šŸ“–Ā Is there a role in reformed public services for ‘system navigators’?

I’ve been mulling a bit on what could be funded at the front line of local public service delivery, were we to save a bunch of cash at the back end by harmonising some bits of IT and digital spend.

The driving force, remember, for this drive for consolidation is not some techno-utopian centralised vision, but rather to make use of economies of scale around highly commoditised, non-local-value adding capabilities, that frees up cash to pay actual human beings to help other human beings with the complexities of their lives.

My family have a fair bit of experience of having to navigate the ‘system’ – social care, benefits, health, housing, and so on – and it genuinely is a nightmare. And we come at this from a very priveleged position: we’re pretty well educated, we have the time to deal with it, and at least one member of the family knows a bit about how councils operate.

We often wonder – if we are finding this so difficult, what must it be like for people without our advantages? Bewildering, maddening, and deeply traumatising, I would expect.

One thing that we agree would definitely help would be to have a consistent person to talk to. Social care case managers change so regularly, it is almost impossible to build relationships, with an understanding of the history, and so much time is wasted having to explain the same things over, and over again.

What’s more, even when there is a case worker to talk to, they often have little knowledge or influence over other parts of the same organisation they work for, let alone others within the system, such as other tiers of local government, or health, or the DWP to name just a few.

My brain fart today is this: if we saved enough money on boring IT gubbins, could we spend it on creating an attractive, well paid role for ‘systems navigators’, who are the single point of contact for families with complex needs, who understand the workings of the different public services involved, who knows who to talk to to find answers or to jolly things along, who can just keep the family informed and up to date about what is happening to them?

This is such a bloody obvious idea that it has surely been attempted before, and yet clearly in the places we have lived, it hasn’t quite worked. Maybe it wasn’t properly funded. Maybe the jobs weren’t attracting people of the right calibre to want to stick to them for a longish term. I don’t know.

To return to the usual theme of this blog, there’s no doubt that good digital services would help these people do their jobs a lot better; but the important thing would be that they would be actual human beings, embedded in a local area, who knows the context and grows to know the families and their needs, and how the system can help them.

This is, of course, very much a sticking plaster: the real answer would be to reform the system so it was less fragmented and confusing. But that is many years away, even if we started tomorrow, and in the meantime, this is something very simple that could happen relatively quickly, and works well as an example of the kind of highly local, high value service that could be funded out of the savings from shared back office digital capabilities.

It’s just an idea, one of many possibilities. I’m not even sure if it is a terribly good one! But it’s an example of what could be possible.

šŸ“… Daily note for 4 July 2024

Have added Google Analytics to this blog, via the Sitekit WordPress plugin. I guess it will be interesting to see the numbers, but it isn’t really why I do this, so maybe I’ll switch it off again once the novelty wears off. #

Audree Fletcher posted a little while back about Demanding predictable solutions for uncertain and complex problemsā¬ˆ:

I understand it, truly, the desire to know specifically what youā€™re going to get for your money. Itā€™s what people have come to expect of transactions with suppliers. I give you money, you give me a caramel chai. You give me money, I give you my time.

But it only works when you are really certain that the thing youā€™re buying is the thing you need to achieve the outcomes youā€™re seeking.

Straightforward for my posh tea in a high street coffee shop. Less straightforward in a complex adaptive system like, say, education.

Because the more specificity and certainty you demand in advance around what will be delivered in order to achieve the outcome, the lower your chance of achieving the outcome.

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I posted an article yesterday about writing good strategies, based on some of the work I have been doing lately. Also copy and pasted it into LinkedIn, and will send it out on a newsletter at some point too. #

A lovely chat with Jamesā¬ˆ this morning, rather out of the blue. It was great to catch up and share stories about what we’ve been up to for the last 10 years, or however long it was since we last spoke. We talked a lot about online communities – particularly of practice – and shared a bunch of experiences and ideas. He reminded me of a few things I’d forgotten about, like the GDS community development handbookā¬ˆ. #

The community development frameworkā¬ˆ sets out the things that communities need really well: people, programme, and platform. I do struggle with the latter, nothing seems to work terribly well, particularly when it comes to making it easy to extract knowledge out of discussions and into some kind of searchable archive. I’ve not expressed this very well, but I do wonder whether this is the sort of thing that a large language model type thing might actually be useful for. #

Have just come across this great blogā¬ˆ from a local government technology person. They don’t mention their name on their blog, so I won’t do it on mine. Well worth a read and a subscribe though! #

Richard Popeā¬ˆ has a book in the worksā¬ˆ! Exciting! #

šŸ“– A framework for (digital) strategy

This post and all its contents is published under a creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Find out moreā¬ˆ.

