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.
Following on from my post about where we are with digital and technology in local government, I have been trying to put some thought into an idea around how to make this a bit easier for everyone involved. As is often the case, I am struggling with getting something small and quick done, against the knowledge that it might not be enough. As always I ought to be quaffing some of my agile mindset kool-aid, but it’s hard.
A thought is also very much in my mind: why is it me doing this? It really ought to be somebody’s job, rather than the hobby of a bloke in Spalding.
I have loved the album ‘original’ of this song since I first heard it, but when I came across this version, quite recently, I was absolutely blown away:
Does the browser need reimagining? These folk seem to think so: https://arc.net/ – I don’t like the insistence on opening an account before you can do anything else.
Am consistently impressed with dxw’s blogging. Always authentic, always helpful. Very rarely sales-y.
Last weekend we started watching the Mission:Impossible films in order. Fair to say they are of variable quality. However, my favourite moment BY FAR is in the first one. Tom Cruise’s character needs to track down the identity of someone codenamed ‘Max’. He knows they sometimes use the internet. He opens his laptop, and with a sense of expectation searches Usenet for the URL ‘max.com’ and hits enter. The sense of disappointment on his face when this brilliant scheme doesn’t produce results is heartbreaking.
My piece about single customer accounts seems to have gone down quite well in most parts. My focus in the last year has mostly been on people and capability stuff, and before that on some of the trickier IT problems facing councils. It’s great that my current work in Lambeth is giving me the chance to revisit the ‘digital experience’ and challenge my thinking a bit: https://sensibletech.co.uk/should-you-develop-a-single-customer-account/
There’s lots of very good stuff in here from Coté: “Waiting for the close of open – how long can the 2000s spirit of open source and open APIs last?” https://cote.io/2023/07/21/waiting-for-the.html
Elon Musk has already had a company called X. It merged with PayPay in 2000, and then within months the PayPal people got sick of what a terrible guy he was to work with, and sidelined him. I dare say rebranding Twitter is the first step in what Musk hopes will be his great ‘I told you I was right’ project. He’s re-opening a 23 year old wound. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66284304
I keep seeing this image popping up in various online places, and it sums up exactly where a lot of local gov is when it comes to Ai, machine learning etc:
Daughter was telling me this morning about dog and cat based ASMR videos, and I said I really don’t think that was what TBL had in mind when he invented the web and she said dad, you’re so old.
Am stepping things up a bit with localgov.blog. Have coerced Steph Gray into helping me migrate and upgrade the whole thing, and set up a Basecamp site (still my favourite online collaboration thingy) to get all the users in one conversation to help me understand better what they need.
My Bluesky experience so far has been mostly terrible. I really don’t like the website interface – it feels like something I might have put together myself. Notifications fail to clear, and the same posts are always just there for some reason. I don’t follow enough people, is no doubt part of the problem.
It was our son’s graduation yesterday. So proud! But also, how did that happen? I’m so old!
On Saturday we watched the new Indiana Jones film. Very silly of course but it did capture some of the fun of the originals, which I was just mad keen on when I was a kid.
I used ChatGPT to build myself a simple flat file homepage to point to the various places I exist online. It’s remarkably easy to just feed it a few prompts and then tweak as necessary. Am sure I will keep fiddling, but it’s a start, and was so easy! https://www.davebriggs.xyz/
I think this is true of a lot of online communities too – there’s that concept which was spoken about a lot 15 years ago (remember Wikipatterns? https://stewartmader.com/wikipatterns/ ), but now not so often, of online community ‘gardeners’ – people who’d tidy conversations up, retrieve and keep the good stuff where everyone could find it, and not allow knowledge to be lost or forgotten.
Said this a few time this week – you can do amazing work with a good team, good culture, plenty of enthusiasm and terrible tech. With great tech and rubbish everything else, not so much.
Have made it onto Bluesky, just in time for it to die probably. But if you are there, come say hello! https://bsky.app/profile/davebriggs.bsky.social. Thanks to Jukesie for the invite code 🙂
It’s almost like we need something kind of Gartner-esque but focusing on the technology and services providers working with local government. We ask why the same old vendors are so successful, but really, why wouldn’t they? Where’s the independent advice coming from?
I’m getting some good reaction to the regular blogging here, and I think the newsletter is going alright, although it’s early days for that. What I have not done in a while is any longer, advisory type blogging, which usually gets posted over at https://sensibletech.co.uk/ – and I probably ought to do some of that soon.
I had the pleasure earlier this week to speak for the first time to Doug Belshaw. I have been following Doug’s stuff online for years and always found it useful and interesting. Never actually spoken though, so it was lovely to do so. I recommend it! https://dougbelshaw.com/about/
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
On reflection, my honest view is that, 5 years in, councils that have signed the declaration really ought to be doing an awful lot more of the things they signed up to do. The declaration’s content is fine. It just needs to be acted on.
This is one of those articles that goes after a sacred cow or two, and is pretty excorciating in places. I don’t agree with much of it, but it sure is a useful challenge: “Beware the Digital Whiteboard” https://www.wired.com/story/beware-the-digital-whiteboard/
(This is a repost of something I posted elsewhere but hadn’t backed up on this blog before. I have backdated the post to the original date, but it’ll probably pop up in places automatically. It’s evergreen content though, so it’s all good 😊)
I dare say that if you were to stand in a town centre and ask passers-by whether they would find it useful to have everything they interact with their local council about in one online place, there’s a good chance most people would say yes. It kind of sounds sensible, a difficult thing to argue against.
