We are moving house again this week. Lucky enough to have removals folk helping us, they are here packing boxes today, then the big shift happens next week. No broadband til the 13th, so that will be interesting! I hate moving, it’s the kind of disruption and change that I find incredibly unsettling. #
I love the idea of Emily’s planning game⬈. Reminds me of the good old days of the digital engagement game (dead links ahoy in that post, btw). After last week’s workshopping, I fancy doing something new along those lines for the work I am focusing on at the moment. #
Working in the open in the public sector could really do with a renewed, optimistic case for it. By working in the open, I mean teams thinking out loud, announcing product changes they’re trialling, sharing good practice, stuff like that.
Why isn’t there a cookie-cutter website for local councils in the UK?…Imagine if we had a common system, similar to central government’s approach, with shared components and a unified content management system. Councils could save time and money, focusing on improving services rather than reinventing the wheel.
I couldn’t help but dive in, naturally…
I think the days of individual council websites are probably numbered – it isn’t justifiable for 300 organisations to be recreating – mostly quite poorly – the same website over and over again when they are cutting funding on social care and housing, etc. It’d be lovely if there was the money for each and every council to have their own, high quality website, but sadly that isn’t the reality and the sooner decision makers get their heads around that the better.
Do I think all local authority websites ought to be folded into GOV.UK? Probably not. There is a place for some sense of local identity I think for council run services.
But I do think that having 300-odd organisations spending public money building, designing and writing content for websites over and over again is not the best way to be doing things. LocalGovDrupal is a start when it comes to sharing software, but there are still too many costs involved in running it if you don’t have a well stocked tech team. We need a turnkey solution that any council of any size can just start using.
Content needs a focus – so much of the words on council websites are basically the same. Write it once, write it well, and let – or make councils reuse it.
Then move onto online services – establish patterns, build them out in a handful of common platforms, and then make councils use them. If it means standardising some process, so be it, was long as local policy can be reflected in configuration.
There’s a bunch of middle ways between the current fragmented, duplicative, and poor quality mess we are currently in, and a fully centralised single website for all local councils, and in that middle ground the answer will be. Maybe it’s regional working, maybe it’s allowing councils choice between several competing platforms, based on clear and open standards for service patterns, content, and layout etc. #
Another great video from Mark Thompson on how public services can benefit from radical reform in the way they use technology:
August was not the chilled out month I was hoping for! Took a week off for staycationing but otherwise was nose to the grindstone on really exciting work, but work nonetheless. Hoping to be able to poke my head up above the parapet more over the next few weeks! #
One of the things I have been working on is a rebrand of my consultancy business, SensibleTech. I’ve never been hugely keen on the name, and the current website is basically an embarrassment!
So, am rebranding it to Localise, emphasising my almost-total devotion to local public services, and with an awful lot of help from Steph⬈, I’ve been wrangling with WordPress to give a better account of what I actually do these days – embedding stuff like the digital quality model and my strategy framework into something vaguely coherent. Launching soon, but here’s a sneaky peak:
Of course, I know that most people don’t care one jot about this – for the meantime Localise will remain very much Dave Briggs Incorporated – but I think this new brand gives me more of a chance to grow the business, should I choose to in the future. #
Working with a client last week, I ran a new exercise in a face to face workshop which I called Empathy and Efficiency.
It combines producing an empathy map⬈ for a person using a service with an ‘efficiency map’ which looks at things from the council’s perspective. Once both are complete, you are able to compare them and spot areas of alignment, and – perhaps more importantly – where the clashes are.
It is obviously incredibly important to consider user needs, and design around them. But it’s also vital that the organisation’s needs are also met – whether statutory, financial, or political. Otherwise, what’s the point?
I think it worked well, and at some point I’ll tweak it and share some templates, etc. #
I am constantly struck by how often we in local government are forced to buy poor technology. For all the brilliant digital work done over the last decade we as a sector seem remarkably content to put up with badly designed stuff that is built on legacy architecture which is badly translated to the cloud.
It’s simplistic (though tempting!) to blame client side skills gaps for our purchasing decisions and I think thats part of it. I think it’s also down to us not creating an internal appetite for better technology – once you give people an awareness that something better is possible then they will be more demanding.
It’s an important point, brilliantly made, and one I have been wrestling with over the summer a great deal. #
What do you believe about how the world works? Do you believe it works like a machine, that a cause always leads to an effect and that makes the world predictable? Or do believe it works in random ways, where sometimes a cause doesn’t have the expected effect and sometimes effects appear from unknown causes, that the way the world works is unpredictable and emergent.