I’m doing a fair bit of strategy work with councils at the moment, and have hit upon a framework for putting them together which seems to help keep strategies strategic, and thus make them more useful.

I’m typing here about the work I’m doing on digital strategies specifically – although this stuff may well work for other kinds of strategies too. Also, this isn’t a ‘do you need a digital strategy?’ kind of post – it assumes you’ve decided you do need one. Finally, when I say digital, I mean it as a shorthand for technology, data, and online experience. OK, let’s get into it!

Strategy sometimes has a bad reputation – and thatā€™s probably because a lot of strategies arenā€™t very good!

  • They donā€™t align with any other strategic vision
  • They are too detailed
  • They are written in weird corporate speak and fail to engage people
  • They try to do too many things
  • They date really badly
  • Nobody reads them, or refers to them

What does good strategy look like?

  • Good strategies provide a destination for organisations. They describe why things need to be different in the future.
  • With that vision, individual teams can use them to plan what they will do, when they will do it, and how they will deliver.
  • Strategies aid decision making, prioritisation, architectural decisions, team structures, culture, ways of workingā€¦ pretty much everything! But, importantly, they don’t need to include the details of those things.

My approach to making this all a lot easier is to do the following:

  • Really focus on what exactly the strategy needs to do. Keep it short, high level, outcomes focused
  • Resist the temptation to put operational details or project plans into strategies – ie the stuff that’s likely to change
  • Have proper documents where that stuff can go, to ensure it still gets thought about and written down
Strategy framework showing the 4 levels: strategy (why), blueprints (what), playbooks (how), and roadmaps (when).

Explaining the framework

The way this works is that all the stuff that often (wrongly, in my view) ends up in strategies is actually published in 4 separate documents (or not documents – could be any format depending on the content).

It also ensures we can be flexible with the bits that need to be flexible. Plans change, technology changes, stuff happens. That shouldn’t affect your strategic vision, themes, and principles – but it will and should change your choices, pipeline of work, and approaches to doing work.

  • This strategy is high level and long term. It outlines the outcomes expected from the strategy and answers the question ā€˜why?ā€™. The strategy is the formal document, which is formally adopted by the Council and will rarely if ever change.

    I’m thinking of this as a maybe 6 page document (maybe more to allow for the senior person’s introduction, etc etc). It is vital that it is properly socialised across the entire organisation and referred to all the time. Maybe find a way to pull bits out of it to go on posters and things, to keep them in folk’s minds.
  • Blueprints are created individually for different elements of the strategy, such as core ICT, applications, data or online experience. They provide a link between strategy and delivery. They answer the question ā€˜what?ā€™. They are likely to change as decisions are made around the issues involved.

    Blueprints are likely to come in a variety of formats. Could be enterprise architecture type diagrams, could be statements of approach, could be policu documents, could be organisation charts. All depends what bits of the mechanisms of strategy delivery you’re articulating.
  • Playbooks define the ways of working and approaches to delivering the work. They answer the question ā€˜how?ā€™. They ought to be truly living documents that evolve as the organisation gets better and more mature in their approach to doing digital related work.

    I think the best playbooks tend to be online and easy to refer to. So, could be on the intranet, or on a blogging platform, or using something like Gitbookā¬ˆ. It’s important that it’s easy to access and easy to update and add to.
  • Roadmaps are created individually for each theme. They describe the activities to deliver the strategy outcomes, in other words, the ā€˜when?ā€™. It’ll be updated all the time, as prioprities switch around, things take longer to deliver than expected, or where emergencies arise.

    The nice way to do a roadmap would be with some nice software to make it pretty – there are loads out there. But it could be a Gantt chart type thing, or a simple portfolio list that shows when things are planned in to be done.

Hopefully that makes sense. The idea is simple – keep the strategy strategic, and make sure everyone understands it. All the detail still needs documenting, but in the appropriate place and in an appropriate format.

Let me know what you think!

