Friday, 3 November, 2023

Daily note for 3 November 2023

I published a newsletter on Wednesday, talked a bit about blogging. Hadn’t done one for a whole and picked a fairly safe topic just to get back into the swing of things.

Today’s innovation igloo was a right laugh, as usual. Next time, Nick, me and the gang are meeting on Friday 17th November at 1pm and will be discussing the steps needed for an organisation to become truly data driven. If that sounds like your idea of quality thought-nosebag, sign up!

Have had a difficult week this week. I think I’m suffering a bit with stress, with a lot of work on and things happening at home. That seems to be affecting my blood sugar, which seems very high all the time, no matter what I eat or how much insulin I take. Tuesday I felt absolutely done in and spend the day asleep in bed.

Eddie Copeland wrote a nice post: Maintain, Fix, Equip, Create or Involve. What scale of solution do YOU need? I like stuff about levels of change and it’s helpful for people to remember that change – digital or otherwise – isn’t monolithic. It can mean different things depending on context and the outcome that is desirable and realistic. I wrote my own (sort of) version of this a while ago.

How video and images can help people complete forms – useful from Aderonke Olutunmogun at Citizens Advice Bureau (also, gah! Medium).

Nice new site from Emily Webber pulling bits and pieces together around communities of practice.

Sunday, 29 October, 2023

Daily note for 29 October 2023

LocalGovCamp was lovely last Wednesday but exhausting. I did very well not to drink much at all the night before which definitely helped. But… so many people to talk to, so much going on. I attended way more sessions than I have done previously and I think that was a good move. Sometimes the opportunity to sit (a bit more) quietly and listen is a way to recharge the social batteries. Anyway, it was great seeing people and as always the energy of the local gov crowd, despite all the challenges, is always an inspiration. Credit to Mr Hill for his organising skills, and the sponsors for their support.

Neilly Neil is blogging again, hurrah!

The next innovation igloo is about blogging, don’t forget.

“Full Stack Service Design is a model to help people break services down into the parts that make them and understand how all of these parts impact the user experience.”

Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software.

Abort Retry Fat is a brilliant newsletter about the history of various bits of IT. This one on Lotus, from 1–2–3 to Notes, is a belter.

How to run a daily stand-up – very useful from Alan Wright (as always).

Monday, 23 October, 2023

Daily note for 23rd October 2023

I’ve had a quiet couple of weeks here on the blog. Also no newsletters in that time and limited engagement in places like LinkedIn and Bluesky. A dip definitely driven by my mood and stuff going on in life, but also because I’ve had a lot of work on and achieved some good things.

LocalGovCamp on Wednesday this week, in Bristol. First time I have stayed away from home in over a year and ngl I am a bit antsy. It will be nice to catch up with people but also – I suspect – exhausting.

I have been putting together a kind of minimum viable project documentation thing in Google Spreadsheets. There are so many projects on the go in local authorities in particular that require a certain amount of documentation, no matter how old school it might feel. Often though it just doesn’t get done, and that’s largely because there’s often a gap between project document templates, which tend to be large and overblown, and just keeping a list in a notebook, which sometimes turns out to be inadequate.

Of course documentation is never the reason that work fails, but sometimes it can provide a bit of a foundation, and having reasonably nice to use and look at, lightweight documents make it all a bit easier. Of course, I would recommended people make their own copies of this thing and adapt the hell out of it to meet their needs. It’s unlikely they are the same as mine.

In a message to a chum, just now, on blogging: “I think it’s just a case of finding a rhythm that works. I find posting little snippets – or aggregations of snippets – works well for me at the moment. As soon as I try to write 500 words on one topic I seize up”

We ran an Innovation Igloo on Friday last week, on service directories, and it was well attended and people seemed to enjoy it. They now seem to be a regular fortnightly affair on a Friday lunchtime. The next one is on Friday 3rd November at 1pm, and it is about blogging and working in the open.

Service directories are a really interesting example of what is on the face of it a very simple technology answer to a policy problem, but one that with a little imagination could be scaled up and out to help design a new operating model for a whole bunch of local public service delivery – and most importantly, prevention. I need to write it up really. Anyway, well worth checking out the Open Referral standard for directories and the research Jukesie is doing on engagement with said standard.

The humans of digital transformation – a talk for Digital Government North, and reprised for the GDS Speaker Series – lovely stuff from Matt Edgar.

Nice reflective week notes from Alex.

