digital

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!

CIPFA claims blockchain is a ‘promising solution’ for the public sector. I disagree.

CIPFA have published a report entitled Exploring blockchain technologies for collaboration and partnerships [PDF warning].

The very first statement of the executive summary is problematic.

Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution for collaboration and partnerships, providing a secure and transparent way for multiple parties to interact and transact without intermediaries.

Has it? I’m not sure myself.

Anyway, they include a helpful decision tree to help you decide whether you should use the blockchain or not:

Which I am happy to simplify for everyone:

All snarking aside, I think this is a massive waste of time, money and attention for everyone concerned.

Across the public sector, technology and digital budgets are being salami sliced away, leaving organisations facing critical levels of risk and failing to grasp the opportunities that better investment in these areas would unlock.

What would be really helpful would be some practical advice around fixing that problem, not farting around with blockchain.

DDAT or D:DDAT?

Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash

Just a quick post on a rather semantical topic!

The phrase DDAT – standing for digital, design and technology – has become a commonly adopted bit of industry jargon in government circles, to describe the work that people do in this thing we call digital.

However, I find it just doesn’t quite work for me, and I think it is because of the use of the word digital within it. I think in the definition, digital is meant to cover things like user centredness, service design, digital culture and so on – but this isn’t terribly clear.

So, I have found myself on occasion instead referring to digital: design, data and technology. I’ve never abbreviated it, but I suppose that if I did it would be D:DDAT.

For me, D:DDAT gets across the idea that ‘digital’ encompasses the use of design, data and technology rather than being separate from the latter two.

This hardly matters in the grand scheme of things, but I thought it worth sharing! 🤷‍♂️

Load more posts!