šŸ“… Daily note for 2 July 2024

Kiasmosā¬ˆ have been providing some of my favourite beepy-boopy music of recent times. They have a newish album outā¬ˆ, which is excellent. My favourite track of theirs, though, is still Loopedā¬ˆ from their 2015 debut album:

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We had the July edition of LocalGovDigital Live!ā¬ˆ This morning. We were meant to have a session on the Open Referral Standard but sadly Jukesie was poorly and couldn’t make it. So, we had more of an open discussion instead. Think it went ok, although personally I think these things work best with a proper presentation of some sort. #

Stefan pointed outā¬ˆ – quite rightly – that my idea for publishing a daily note and then adding to it throughout the day will be terrible for a lot of RSS subscribing types. This is because RSS feeds don’t tend to appear as new when they have been edited, only on publishing. So, I won’t do that! #

Somehow I missed this postā¬ˆ when it appeared a couple of weeks ago. The digital folk at Birmingham are continuing to do some amazing work despite the financial situation they find themselves in.

Finding ways like this to improve the small tactical stuff is really important. Doesn’t take away the need to focus on big picture, long term structural change – but having both running in parallel means people are seeing results and improvements all the time. Good for morale! #

The linking-to-paragraphs solution I figured out yesterday has made my mind spin a few times around what other bits of blogging heavy lifting could be done on my desktop rather than server-side. Suddenly a switch has been flicked and I kind of understand the appeal of flat file blogging engines, like Jekyllā¬ˆ etc. #

Another little presentational tweak to the blog – post titles now have an emoji prefixing them, as a guide to what they contain. So daily notes have a calendar, links posts a link (duh!), longer pieces an open book, techie bits a person behind a laptop, and a TV screen for video posts. Am doing this manually at the moment, suspect there would be a way to automate it but I can’t be faffed. #

The complexity is the attraction – reflections on trying to use cryptoā¬ˆ – interesting stuff from Terence Eden, especially this:

I don’t need to know how the underlying infrastructure works. I don’t need to understand how the global financial system works. But, with crypto, I need to understand staking, gas fees, bridges, offramps, DeFi, and a dozen other things. This is stupid. It makes insiders feel smart because they have embraced the self-created complexity, and allows them to feel smug that normal people aren’t as smart. That’s it. That’s why some people love crypto.

I suspect this may be true of other technologies, too. #

šŸ“… Daily note for 1 July 2024

Pinch, punch, first of the month.#

Am trying a thing to easily(ish) create anchor links at the end of paragraphs in these daily notes. That way I can point people directly to a specific nugget within a post. There is a very limited user need here, beyond scratching an itch, which is to try and replicate one of the ways that Dave Winer’s bloggingā¬ˆ works, and Lloyd tried a similar thing a while backā¬ˆ.

I’m aided here by the fact that I write my blogs posts in MarsEdit, a desktop app on my Mac, rather than the WordPress interface itself. MarsEdit lets me create macros assigned to keyboard shortcuts, so now when I hit ctrl-cmd-p, it plonks in opening and closing paragraph tags, and prompts me for the anchor id, which it then uses to spit out the necessary tags to make a clickable # sign at the end of the paragraph.

(A slight pain is having to type in the anchor text twice – once for the anchor and then for the link. Mistyping this will obviously lead to errors, but am not sure how to get around it.)

I think it works – try it out on this paragraph and let me know how much of a waste of time this was! #

What this hopefully will mean is that, rather than waiting until the end of the day to publish these notes, I can publish it after the first item is written, and then update it during the day. Having the anchor links means if I want to point to a specific thing before the end of the day, I can.#

Not a lot to argue about in this articleā¬ˆ on building “21st century digital government” – data and interoperability are jolly important. But the click-baity headline means that it’s presented as the only answer, and we know that – as important as data etc is – it’s isn’t the only thing organisations need to be focusing on. I don’t think anyone would argue that rather obvious point, but the danger is that some less informed folk might read this as being a ‘data will solve everything’ argument, meaning that the other stuff gets missed.

Basically, everything is complicated.#

I’ve ordered a new desk chair, on the recommendation of Ann Kempsterā¬ˆ. Thanks Ann! This one isn’t too big, so won’t dominate the room, and most importantly, it won’t bankrupt the shareholders of SensibleTech Ltdā¬ˆ. I asked for suggestions on Bluesky and LinkedIn – feels as if questions like that are ideally suited to social networks. #

Speaking of LinkedIn, it does seem to be continuing its march towards replacing Xwitter as the best place to get work-related engagement going. Noticed a few people writing fairly lengthy piece as ‘posts’ rather than ‘articles’ – would be interested to know what difference this makes, as both require a click to read the bulk of the text. Might try an A/B test to check it at some point.

