An online notebook
Get posts sent to your inbox:
An online notebook
I’ve started up a new email newsletter, called Digital Digest. If you would like to sign up, just visit digest.digital.
If you’d like to have a look at the sort of thing you’ll be receiving, the first issue is on the web for your viewing pleasure.
I hope you sign up, and find the content useful!
The Ad Hoc Government Digital Services Playbook compiles what we’ve learned from four years of delivering digital services for government clients. Our playbook builds on and extends the Digital Services Playbook by the United States Digital Service. The USDS playbook is a valuable set of principles, questions, and checklists for government to consider when building digital services. If followed, the plays make it more likely a digital services project will succeed.
Original: https://adhocteam.us/2018/05/24/the-ad-hoc-government-digital-services-playbook/
This tool is designed to help you make an honest assessment of how advanced your organisation is at dealing with data. You can compare your assessment with others from your own organisation, and from around the country.
Original: https://datamaturity.esd.org.uk/
Digital technology, coupled with design approaches, can help third sector organisations expand the reach of existing services, sense and respond to new needs as they emerge, and achieve more for less.
Original: https://medium.com/@wearecast/top-tips-for-nonprofits-building-digital-services-e624cec3408c
Transforming an organisation is fundamentally about working with people to help them do new things and work in new ways. There’s a whole industry built on workplace training with courses, curricula and training providers to fit almost any skills gap. But when it comes to digital transformation, this way of thinking falls short in several ways.
Original: https://blog.wearefuturegov.com/throw-away-your-corporate-training-plan-e8eae41ae6c8
Although digital technologies are a powerful way to change a service, what really matters is the method with which change is done: user research, UX design, agile working, co-design, and solving problems in experimental ways. We now want to apply those methods to a wider set of problems, not all involving digital tech.
Original: https://wearecitizensadvice.org.uk/to-take-the-next-step-on-digital-we-dropped-the-word-digital-14b09ec2f25f
“I think we have to accept that there’s going to be legacy stuff out there, and there’s going to be unsupported systems. So it would be better to accept that we’ve got that and come up with strategies for how we’re going to manage that.”
Original: https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2018/05/24/understanding-legacy-technology-in-government/
Due to time constraints, many Local Government Service leads are inevitably ‘heads down’ and perhaps overwhelmed by the variety of technology on offer. It can be hard to team up with neighbouring boroughs because that adds complexity and may slow things down through collaborative decision making. They need more ‘heads up’ time to reflect and review what is going on elsewhere, and try to be open minded and consider wider options – we as SMEs on the other hand need to present our products in terms of their benefits, in plain English, not as a technology offer.
Original: https://medium.com/@hilary.simpson/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-engaging-smes-and-local-government-in-innovation-d9b6d371feff
‘A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.’
Original: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/
The endless noise emanating from Silicon Valley essentially has two complementary elements. One is all about dreams so unlikely that they beggar belief: the idea that the Tesla CEO Elon Musk will one day set up a colony on Mars; or that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg can successfully marshal an attempt to “cure, prevent and manage” all diseases in a single generation. Whatever its basis in fact, this stuff casts people and corporations as godlike visionaries, and then provides a puffed-up context for the stuff the big tech companies shout about week in, week out: stuff we either don’t need or, worse, which threatens some of the basic aspects of everyday civilisation.
Original: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/21/big-tech-products-silicon-valley