📅 Daily note for 18 July 2024

A really busy week, hence lacking of noting. #

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! #

Last day to complete this LGA / LocalGovDigital survey⬈ on the use (or not) of the service standard in local government.

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. #

“ChatGPT predicts tremendous role for ChatGPT in UK government⬈“ #

📅 Daily note for 10 July 2024

I am back at a desk with all my usual stuff! Yay for productivity! #

Ben Welby on “Five things I think about GDS, CDDO and i.AI moving into DSIT⬈“:

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.

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“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. #

“Not bad for week one⬈” is Public Digital’s take on the new government:

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.

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“Platform Engineering is just adding Product Management to Ops⬈” by Coté.

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📅 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.

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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.

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📅 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.

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