The URLs for posts rather than articles are very ugly, and it’s a poorer reading experience for people who aren’t logged in or have an account.

Another thought: posting these daily notes in their entirety to a LinkedIn post, rather than just linking to them? šŸ¤”#

Here is one such LinkedIn postā¬ˆ, an excellent one from Adrian Lent, in which he proposes what those wishing to see radical change in public services ought to do:

I think history is clear on what works. Those who want change must come together, work out a shared vision of generalised reform and then press for it as determinedly as possible. In effect, creating a movement within the public sector for system transformation.

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This is a lovely post from Jukesieā¬ˆ about his love affair with libraries, and his inspiring decision to start volunteering. #

Steve recently started sharing his blogrollā¬ˆ – a rather old school blogging concept of maintain a public list of blogs you like to read, to encourage others to find them and share theirs.

Was reminded of this when I came across this post from Dave Winerā¬ˆ, sharing an automated way of finding blogs from blogrolls, and then finding more blogs from those blogrolls, and so on – all thanks to a defined standard. Nice.

(I just noticed that one of Steve’s posts mentions Winer’s standard too – I must have missed that at the time!) #

šŸ“… Daily note for 28 June 2024

I’m back! First daily note in a while. Hope you are as pleased with me as I am šŸ˜

The blog has been rehosted, meaning I can save a bit of money shutting down an old hosting account. Have also changed the theme, going from the venerable Twenty-Fifteenā¬ˆ which has served me well for a long old while.

I’ve gone for GeneratePressā¬ˆ, which is a very bare-bones (the idea being that you can customise it to do whatever you like). I’m just tweaking it here and there to keep things light and simple. I’ve avoided blog-tinkering for a while, but it’s quite nice to change things up.

I’ve tried to trim down the number of RSS feeds I am checking on the regular in NetNewsWireā¬ˆ. Am subscribed to over 400 but huge numbers of those are inactive these days, and others I rarely check. So, have split them into two folders, Must reads and Nice to reads. The latter stays shut unless I’m desperate for something to look at!

Eddie Copeland posted an interesting asideā¬ˆ on language and how he isn’t using the word digital much, and it seems to be working for him. Fair enough! I’m a bit horses-for-courses on this one really, sometimes it can be a helpful word, sometimes not. Depends on the organisation’s context I guess.

When I do say ‘digital’ these days though, I invariably follow it up by saying that it is a simple shorthand for technology, data, and online experience.

I love this quote from Matt King in his post the future of digital is already hereā¬ˆ:

Working in public sector digital environments can often involve an almost disorientating sense of deja-vu, where a chance phrase drops you deep into a flashback to the previous times you had a similar conversation. When this first happens, itā€™s tempting to think that youā€™re getting old, and that either that the organisation youā€™re working with has ignored the last 15 years, or that the case for digital change is doomed. The reality is usually that none of these things apart from the getting old bit is true, and that the organisation youā€™re dealing with is both ahead of the curve in a few places and has missed some stuff in other places. The future of digital is not very evenly distributed at the moment ā€“ itā€™s pretty bumpy ā€“ but what weā€™ll see in the next 15 years is that distribution improving.

Going down to London and speaking at the Town Hall 2030 launch on Tuesday was pretty exhausting but also inspiring. I love the fact that the lens for quite a few big beast policy types is now on local public service delivery.

With the likely new government on its way, it feels like a very optimistic time, which is a very nice feeling to have. I came away with many thoughts that I will try and wrangle into posts in the near future.

Does this actually work? #

šŸ§‘ā€šŸ’» Movements

I have rehosted this blog, which seems to have worked ok. Well, if you’re reading this, it must have!

One side effect is that anyone subscribed to the RSS feed may well have suddenly received a bunch of old posts popping up as a result. Just mark ’em as read and move on, there’s nothing new to see there!

I’ve switched the theme as well, for the first time in many years. Not sure what direction I’m going in with it all yet though – plenty of tinkering ahead!

šŸ“– What could a “Local Government Centre for Digital Technology” actually do? šŸ¤”

(Previously published on LinkedIn and in my newsletter.)

In the LGA’s recently published white paper on the future of local government, there’s a very interesting line about digital. Just the one line, admittedly, but I think it is fair to say that it is doing a lot of work.

