digital

💡 How the Institute of Digital Public Services could get started

A lot of people seemed to like the idea of the ‘Institute of Digital Public Services’ (IDPS) – admittedly a few didn’t, but not enough to convince me it isn’t an idea worth pursuing!

How on earth to get something like that off the ground though? I must admit I am well outside my comfort zone with things like this. Findings funders, setting up governance arrangements, creating legal entities. Not really my wheelhouse.

So, as is often the case with one of my ideas, I think about how it could be bootstrapped with minimal effort and risk. Of course, that means there’s a higher chance of it not being as effective, but I have to work with what I’ve got, right?

So how about this:

  • The IDPS is a website. People join, which means they are added to an email list
  • Every other month, a clever digital government type is asked to pen an article that sets out a big idea, and it gets published via the site and the email list, and all the social get a ping. Comments on the article provide a space for discussion
  • A few weeks later, an online session is run where the author gets to explain their idea, an expert panel quizzes them, and a Q&A happens with the attendees
  • Rinse and repeat every couple of months
  • Maybe – maybe – an annual in person get together where the speakers discuss their ideas in person and everyone gets to meet each other, which might be nice

So, cost = low, risk = low, impact = probably also low. But it would be a start and maybe enough to get serious people interested in doing it properly.

Thoughts?

💡 I think we need an “Institute for Digital Public Services”.

Where’s the centre of gravity for conversations about how we can and should be leveraging the digital revolution for the benefit of society through our public services? I think about the flurry of activity when James Plunkett kicked off a debate a few months ago⬈ about ‘local GDS’ or the more recent excitement caused by the publication of Richard Pope’s <a href=“https://anatomyofpublicservices.com/”>Platformland⬈. Going back a few years, Mark Thompson has tried to get conversations going with a number of different analogies, whether Lego⬈, Heart FM, or Tesco⬈.

But these discussions are never sustained, and they never seem to make it past conversations and into ‘test and learn’ (to quote Philippa Newis⬈!) to identify which of these ideas might work better than others.

It feels like an institutional gap that an ‘Institute for Digital Public Services’ would fill. A home for the discussions. A place for convening and curating of ideas and practice. A way to consider the full breadth of public service, from central government to local government, with health and blue light services and everything else in-between.

Most importantly a place where the concepts and the theories can be prototyped, experimented with, and new things learned, with practice being developed and adopted along the way – turning ideas into reality.

📖 What could a “Local Government Centre for Digital Technology” actually do? 🤔

(Previously published on LinkedIn and in my newsletter.)

In the LGA’s recently published white paper on the future of local government, there’s a very interesting line about digital. Just the one line, admittedly, but I think it is fair to say that it is doing a lot of work.

We are calling for… [a] Local Government Centre for Digital Technology: using technological innovation to deliver reform and promote inclusive economic growth across councils.

There’s no more detail in the document, and little in the news article about it in UKAuthority either.

Now, I’ve been chatting with Owen Pritchard, who I would guess is the person behind this line, for a few years now, and I don’t doubt that he has his own, very long list of things he thinks the centre should do – so I’m pretty excited to find out in due course what that looks like.

In the meantime though, let me toss around a few ideas… what could this centre do?

1) Coordinate procurement

The first thing for me would be to start investigating how the buying power of the sector could be consolidated to produce economies of scale, and better contracts.

I’d start in the bottom right of a Wardley map, the commoditised digital gubbins that keeps councils running, and where it makes no sense to have that stuff duplicated 300 odd times across the country.

Laptops, phones, broadband connections, hosting services… all these things have councils up and down the country running procurement exercises, negotiating contracts, managing those contracts… all this could be done once nationally, or a few times regionally, with no negative impact on local service delivery.

Once that’s done, how about we move on to using that collective buying power to:

  • demand better products from suppliers, particularly in the line of business system market
  • consolidate social value across contracts, to create meaningful, large scale opportunities for suppliers to support local public services
  • Invest in the development of new products and services, either through existing or new companies, or even local authority trading organisations

This stuff is pretty boring in many ways, but I’m putting it first in this list because I think the actual opportunities are vast.

