by our central digital team in change projects. We don’t go this way every time — we’re not purists — but time and…
How low (code) can you go?
There’s an increasing amount of talk in digital circles about low code. These are systems for building systems: ways of using simple drag and drop interfaces to build out workflows and databases to deliver business processes. Some low code platforms…
LINK: “Silicon Valley Can’t Be Trusted With Our History”
We create almost everything on the internet, but we control almost none of it. Original:
LINK: “Making public policy in the digital age”
When the policy is broken, the service fails. And when the service fails, trust in the institution providing the service diminishes. More often that not, high-profile breakdowns are seized upon as a failures of technology or implementation. The truth is…
LINK: “Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write”
Bezos’ letters make splendid material for a Business School course on Strategy and Communication. A caveat applies, however. Most of the strategies and practices advocated by Amazon’s founder have broad applicability, but a central mystery remains: Bezos himself, his combination…
LINK: “Service design at NHS Digital”
user’s point of view – from the very beginning of how users become aware the service exists, to the very end of them leaving it. But what makes service design different from just thinking about the user journey, is also…
LINK: “‘There Is No Public Internet, and [Wikipedia is] the Closest Thing to It’”
…we sort of are a legacy of the original spirit of the web, and that’s very much what the Wikimedia Foundation was created to do — to ensure that Wikipedia was preserved as a nonprofit entity, with respect for community governance, and…
LINK: “What is ‘commissioning’?”
Much of the value of commissioning, I believe, is that it is an emerging field — not yet fully formed and devoid of inspiration. Yet there is much commissioning practice and activity out there. Original:
LINK: “CDO for Scottish Local Government Digital Office, Martyn Wallace – Creating shareable platforms for local government”
Successful digital transformation in the public sector requires a significant shift in mind set from all employees to generate the best possible return for citizens. Councils also need to work together to generate ideas and platforms, which can then be…
LINK: “How to Build Your Own “Spotify Model””
At the end of the day, use the Spotify model as an inspiration for what’s possible when you spend time and attention developing your own operating system — not as a model for what your own system may end up looking like.…
The Rise of Digital Platforms
Great short-ish summary of the rise of aggregating platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon from the ever-insightful Ben Thompson:
Creating better software with agile, devops, etc
There’s loads of great digital transformation nuggets in here, from Coté.