We are calling for… [a] Local Government Centre for Digital Technology: using technological innovation to deliver reform and promote inclusive economic growth across councils.

There’s no more detail in the document, and little in the news article about it in UKAuthority either.

Now, I’ve been chatting with Owen Pritchard, who I would guess is the person behind this line, for a few years now, and I don’t doubt that he has his own, very long list of things he thinks the centre should do – so I’m pretty excited to find out in due course what that looks like.

In the meantime though, let me toss around a few ideas… what could this centre do?

1) Coordinate procurement

The first thing for me would be to start investigating how the buying power of the sector could be consolidated to produce economies of scale, and better contracts.

I’d start in the bottom right of a Wardley map, the commoditised digital gubbins that keeps councils running, and where it makes no sense to have that stuff duplicated 300 odd times across the country.

Laptops, phones, broadband connections, hosting services… all these things have councils up and down the country running procurement exercises, negotiating contracts, managing those contracts… all this could be done once nationally, or a few times regionally, with no negative impact on local service delivery.

Once that’s done, how about we move on to using that collective buying power to:

  • demand better products from suppliers, particularly in the line of business system market
  • consolidate social value across contracts, to create meaningful, large scale opportunities for suppliers to support local public services
  • Invest in the development of new products and services, either through existing or new companies, or even local authority trading organisations

This stuff is pretty boring in many ways, but I’m putting it first in this list because I think the actual opportunities are vast.

2) Fill the security gaps

With the cyber assessment framework and the LGA’s own cyber 360 reviews, there is plenty of advice out there in terms of best practice on security. However, many councils are lacking the capacity and the capability to implement this guidance. It’s nobody’s fault, just the result of many small organisations, who through years of austerity have been unable to invest in their technical infrastructure.

This could be sorted by having support available to councils to put in place the measures needed to ensure that data and information is kept as safe as possible from a technical standpoint. Flying squads of security experts who understand the local government environment, are knowledgeable about the frameworks and guidance, and can put in place the necessary steps to make all councils as secure as possible.

3) Education, education, education

One of the most important things that a centre like this could do would be to put a lot of effort into increasing the knowledge of digital across local government. Despite various efforts in recent years, the level of digital confidence within the general workforce in the sector is remarkably low.

We need people in leadership positions to understand what is possible and what they can do to unlock this potential. We need politicians who understand the strategic levers they need to pull to ensure the right long term decisions are being made in councils around technology strategy. We need the specialist teams within local government to be up to speed with the latest developments in cloud, development, security, and data, depending on their role. We need council teams to be way more confident in utilising user-centric service design approaches.

All of this could be advanced really quickly through a properly funded and planned out strategic learning programme across the sector.

The second strand is less about formal training and more about curating existing good practice case studies and examples, and creating ones that don’t exist but really should. Part of the problem of a fragmented sector of over 300 organisations is that it is really hard for anyone to know what is going on everywhere else.

The standard of documenting the good stuff is really poor. Case studies are dominated by vendors, announcing deals and anticipated outcomes, but with no follow up. We have councils going through the process of turning into unitaries, for example, but no documented playbook on how to successfully aggregate the IT in these situations. Why the hell not!? A local government dedicate centre could have a team of researchers and content designers producing useful, findable, actionable content that would help spread the word on how to get things done.

4) Data and standards

Everyone knows about the untapped potential of data within local government, but nobody so far has had the right mix of time, money, and intestinal fortitude to get it done properly.

It means taking on the line of business system providers to open up access to the data; to help navigate the arcane table structures of these creaking software behemoths; to have in place the data platforms to aggregate, transform, and usefully visualise data; to have data engineers and scientists able to formulate the right questions and figure out how to get the answers; and to have service managers who are open and willing to become data informed, and to change a lifetime’s habit of going by hunches and guesswork.

It’s a big ask, and it’s no wonder that progress has been slow. But so many of these problems are shared by every single council in the country. A centre such as the one being propose could come up with a whole host of replicable and scalable answers to these problems.

Alongside this kind of support, there’s also a need for standards around data and a centre could help coordinate and manage standards where they exist, and support the development of them where they are needed. Just as importantly, though, the centre could provide some teeth, ensuring that councils and their suppliers are meeting these standards to enable the safe use of data to improve outcomes for local areas. The use of coordinated, collective buying power would definitely help with this!