2) Fill the security gaps

With the cyber assessment framework and the LGA’s own cyber 360 reviews, there is plenty of advice out there in terms of best practice on security. However, many councils are lacking the capacity and the capability to implement this guidance. It’s nobody’s fault, just the result of many small organisations, who through years of austerity have been unable to invest in their technical infrastructure.

This could be sorted by having support available to councils to put in place the measures needed to ensure that data and information is kept as safe as possible from a technical standpoint. Flying squads of security experts who understand the local government environment, are knowledgeable about the frameworks and guidance, and can put in place the necessary steps to make all councils as secure as possible.

3) Education, education, education

One of the most important things that a centre like this could do would be to put a lot of effort into increasing the knowledge of digital across local government. Despite various efforts in recent years, the level of digital confidence within the general workforce in the sector is remarkably low.

We need people in leadership positions to understand what is possible and what they can do to unlock this potential. We need politicians who understand the strategic levers they need to pull to ensure the right long term decisions are being made in councils around technology strategy. We need the specialist teams within local government to be up to speed with the latest developments in cloud, development, security, and data, depending on their role. We need council teams to be way more confident in utilising user-centric service design approaches.

All of this could be advanced really quickly through a properly funded and planned out strategic learning programme across the sector.

The second strand is less about formal training and more about curating existing good practice case studies and examples, and creating ones that don’t exist but really should. Part of the problem of a fragmented sector of over 300 organisations is that it is really hard for anyone to know what is going on everywhere else.

The standard of documenting the good stuff is really poor. Case studies are dominated by vendors, announcing deals and anticipated outcomes, but with no follow up. We have councils going through the process of turning into unitaries, for example, but no documented playbook on how to successfully aggregate the IT in these situations. Why the hell not!? A local government dedicate centre could have a team of researchers and content designers producing useful, findable, actionable content that would help spread the word on how to get things done.

4) Data and standards

Everyone knows about the untapped potential of data within local government, but nobody so far has had the right mix of time, money, and intestinal fortitude to get it done properly.

It means taking on the line of business system providers to open up access to the data; to help navigate the arcane table structures of these creaking software behemoths; to have in place the data platforms to aggregate, transform, and usefully visualise data; to have data engineers and scientists able to formulate the right questions and figure out how to get the answers; and to have service managers who are open and willing to become data informed, and to change a lifetime’s habit of going by hunches and guesswork.

It’s a big ask, and it’s no wonder that progress has been slow. But so many of these problems are shared by every single council in the country. A centre such as the one being propose could come up with a whole host of replicable and scalable answers to these problems.

Alongside this kind of support, there’s also a need for standards around data and a centre could help coordinate and manage standards where they exist, and support the development of them where they are needed. Just as importantly, though, the centre could provide some teeth, ensuring that councils and their suppliers are meeting these standards to enable the safe use of data to improve outcomes for local areas. The use of coordinated, collective buying power would definitely help with this!

Another area of standards where a centre could help would be to produce re-usable data sharing agreements and policy documents, to help councils collaborate with other parts of the local public service system, without the need to reinvent the wheel at significant cost, over and over again.

5) Innovate at scale

Finally, I’d want to see some collective effort at innovating in a coordinated, replicable and scalable way. Pooled resources that can reduce the risk exposure for individual councils, bringing together the best brains and ideas with the people best at delivering results, to experiment, test, iterate and improve on radical ideas for local public services.

It’s far too big a risk for individual councils to take on, and no surprise that transformational change in local government is often so incremental. The exploration of new operating models in the internet era – companies like Uber, AirBnB, Netflix and so on – have been funded by billions in venture capital. But somehow we expect councils do be able to do it, alongside running the existing services, on a shoestring?

Imagine a centre, with enough resources to be able to pull together the best service design folk, the best data people, the best technologists, the subject matter experts for specific services, all able to identify the biggest challenges facing the sector and to innovate their way through to workable solutions that can be adopted across the sector. With this kind of scale and authority, such a centre could have the clout to agitate for legislative reform where it is needed, to call for the establishment of new institutions to deliver specific outcomes, or to work alongside existing council teams to help them adopt the new models.