Tuesday, 10 October, 2023

Daily note for 10 October 2023

Props to Doug for pointing out this free course called Mastering Systems Thinking. Am giving it a go!

Stockport Council published Towards a digital solution to reduce delays in transferring patients to social care.

Hurrah for Adele Gilpin and the West Northants digital folk for working in the open on their new blog!

Dan Hon writes in his newsletter about the imminent enshittification of Substack. This is not news I want to hear. I replied on LinkedIn:

I guess as well as Quora the other comparison is with Medium, which started out offering an amazing user experience for writers and an ok one for readers, but now seems to want people to log in just to read content.

The problem at the moment is that the experience for writers on every email platform I have tried recently has been so awful, it’s pushing people towards Substack, despite the fact that there are these warning signs for readers.

I’ve been coping with the slow death of Twitter by making more use of my blog, and maybe I ought to start archiving newsletters on there too, just to keep an open web version always available.

So expect to see a slew of posts on here soon, copied and pasted from my newsletters 😀

AI isn’t a drill, and your users don’t want holes –

The Tyranny of the Marginal User – this is excellent:

What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user – the billion-plus-first user – and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.

Friday, 6 October, 2023

Daily note for 6 October 2023

Sent out a newsletter yesterday. It features some notes on building network of digital enthusiasts in your organisation.

The innovation igloo about service patterns was fun today. We talked about service patterns and referenced the Essex/FutureGov work, the GDS Verify-inspired work, and something I have been noodling on myself recently.

The next one is in two weeks time and it’s about service directories. Sign up here.

Had a lovely chat with Jukesie today. Seems like he is very much enjoying life right now, which makes me happy.

Two books about tech related topics have come out recently. One turned out to be predictably disappointing – the Walter Isaacson book about Elon Musk, and the other to be disappointingly disappointing – Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried. I can’t tell you how much I was looking forward to the latter, but having read some reviews, I’m in two minds about whether I should bother with it.

An oldie but a goodie, Sarah Drummond on The what not the how of Service Design.

Harry at Neontribe told me about CharityCamp – so now I am telling you.

Monday, 2 October, 2023

Daily note for 4 October 2023

I visited Newark and Sherwood Council, just over the Nottinghamshire border, on Monday, to give a talk to their digital champions network. I borrowed the ‘5 digital things everyone needs to know about’ frame for the talk from my Digital Essentials e-learning course, and it seemed to work as a 40 odd minute talk (although I was only meant to do 20, oops).

Am open to delivering this to other organisations – probably remotely rather than in person though. If this would be useful, drop me a line and we can have a chat about it!

Local Digital evaluation study: A snapshot of our initial findings – I have views, will write them up at some point.

People. Process. Product – Three lenses to improve your digital strategy.

How we’re opening up access to GOV.UK Forms – access isn’t being opened to local government just yet, which is probably fine for now. Beyond ‘free’ I’m not sure what else GOV.UK Forms would bring to the party at this stage in its development. One important consideration for me is what it spits out once a form is submitted – am guessing some kind of XML or JSON maybe. Organisations adopting these forms will need the in house capability to do something useful with that output, which isn’t usually the case.

Friday, 29 September, 2023

Daily note for 28 September 2023

A new Wilco album! Ace.

I newslettered: “Mark [Thompson]’s rallying call around this stuff – that digital age operating models that make use of what computers are good at, and what the private sector is good at, in order to free up public servants to do what they are good at – feels increasingly like an idea whose time is now. At the very least, it should be part of the conversation. We should not take localism to mean doing things in exponentially ineffective and inefficient ways for the sake of it. There has to be a point where local configuration of nationally adopted standards kicks in at the delivery level as well as at the policy level.”

Weeknotes rules by Giles Turnbull – helpful because they “set expectations about what good weeknote behaviour should look like”.

Team manual and team charter – my two favourite workshops to run with new teams or teams with new members – I love Alan Wright’s blog, so full of insight and useful, practical advice.

Stacks of really, really useful stuff in this guide to digital transformation in HE from Jisc. Lots that can be applied to other sectors.

Tuesday, 26 September, 2023

Daily note for 26 September 2023

Rather terrifyingly, I was invited to chat on this podcast, which came out yesterday, on all things local government, technology and digital.

Nice practical tips on Outlook etiquette from top localgov blogger Tass.

Two great jobs at City of Lincoln Council, joining a team that’s really going places under the awesome leadership of Emily Kate Holmes. Choose between being a Business Intelligence Officer or a Business Analyst in a beautiful city in the best county in the country.

