An online notebook
Nice, insightful set of principles around how Martin Wright writes his weeknotes:
I write about what’s stuck with me when I sit down to write my weeknote. I don’t want to assume what’s important, or interesting enough to weeknote while it’s happening, so I don’t take notes during the week to feature in my weeknote. If I’ve forgotten it by the time of writing then it wasn’t worthy of inclusion in a weeknote.
Phil ‘The Rumenator’ Rumens on service patterns:
A lack of common service patterns can prove costly within a single organisation too. We’ve all read reports of spiralling costs and lengthy delays in pubic sector IT projects, and in part this can be attributed to the desire for bespoke functionality resulting in tweaks or even wholesale redesign of how a platform functions to meet the unique service designs of that organisation.
He isn’t wrong to flag this. I’ve been noodling around with this idea a bit in the last few months, which I need to blog about at some point.
The Somerset Council target operating model is quite nice, I think.
Eddie Copeland writes helpfully and convincingly on the future of local government digital leadership following the mention of it in the government digital blueprint. Tried to pull out a bit for a quote but couldn’t it was all good.
In all the research work I have done in the last year or so, leadership comes up time and time again as being one of the biggest things holding local government back from making the most of the digital opportunity.
Rachel Coldicutt, Words Matter:
Digital technologies require a strange combination of seemingly unconnected things, including (but not limited to) big material things like data centres, small things like phones and computers, even smaller things like chips and processors, and a bunch of invisible processes and protocols that conjure tools and services and apps and web pages and all the rest into being. What we see at the end tends to look quite neat and tidy, but many decisions and things are hidden behind those icons and dashboards and shiny cases, so they need great big stories to talk them up and make them feel exciting.