There’s 5 ideas I had. Any thoughts?

📖 Where can councils start sharing effectively?

(Previously published on LinkedIn and in my newsletter.)

Following on from previous posts during the Great Local GDS Flurry from a few weeks ago (has everyone else moved on? Well I haven’t!), I thought I would follow up on one of my ideas for what I see as the central problems facing local authorities wanting to make the most of digital (by which I mean: technology, data, and online experience). Those problems are capacity and capability.

An answer to those problems is sharing of services. Now shared services often have a bad rep (in a lot of cases they are neither shared nor a service). But that doesn’t mean the model can’t work. It just means you have to do it right, and that doesn’t mean munging two or three teams together, sacking a couple of managers, then bagging the savings and carrying on exactly as before.

The right way is to methodically plan what functions are suitable for sharing, that will deliver benefits like efficiency and economies of scale, and not forcing into a shared arrangement something that just doesn’t belong there – or at least, not yet.

It strikes me that Wardley mapping could be very helpful here. I’ve been a massive fan of the approach for years, but have never actually used it in anger, largely because my brain is too small to cope with it. Here’s a video where Simon calmly explains it all.

The broad points are this:

  • There are no one size fits all approaches to any kind of business capability, but especially not technology ones
  • The more established and commoditised a capability, the better suited it is to things like shared services or outsourced arrangements
  • The more innovative a capability, the more suited it is to being kept close to the organisation
  • Likewise, the closer a capability is to affecting the experience of your end user, the closer you want to keep it to the organisation. If it is back-end gubbins, then that’s more suitable to being handled by someone else.
  • It is also possible for capabilities to move as they mature or become commoditised. So the way things are today don’t have to be the way they are tomorrow.

OK! So bearing that in mind, how could we think about applying this thinking to digital capabilities within a Council?

I’ve produced a dumbed down Wardley map to help guide this thinking. It isn’t comprehensive by any means, but hopefully has enough in it to get the point across!

I find having a grid approach helps organise my thoughts around this a bit. It means you lost a bit of the elasticity of the original Wardley approach, and if you find that annoying, no worries! You don’t have to do this the same way I do.

So the darker orange box in the bottom right is where sharing of digital capabilities ought to start on day one. These are utility-like components that have little impact on the end user and where real economies of scale can be achieved by organisations joining together.

After that, councils could start exploring the other boxes, depending on their context and ambition. There are some areas that should be left well alone, at least until they can be shifted rightwards in some way – either the market and the organisation’s experience matures, or the organisation is able to change the way it works to facilitate a rightward shift for that thing.

Now, we could all have an arm wrestle about which of these capabilities fits in what box, and I dare say that some local customisation will be required depending on context (some councils have insanely complicated bespoke arrangements around laptop builds, for example). But it feels like a handy tool to use when planning collaborative endeavour, whether formal shared services or not.

It would be great to know what you think!

Drafting the ‘so what?’ of the digital quality model

A bit of feedback from the recent call about the Local Government Digital Quality Model call was that the materials really need to sell the ‘so what’ around all of this.

I think there are 2 things here:

  • so what about the model
  • so what about being good at digital, design, data and technology

I have had a go at the second one initially, because I think this might make it easier to do the first one!

So, what I have come up with is this, as a first draft:

Why should councils care about the quality of their digital design, data and technology?

  • Efficiency – the better you are at digital, the cheaper and quicker your services will be at successfully meeting the needs of residents (etc)
  • Prevention – good use of digital helps the council to prevent need from arising in the first place, reducing demand on the council’s services
  • Resident (etc) experience – better use of digital means the users of services get a better experience, and are less likely to complain, or resort to other channels
  • Agility – councils with high quality approaches to digital are adaptive organisations, able to respond to change quickly and successfully
  • Risk reduction – good digital councils lessen the level of information security risk and the risk of projects or services not working as planned

As always I am struggling with the word resident – ‘user’ sounds too techie, and ‘customer’ puts a lot of people off. Any ideas for that?

Any feedback welcome!

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