Another area of standards where a centre could help would be to produce re-usable data sharing agreements and policy documents, to help councils collaborate with other parts of the local public service system, without the need to reinvent the wheel at significant cost, over and over again.

5) Innovate at scale

Finally, I’d want to see some collective effort at innovating in a coordinated, replicable and scalable way. Pooled resources that can reduce the risk exposure for individual councils, bringing together the best brains and ideas with the people best at delivering results, to experiment, test, iterate and improve on radical ideas for local public services.

It’s far too big a risk for individual councils to take on, and no surprise that transformational change in local government is often so incremental. The exploration of new operating models in the internet era – companies like Uber, AirBnB, Netflix and so on – have been funded by billions in venture capital. But somehow we expect councils do be able to do it, alongside running the existing services, on a shoestring?

Imagine a centre, with enough resources to be able to pull together the best service design folk, the best data people, the best technologists, the subject matter experts for specific services, all able to identify the biggest challenges facing the sector and to innovate their way through to workable solutions that can be adopted across the sector. With this kind of scale and authority, such a centre could have the clout to agitate for legislative reform where it is needed, to call for the establishment of new institutions to deliver specific outcomes, or to work alongside existing council teams to help them adopt the new models.

There’s 5 ideas I had. Any thoughts?

šŸ”— Some links and stuff

I sent out a newsletter today, which featured some links that I’ve pasted below for posterity.

However I’ve realised that I’ve written a few pieces on LinkedIn etc that I haven’t also published here, so will sort that out in the next day or so. Expect a sudden flurry of publishing as a result!

šŸ“– Where can councils start sharing effectively?

(Previously published on LinkedIn and in my newsletter.)

Following on from previous posts during the Great Local GDS Flurry from a few weeks ago (has everyone else moved on? Well I haven’t!), I thought I would follow up on one of my ideas for what I see as the central problems facing local authorities wanting to make the most of digital (by which I mean: technology, data, and online experience). Those problems are capacity and capability.

An answer to those problems is sharing of services. Now shared services often have a bad rep (in a lot of cases they are neither shared nor a service). But that doesn’t mean the model can’t work. It just means you have to do it right, and that doesn’t mean munging two or three teams together, sacking a couple of managers, then bagging the savings and carrying on exactly as before.

The right way is to methodically plan what functions are suitable for sharing, that will deliver benefits like efficiency and economies of scale, and not forcing into a shared arrangement something that just doesn’t belong there – or at least, not yet.

It strikes me that Wardley mapping could be very helpful here. I’ve been a massive fan of the approach for years, but have never actually used it in anger, largely because my brain is too small to cope with it. Here’s a video where Simon calmly explains it all.

The broad points are this:

  • There are no one size fits all approaches to any kind of business capability, but especially not technology ones
  • The more established and commoditised a capability, the better suited it is to things like shared services or outsourced arrangements
  • The more innovative a capability, the more suited it is to being kept close to the organisation
  • Likewise, the closer a capability is to affecting the experience of your end user, the closer you want to keep it to the organisation. If it is back-end gubbins, then that’s more suitable to being handled by someone else.
  • It is also possible for capabilities to move as they mature or become commoditised. So the way things are today don’t have to be the way they are tomorrow.

OK! So bearing that in mind, how could we think about applying this thinking to digital capabilities within a Council?

I’ve produced a dumbed down Wardley map to help guide this thinking. It isn’t comprehensive by any means, but hopefully has enough in it to get the point across!

I find having a grid approach helps organise my thoughts around this a bit. It means you lost a bit of the elasticity of the original Wardley approach, and if you find that annoying, no worries! You don’t have to do this the same way I do.

So the darker orange box in the bottom right is where sharing of digital capabilities ought to start on day one. These are utility-like components that have little impact on the end user and where real economies of scale can be achieved by organisations joining together.

After that, councils could start exploring the other boxes, depending on their context and ambition. There are some areas that should be left well alone, at least until they can be shifted rightwards in some way – either the market and the organisation’s experience matures, or the organisation is able to change the way it works to facilitate a rightward shift for that thing.

Now, we could all have an arm wrestle about which of these capabilities fits in what box, and I dare say that some local customisation will be required depending on context (some councils have insanely complicated bespoke arrangements around laptop builds, for example). But it feels like a handy tool to use when planning collaborative endeavour, whether formal shared services or not.

It would be great to know what you think!