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šŸ“… Daily note for 9 July 2024

Some machinery of government changes starting to come through. DLUHC is now MHCLGā¬ˆ (the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) again, which is good. Also all the digital stuff (GDS, CDDO etc) is going into DSITā¬ˆ (the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology) which is potentially exciting.

It will be interesting to see where the Local Digital programme ends up – staying in the policy department or moving across with all the digital teams? #

UK Authority reportsā¬ˆ on Birmingham City Council extending their contract with Oracle, despite it being a pretty disastrous relationship thus far. I commented on LinkedIn, and am pasting here for posterity:

Am not sure what their alternative was, to be fair. They have to have a system to do this stuff, and signing with another supplier would mean starting the whole implementation process again on top of the licensing costs – and I canā€™t see how that would offer better value for tax payers.

Also we have to bear in mind that Birmingham has a budget of Ā£3.2 BILLION – using the standard ERP estimate of 1-3% of budget, means anything in the range of Ā£12 – Ā£36 million.

This is an exceptional case and the numbers have to be huge. I personally think a big issue here originally was the fact that the budget was nowhere near big enough in the first place – which of course means that the original business case was fantasy stuff…

Personally, I would be glad if no council ever bought Oracle ever again. But in this specific case, the reason things went so badly wrong were not entirely the fault of the technology vendor:

  1. the decision to replace the existing system, chasing a highly speculative ‘transformation’ dream – based on a recommendation made by a certain consultancy firm that ought to have known better
  2. a budget and timescale for implementation that were pure fantasy
  3. a lack of understanding of the need to redesign processes to enable the new software to work properly
  4. massive over customisation of the system by the systems integrator, which nobody else could understand
  5. a decision to go live despite the system not having been tested and with multiple vital integrations not properly working.

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How Rushmoor Borough Council have saved money on printing and postingā¬ˆ. #

This is really interesting from Richard Popeā¬ˆ:

Designing the digital account for the Universal Credit digital account, it was abundantly clear that the approach to design that worked for GOV.UK and was spreading across government was fundamentally unsuited to services that used automation, intentionally placed burdens on the public through policy choice, and used data from across government. As was the need for greater transparency and accountability. But as design practice spread across government, the focus on simplicity took on a life of its own, developing into what, at times, felt like a tyranny of design, where anything that distracted from the proximate user need was impossible to justify. The idea that digital public services needed to be more than transactional was lost.

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Need volunteers for an experiment in group digital coaching!

I am looking to recruit a small group of digital doers across local gov to help me test an idea I have had – for a virtual coaching group.

What I think this looks like is maybe a group of 6 people working in local government on digital ‘stuff’ in one sense or another. I don’t think specific roles, experience or levels of seniority matter particularly – in fact a mix will probably really help the group dynamic.

Involvement will be some online conversations, sharing problems, frustrations, ideas and solutions with each other through a mix of text chat, video calls as a group and one to ones. I’ll be in there too, adding whatever experience I might have.

This really is just an idea for now, but it will be interesting to test it to see if it has benefit. If you would like to join, or know someone who might benefit, please let me know by filling in this short form.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

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 weā€™ve tried place a big emphasis on making the lives of developers simpler (or redundant). Unfortunately, we notice this is at the expense of user experience. Low code makes it harder to take a user-centred, design-led approach.

When creating, you have to follow the platformsā€™ chosen UI components and design out of a prescribed box. Once completed, you can then tweak to meet your users needs. As the platform uses its own functionality, you are also restricted by whatā€™s been created so far. Itā€™s a world of functionality first and user needs later, which never ever ends well.

Paul Brewer from Adur & Worthing blogged himself in response:

After careful consideration, we went for what I think was a good, pragmatic compromise. Our chosen open standards platform (this is a must), providing a ā€œlow codeā€ development environment, has a fixed enterprise licence fee that means we can not only build unlimited apps for ourselves, but can build apps for any public sector body operating in our geography at no additional cost. Development time is much faster than it would otherwise be, and the skills required are significant, but lower than other development environments.

Worth reading both in full to help you decide if low code fits into your strategy.

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