An online notebook
Dave “I think we have to accept that there’s going to be legacy stuff out there, and there’s going to be unsupported systems. So it would be better to accept that we’ve got that and come up with strategies for how we’re going to manage that.”
Original: https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2018/05/24/understanding-legacy-technology-in-government/
Due to time constraints, many Local Government Service leads are inevitably ‘heads down’ and perhaps overwhelmed by the variety of technology on offer. It can be hard to team up with neighbouring boroughs because that adds complexity and may slow things down through collaborative decision making. They need more ‘heads up’ time to reflect and review what is going on elsewhere, and try to be open minded and consider wider options – we as SMEs on the other hand need to present our products in terms of their benefits, in plain English, not as a technology offer.
Original: https://medium.com/@hilary.simpson/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-engaging-smes-and-local-government-in-innovation-d9b6d371feff
‘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: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/
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; or that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg can successfully marshal an attempt to “cure, prevent and manage” all diseases in a single generation. Whatever its basis in fact, this stuff casts people and corporations as godlike visionaries, and then provides a puffed-up context for the stuff the big tech companies shout about week in, week out: stuff we either don’t need or, worse, which threatens some of the basic aspects of everyday civilisation.
Original: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/21/big-tech-products-silicon-valley
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 should the user journeys for these services be between individual authorities? Or, put another way, at a time of such pressure on public finances, can we continue to justify the level of local variation in the design and delivery of these services that we continue to see across the country?
Original: https://methods.co.uk/blog/local-government-must-share-driving-accelerate-transformation-benefits/