These two opposite ways of seeing the world are often so deeply rooted that we don’t recognise them, but they matter. They matter when we run organisations the way we see the world. And they matter when we try to apply tools and techniques in our organisations. Our tools and techniques fit with one or the worldview, and they aren’t interchangeable.
Been trying to think of nice stories to tell about the potential for the use of data to really fundamentally change local public service delivery. The best examples I can think of tend to be in the prevention / early intervention space.
The one I am using A LOT at the moment is:
“Imagine you could identify certain wards in the borough where, if a household misses two council tax payments in a row, you know to send the Citizens’ Advice folk round to help them, because otherwise there’s a 50% chance that household will be homeless and needing emergency accommodation at the council’s expense”
It’s not perfect but quite good at getting the general idea across, I think. #
Last week I attended a jointly run LocalGovDigital and LGA session about the service standard and its uptake in local government. Perhaps not surprisingly, uptake has been low so far. Phil wrote about the session on his blog⬈.
Mark Thompson was there and he talked through his ideas, many of which I think are excellent. His focus on standardising back offices to help fund better local services on the frontline led to me making this point in the chat:
We’ve veered a little way from the service standard onto how standardised services and technology might help local gov with some of its problems – which is good, because solving those problems is what needs to happen.
But to wheel back to the starting point, could a local gov service standard be focused on helping to harmonise service design across the sector, so that it can be in a better place to adopt Mark’s thinking in the future, around shared back office capabilities?
In other words, as part of a service assessment: “Oh, you appear to have not followed sector good practice and decided to do your own thing entirely that means you aren’t going to be able to be a part of a more efficient future when we share stuff. What made you think that was a good idea, and how are you going to convince your rate payers that it is in their best interests?”
This week we ran a virtual roundtable for the Town Hall 2030⬈ project, with a bunch of awesome folk across local government digital, one of whom has already written up their perspectives⬈! 😍 #
This report is in response to heads of IT highlighting challenges in recruiting, developing and retaining staff across all IT disciplines, and increasing pressures facing IT teams. All heads of IT (or equivalent position) in all English councils were asked to complete an online survey between October 2023 and January 2024.
Within software and hardware engineering, product management, user centred design and a myriad of other professional practices, there are known ways to make technology more resilient and reliable. What’s missing is the rigour provided by matching enduring teams to enduring technology, to ensure these skills can be applied continuously.
Time and again, National Audit Office reports contain universally similar themes. Over-optimistic delivery plans mean budgets get burnt, deadlines are missed, governance is ineffective.
Terrific series of 4 posts⬈ by Ben Welby on building a data driven public sector.
David McCandless, of Information is Beautiful, suggested that instead of thinking about data like oil, we should rather think of it like soil. Data is a fertile environment from which good things might happen.
I work in tech. I think a lot of cool stuff is being built and a lot of good work is being done. But tech is a mature industry, and most of what is interesting these days has to do with bringing the things we learned from 2000-2015 about how to use software into places that have not yet modernized. We’re at the tail end of what’s interesting and good and novel. Software technology has very little left to change in a major way. And the entire ethos of a16z and the like has utterly failed to produce breakthroughs in computer hardware, biological sciences, energy, environment or any other major sector. The last decade of innovation has been entirely about reducing friction in commerce. That’s it. And it’s not that profitable and will end up with a very small number of winners.
Ever since the decline of Evernote as an ‘everything bucket’ I’ve lacked a decent option for a place to just save stuff – links, PDFs, anything I might want to come back to later. Have tried all the options and not liked any of them! Even venerable native Mac apps like Yojimbo and DevonThink have left me cold.
However Tom Steel’s post⬈ has made me take another look at Notion again, and it isn’t too bad. It has a browser extension for Chrome and Safari, and that saves a whole copy of the content of the page, as well as a link to the original, which is nice. Will see how it goes. #
Local Stuff for Local (Gov) People⬈ really is my favourite blog at the moment. If you’re someone who is thinking about starting to blog but struggling to make the leap, this is such a good example of a new blogger just going for it – a real inspiration! #
I think my view on this is that there needs to be a standard used in local government, but the current one is not nearly flexible enough to cope with the constraints councils operate within. #
In the UK, GDS benefitted from Francis Maude as the Minister for Cabinet Office (MCO) with his leadership backing the wave of transformation through to 2015. Under his watch many of the things that established the culture for digital transformation bedded in. And then in 2015 there started a sequence of 12 MCOs in 9 years. Not many of them showed the same aptitude for leading digital transformation as Maude.