However, in practice, would they use it? Would it make their lives any easier? Would it lead to better outcomes for them? I would argue probably not.
But there’s another problem with single online accounts, and that is the fact they are non-existent. I’ve never heard of one that actually has every service a council offers online operating inside it. Instead, all single accounts cover all the services, except for all the ones they don’t.
This is for perfectly understandable reasons, but the lack of openness about the fact is really problematic. If you market your account as being the single account, but then have to tell users that actually it isn’t, and they need to use something different to look at their planning application or complete the social care financial assessment, it makes a mockery of the whole thing and it confuses the hell out of everyone.
The sheer amount of time, effort and money that would have to be spent to create a genuine single account would make it the ROI calculation result so negative you’d have to make the cell in your business case spreadsheet really wide just to display it.
The other thing to consider is that the actual user need here doesn’t really exist. How many services are there where seeing them together is useful?
I’d argue that most people never interact with their council. When most do, it’s a case of a single objective, where the user wants to get in and out as quickly as possible. There are some people who have complex needs who regularly interact with multiple council services – but for these people, you’re never going to online transact your way through their issues. It will invariably need a much more human relationship than can be offered by a digital account.
It’s the same with single customer records, or golden records. Is it a good thing? I’m not convinced myself, but luckily I don’t have to be because it’s an impossible thing to actually achieve. The data gets messy, duplicates get created, data doesn’t pass between systems very well, some services just don’t use systems that touch anything else, others use systems you aren’t even aware of.
To summarise – I’m pretty sure that the user need for single accounts doesn’t exist and that implementing them will make most user journeys harder than they need to be. What I am definitely sure about is that they are practically impossible to implement, and leaving the inevitable halfway-house in place is just going to confuse and infuriate your users even more.
So what should you do?
Spend the time and money you would have spent on aggregating a bunch of services into a single digital space on designing really good digital services, using the right service patterns and technology capabilities for that service – rather than trying to jam everything into the same model of delivery
Put effort into creating consistent online experiences for your users – whether they are accessing a service you have built yourself, or interacting with something one of your line of business system suppliers has put together for you. Have a design system which articulates the look and feel of online user journeys and sets out common patterns in terms of what information is asked for when, and so on. If your supplier can’t meet these needs, consider building a front end for them – but that doesn’t mean integrating that service with a bunch of other, unrelated ones
Consider the actually helpful element of a single account and apply those to your digital services. It might well be that having one way to authenticate yourself is a good thing, so nobody needs multiple passwords. But even with this – don’t allow yourself to fall into the trap where because you can authenticate people, you always should. If you don’t need a username and a password to complete a service, don’t force people to use them
There are clear advantages to being able to bring data about people and households together in an ethical way to better understand their circumstances, predict potential future issues and to work out what the most impactful interventions might be. However, this is a council problem, not a user problem, and so the hard work should not be outsourced to the user by making them jump through hoops to get the help they need. Instead, get the data you need out of wherever it exists and use data tools to bring it together, transform it, and make decisions based on it
So that’s my view. Single accounts are almost impossible to achieve and are of dubious benefit. I shall return to this topic in 2030.
A decision I made when I took my current gig at Lambeth was just to do 4 days a week, so I had a day a week to pootle about doing other things. The first of those days is today and ngl it feels a bit odd!
I was around when this idea was first being mooted, and it’s brill to see it live. It’s a genuine digital age capability that can be slotted into many a service, making life easier for service users as well as making the back office a bit more efficient. What’s not to like? https://www.madetech.com/blog/evidence-saas-product/
For a few years now, I have been advising councils not to seek savings through digital work, but to use digital to make the savings they were demanding from their services anyway tolerable for their service users and staff.
This means being more creative about how to fund digital work, beyond simple invest to save capital spend.
This is a lovely piece by Giles Turnbull and I will be first in the queue for the book when it emerges! https://howteamsremember.com/
“I created Clippy”:
I’ve signed up for and downloaded Threads. I don’t like the lack of a web interface, if I’m honest and it makes a mockery of my no-social-media phone policy. Hopefully one will come soon. It’s also full of a lot of “suggested content” that I’ve not chosen to see and there’s no apparent way to turn that off. Which is a turn off.
I wonder if there’s a tweak to Betteridge’s law of headlines that states that when the headline ending in a question mark is related to AI, the NO answering it is even more emphatic than normal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
New newsletter out today, which I have switched to Substack. It does feel like building personal networks through things like email might be the answer to the breakdown of more public social media like Twitter etc https://daveslist.substack.com/p/daves-list-vol-3-issue-1
I can’t believe the above doesn’t include Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy or What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff!
Haringey Council have launched a new blog on my localgov.blog service, chatting about their website redevelopment project. Do check it out, and if your council wants a free blog, you know where to find me. https://haringey.localgov.blog/
I do need to have a think about localgov.blog and what I ought to do with it. Right now it’s fine and it ticks along quite nicely, but there are improvements that in an ideal world I would like to make. Currently though, am not sure the effort would really be justified!
I still haven’t reinstalled any social media apps on my phone, and I am still ok with it. Am I spending less time on my phone as a result? Maybe, but think I’m browsing the open web a bit more than I was.
