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.