Along the way the clarity of responsibility for digital started to fray. Digital inclusion, some aspects of data, some parts of Artificial Intelligence, and some parts of digital identity moving over to what is now DSIT.
“About ideas⬈” from ‘a council computer person’ shared some good ways to be more creative at work. Also, the posts links to a thing called Mermaid⬈ for drawing diagrams and flow charts, which looks dead useful and interesting. #
Change is never easy; we learned that before. But we also know that effective delivery – and the million silent nods of approval that decent public services can earn – doesn’t happen without the right organisation and the right leadership. Political leadership is an essential part of that.
Ministers decide. The best can unblock delivery too. We hope these ministers will.
Some machinery of government changes starting to come through. DLUHC is now MHCLG⬈ (the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) again, which is good. Also all the digital stuff (GDS, CDDO etc) is going into DSIT⬈ (the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology) which is potentially exciting.
It will be interesting to see where the Local Digital programme ends up – staying in the policy department or moving across with all the digital teams? #
UK Authority reports⬈ on Birmingham City Council extending their contract with Oracle, despite it being a pretty disastrous relationship thus far. I commented on LinkedIn, and am pasting here for posterity:
Am not sure what their alternative was, to be fair. They have to have a system to do this stuff, and signing with another supplier would mean starting the whole implementation process again on top of the licensing costs – and I can’t see how that would offer better value for tax payers.
Also we have to bear in mind that Birmingham has a budget of £3.2 BILLION – using the standard ERP estimate of 1-3% of budget, means anything in the range of £12 – £36 million.
This is an exceptional case and the numbers have to be huge. I personally think a big issue here originally was the fact that the budget was nowhere near big enough in the first place – which of course means that the original business case was fantasy stuff…
Personally, I would be glad if no council ever bought Oracle ever again. But in this specific case, the reason things went so badly wrong were not entirely the fault of the technology vendor:
the decision to replace the existing system, chasing a highly speculative ‘transformation’ dream – based on a recommendation made by a certain consultancy firm that ought to have known better
a budget and timescale for implementation that were pure fantasy
a lack of understanding of the need to redesign processes to enable the new software to work properly
massive over customisation of the system by the systems integrator, which nobody else could understand
a decision to go live despite the system not having been tested and with multiple vital integrations not properly working.
Designing the digital account for the Universal Credit digital account, it was abundantly clear that the approach to design that worked for GOV.UK and was spreading across government was fundamentally unsuited to services that used automation, intentionally placed burdens on the public through policy choice, and used data from across government. As was the need for greater transparency and accountability. But as design practice spread across government, the focus on simplicity took on a life of its own, developing into what, at times, felt like a tyranny of design, where anything that distracted from the proximate user need was impossible to justify. The idea that digital public services needed to be more than transactional was lost.
In the middle of a house move, so am working on my laptop rather than my main computer, and am on the sofa – my new desk doesn’t arrive until Wednesday!
A Sunday daily note! A rarity indeed. I’m not using my usual computer today, which means that I don’t have MarsEdit and thus this post does not sport any paragraph links. Let me know how little you care in the comments! 🙂
While catching up on David’s recent blogging, i also came across this post about GDS’s registers project⬈. It’s a really interesting read.
It’s a shame that David’s posts are on Medium – they are very good and deserve a wide audience. But I find the Medium reading experience diabolical these days.
I posted on Bluesky⬈ whether there might be a need for a multi-author blog, where occasional bloggers could publish posts, but on a platform that was open, and without all the guff that comes from Medium.
Technically it would be very simple, just a WordPress instance with a clean, clear theme on it. People could sign up and after a very brief vetting to ensure they are publicly spirited types, they could post to it whenever they felt the need. Could be like a training ground for new bloggers, who don’t quite want to take the leap of having a whole site dedicated to themselves.
I dunno, it’s an idea, I guess. Jukesie wasnt sure⬈, but I do wonder if it will help some folks, and most importantly, get others off Medium!
I increasingly see designers start designing complex websites or repeat-use services by going straight to high fidelity screens. To me, this suggests that they haven’t been told about the need to consider structure, and how to make tradeoffs on different tasks serving different user groups (to use an information architecture analogy, like designing a flow for a supermarket or shopping mall). I’ve also come to feel that if I can’t find a sitemap for an existing repeat use service it’s likely no one else thought about structure from a user’s perspective either.
