📅 Daily note for 9 July 2024

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:

  1. 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
  2. a budget and timescale for implementation that were pure fantasy
  3. a lack of understanding of the need to redesign processes to enable the new software to work properly
  4. massive over customisation of the system by the systems integrator, which nobody else could understand
  5. a decision to go live despite the system not having been tested and with multiple vital integrations not properly working.

#

How Rushmoor Borough Council have saved money on printing and posting⬈. #

This is really interesting from Richard Pope⬈:

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.

#

📅 Daily note for 8 July 2024

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!

The computing revolution: How the next government can transform society with ethics, education and equity in technology – the British Computer Society’s vision for technology under the new government.

It mostly seems to involve more people being chartered… with the British Computer Society 🤷‍♂️

“I Will F**king Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again” – my thoughts exactly. This post has been doing the rounds a lot, but that’s because it’s good!

Bear seems an interesting lightweight blogging platform.

📅 Daily note for 7 July 2024

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! 🙂

Following my wittering about online communities on Friday, I came across this post from David Durant⬈, which is very thoughtful and wise.

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!

Vicky writes about the “lost practice of information architecture⬈”:

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.

📖 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.

📅 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 problems⬈:

I understand it, truly, the desire to know specifically what you’re going to get for your money. It’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 you’re buying is the thing you need to achieve the outcomes you’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.

#

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 James⬈ 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 handbook⬈. #

The community development framework⬈ 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 blog⬈ 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 Pope⬈ has a book in the works⬈! Exciting! #

Load more posts!