Because we didn’t meet the threshold of complaints last time, the innovation igloo is coming back! MARVEL at my lengthy and rambling monologues on digital and technology. DELIGHT in the willingness of the igloo inhabitants to share their experiences and knowledge. BOGGLE at where the hell Nick might have disappeared to for the last 15 minutes after looking so uncomfortable for the previous 45. SIGN UP using the absurdly tiny register button on this web page.

Visit a National Trust place for free this autumn – why on earth wouldn’t you?

How to cultivate a writing culture – “Convince an engineering team to care about docs”.

I left a lengthy comment on Benjamin Taylor’s post on LinkedIn, which I will paste below for posterity:

My focus as you know is particularly on local government, but will try and be inclusive as possible with these comments!

I think you’re spot on with a lot of your commentary Ben… I like others have been guilty in the last 10 years or so as seeing the technological and cultural shift of ‘digital’ as being a way to genuinely transform entire organisations, but I accept now that this isn’t possible, or indeed terribly helpful.

What I do think is that for genuine systems-based change to happen – the type you rightly advocate – we need the institutions within that system to be operating as well as they possibly can be, and we are a long way from that. I think it’s ok for folk like me to focus on the digital/tech side of things, because it’s vital that we get it right, to build the platform for fixing the bigger, more complex issues.

Organisations have been starved of funding for over a decade now, and that is being felt particularly in the digital/tech space where leaders have been told that technology doesn’t really matter. Only, now you have infrastructure that’s falling to pieces, teams that can’t get their heads around doing anything differently, a supplier market that effectively holds its customers hostage – maybe, actually, we should have been paying more attention.

We need leadership types to understand their responsibilities here. We need middle managers to take ownership of the tech/digital elements of their services and not ‘outsource’ it to the IT team and then moan about them. And we need all public servants to understand that technology is an absolutely vital means to an end. It may not be, and should never be, the end in itself, but that doesn’t mean we don’t take it very seriously.

Finally (sorry) it has to be acknowledged that there are very few efficiencies in ‘digital’. The efficiencies are in the services themselves, or in the prevention of the need for those services in the first place. Yes, reducing duplication of effort, enabling those that can to self serve through the transactional stuff, bringing datasets together to identify meeting needs are all enabled by doing digital and tech better, but the efficiencies – if they come at all – will be from service budgets, not IT budgets. This is often weirdly unacknowledged and can lead to some pretty awkward conversations.

Friday, 22 September, 2023

Daily note for 22 September 2023

“While we are thinking about the future, the present is still happening.” Julian Thompson in his keynote at Service Design in Government. Saw this quote shared a number of times and I love it!

Tass has put together a website for the LocalGov Apps Managers Network using localgov.blog. Awesome! Do join if that’s your thing.

Don’t use QR codes in digital media! Have seen a couple of example recently of organisations putting QR codes in emails or even on websites. I find this bewildering – given most people will be using their phone to read said email or web page, how the hell are they meant to scan it? And why oh why oh why wouldn’t you just use a link?!

QR codes are great for getting people from analogue to digital quickly and easily and without typing anything. But when your user is already on a digital channel, it’s a completely unnecessary and user-hostile step.

Creating one directory to rule them all! – Fab stuff from Adele at West Northants.

Thursday, 21 September, 2023

Daily note for 21 September 2023

I newsletter-ed and LinkedIn-ed about something I have been working on recently to help local public services increase their understanding of digital working and culture at scale. It’s an e-learning course which explains digital, user centred service design, agile, data and technology, all in a way that is rooted in the local public service context. Take a look, to see if it might help you.

What I learned in year three of Platformer – “Has the Substack revolution come and gone?”

Undertaking GOV.UK’s largest software infrastructure project – big, difficult things can be done without too much fuss, if approached in the right way.

Recoding America – “why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better”

John Naughton reviews the recent Elon Musk biography.

How I use my RSS reader – love this sort of stuff.

I added a ‘now’ page to this website, explaining what I am working on at this moment in time. Thanks to Steve for the idea.

This morning I attended Lloyd’s first ‘parade’ via Black Elephant. It’s an interesting approach to online community building. I got to meet someone new, who I would never normally have had a chance to meet, and it provided an opportunity for some personal reflection and sharing – something I’ve been working on myself, so it came at a good time. The experience has also got my mind racing a bit about online communities, and what makes the good ones really tick.