Share your stuff with LocalGov Digital!

I’m well chuffed to have joined the steering group for LocalGov Digital, the informal network of bods doing interesting stuff with computers, the internet and change within local councils.

I’m leading on communication and am kicking off a few pieces of work to drive up levels of awareness of and engagement with the network.

The first of these is to pull together some great examples of digital resources in the sector. Stuff like:

  • Digital, IT or technology strategies
  • Service manuals, playbooks and how to guides on digital and transformation
  • Templates for conducting user research or assessing a digitised service
  • Presentations outlining an organisation’s approach to digital and change

…and anything else folk think might be interesting!

Do you have anything like this that you wouldn’t mind sharing with all the good people of LocalGov Digital (and anybody else who browses their website? Just get in touch by email: d@vebrig.gs.

I’ll publish details here of the pages once they are live on the LocalGov Digital website.

Thanks!

Photo credit: Jonathan Simcoe on Unsplash

[RL] The problem with local government software

Original post from Gavin Beckett

With a very small number of exceptions, the established local government technology market is populated by companies that fundamentally do not understand user research.

They do not start with user needs or design great user experiences. And they do not use the tools and techniques of the internet age to deliver working software rapidly, so that real users get value from it quickly and iteratively.

I wrote a little while ago that the software market for local government is one of the things holding back the success of transformation in the sector. Gavin argues the point well in this post – it’s a fairly long read but worth the effort.

Why is local government software bad? Let me count the ways…

  • It’s hard to maintain, taking up huge resources to keep systems patched and updated
  • It’s siloed, with data unable to be meaningfully analysed and shared with other systems
  • It’s user hostile, with manuals in lever arch ring binders and training needed to do the most basic of operations
  • It’s hard to access, often hosted in council data centres, requiring the use of council equipment and connecting technology like Citrix to get anything done

I’m a little glum on this topic. My fear is that there are a couple of things holding back progress. The first is that the market for local government software isn’t big enough to provide the necessary reward for the investment needed to fix it. Second is that the develop challenge isn’t particularly exciting and thus the vendors struggle to attract the talent needed to make really great software.

One solution is for government to write its own software, although that would mean organisations bringing resources together in a way that hasn’t been particularly productive in the past.

Alternatively, councils could make a shared commitment to bring budget together to pump prime an incumbent or a new supplier. This though would almost certainly mean paying twice for a while whilst the new system is developed.

I’m not convinced either of the above are going to happen soon though. In the meantime, we must try to procure as well as we can, and try to hold suppliers to the standards we set ourselves for our own services.

[RL] Accounts and portals

Original post from Salman Chaudhri, FutureGov

…a different, more nuanced approach to authentication can save councils money in the long run. By focusing on making the transactions that apply to most people as seamless as possible, it can help to reduce additional support i.e. the number of phone calls and face to face contact.

An interesting development on the original post by then FutureGover Carrie Bishop, who delightfully wrote “‘I really wish I had one place where I can see all my transactions with the council’, said nobody, ever.”

The idea of accounts for public services kind of makes sense in the abstract – people think of e-commerce and how logging into one place where all your stuff resides is a useful thing. Surely it would be great to have that for council services too?

As this post explains, that isn’t necessarily the case, not least because most people don’t interact with their council all that often, and when they do, creating an account seems like needless faff. In those cases, authenticating users in other ways makes much more sense, and there’s some great ideas shared here.

We’ve found that once you identify the information needed for different types of transactions it’s possible to strip back which services really need a ‘login’.

However when considering the user need, there are some cases where an account might make sense. Perhaps a business owner who has several interactions on a regular basis with different bits of the Council, like commercial waste and environmental health, for instance. Or a developer, who has several sites with planning applications ongoing, or building inspections.

It’s dangerous though to make assumptions about when an account might be needed, and this is certainly one of those areas where keeping that focus on meeting the needs of user can ensure a better experience for them, and creating a digital journey that’s more likely to succeed.

This is a post in the Reading List series, where I link to an interesting article and add some commentary. See here for more information, or find all the posts in the series here.

[RL] Starting the ‘Reading List’

Finding time to blog is tough, and while I enjoy putting together the Five for Friday posts, you may have noticed that even doing those is tricky.

To get myself back into the habit of regularly posting, I’m going to have a go at splitting the idea of Five for Friday up, posting the links and short commentary on them individually, as I come across them.

This hopefully will mean I don’t have the burden (!) of trying to find five every week, or having to edit a bunch of stuff in one go. Instead, I can do it piecemeal as I see things I find interesting.

I’ve always enjoyed the way John Gruber posts to his linked list and I guess this is a similar thing for me to do.

I’ll categorise all the posts as reading list, and also add the [RL] prefix to post titles to highlight what they are. I’ll also find a way to send a bunch out via email (which you can sign up for here) – which people have said they find useful in the past. As always, most stuff ends up on Pinboard and Twitter too.

Just in case that sort of thing floats your boat, I’ll recommend Stefan’s Strategic Reading blog here, as well as link infused newsletters such as leisa reichelt’s and Coté’s.

Two blockers to radical (digital) change

I was asked this morning for the two main blockers to progress in the various attempts at technology enabled change over the years, whether titled e-government or digital transformation.

Here’s what I came up with – it would be interesting to get your thoughts:

Two main challenges for me would be two elements of core capability. The first would be technology, and specifically software. The main line of business systems in use in most local councils is simply not fit for purpose for the digital age. They are horrible to use, don’t interoperate, work poorly on mobile, don’t offer great customer experience for self service and are dogs for the IT team to maintain. Time and time again, otherwise excellent initiatives at e-government or digital transformation are scuppered because of issues relating to core back office systems. What’s more, the market seems to find it impossible to have an impact on the situation, and so driving the incumbents out is very hard to do.

Second, and possibly more important, are the people issues. First is culture, which is risk and change averse, often because of the role of middle managers, many of whom are ‘experts’ in their service area and extremely dedicated to preserving the current way of doing things. Folk on the front line can often easily diagnose problems and suggest solutions, and senior executives are usually well up for a bit of disruptive change. However those in the middle can slow things down and block progress. The other bit of the people problem is capability, in that there aren’t enough really good people around in organisations to drive the change needed forward, which takes guts and stamina as well as intelligence. Without a reasonably sized army of these people in place, initiatives can get run into the ground very quickly.

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