📅 Daily Note: November 10, 2025

Dafydd Singleton – User needs for data standards.

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Dafydd Vaughan – The bridge to nowhere: Why your ‘Target Architecture’ won’t ever deliver:

I’ve lost count of the number of Technical Design Authority meetings I’ve sat in, watching smart people tie themselves in knots over a diagram. We’d debate whether a proposed change conformed to the “target architecture” – a utopian blueprint of a perfectly rationalised, fully integrated, and utterly fictional technology estate.

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Ben Holliday – Analogue innovation (doing one thing well):

The art of making a product that does one thing well has arguably been lost. With so many modern devices, digital overwhelm is everywhere. It’s design without trade-offs. The constraints used to be that products had to focus on a single function or task, or were limited by computing power or what was possible with engineering.

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Phil ‘The Rumenator’ Rumens – Sourcing the stack for local government technology:

…there’s a systemic contradiction that local government is fragmented by design, but given the state of the market, councils often make similar technology choices, then individually procure many of the same products from a small pool of vendors, and separately expend the time of their under-resourced teams managing their own local technology stack of those similar products.

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Ben Thompson – The benefits of bubbles:

What goes up must come down, which is to say bubbles that inflate eventually pop, with the end result being a recession and lots of bankrupt companies. And, not to spoil the story, that will almost certainly happen to the AI bubble as well. What is important to keep in mind, however, is that that is not the end of the story, at least in the best case. Bubbles have real benefits.

(This reminds me again about how much I really want to be the Ben Thompson of local government IT. Just pay me to blog, someone! Please!)

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📅 Daily Note: October 6, 2025

A roadmap for successful AI adoption in Higher Education, from dxw:

Higher education institutions are actively experimenting with AI to improve operational efficiency, yet approaches vary significantly across the sector. Institutions face complex issues including output accuracy, data privacy, and academic integrity – with some organisations establishing centralized AI task forces while others maintain department-led initiatives that risk duplication and inconsistent policies.

Given this landscape, strategic engagement with AI requires drawing on experiences from across the sector and beyond. This is the first in a series of blog posts discussing the different aspects of AI implementation. Here we present two complementary frameworks – EVR’s 4D strategy and dxw’s iterative approach to grounded experimentation – that together provide a comprehensive roadmap for successful AI implementation in higher education.

Useful for any sector.

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Via Neilly, Project vs Product Funding by Jennifer Pahlka:

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Scott Colfer writes Most of What We Call a ‘Service’ Isn’t One (and Why That Matters for Product People)

In government and the wider public sector, we’ve built our identity around “services.”
Digital teams design them, measure them, apply the Service Standard to them.

But most of what we call a service isn’t actually a service.

More often, the work we label as a “service” is really something else:

  • An experience (like applying, enrolling, or updating).
  • A capability (like payments, case management, or publishing).
  • Or a technology system (like a website or platform).

The Service Standard itself, our flagship guidance, is rarely been applied to a true end-to-end service. Most of the time, it’s applied to fragments: experiences, capabilities, or tech.

And that mislabelling matters. You can end up treating a website like a whole service, or expecting a tech platform to deliver a citizen journey.

 

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Interesting take: hands up people who’ve ever said “i cant wait for my local council to build an AI chatbot”

do residents actually want this?

wouldn’t they rather use their chosen AI – which already has access to and understands the internet, their preferences, their context? instead of our RAG bot that knows nothing about them and only works within our little bubble?

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OpenReferralUK show and tell. I wrote on LinkedIn about it:

I genuinely believe there is a golden opportunity in the open referral stuff to use the service directory concept to flip the local public service operating model to matching people’s needs with those that can meet with – with local government getting out of the way.

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📅 Daily Note: September 30, 2025

Ouch: Europe’s largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more:

Elected representatives of Birmingham City Council’s audit committee vented their frustration this week after hearing that the rollout of the IMS – designed to replace the council’s banking reconciliation system (BRS), which went so badly wrong after the April 2022 go-live of Oracle Fusion – is to be postponed again.

The council’s financial management has been unable to file auditable accounts since it replaced an aging – but functioning – SAP system with new cloud-based software from Oracle. Although the council had expected to implement the system out-of-the-box, it made customized modifications including the introduction of the BRS, which failed to function as planned. The council was declared effectively bankrupt in September 2023, because of the ERP disaster and outstanding equal pay claims. It is now working to reimplement Oracle from scratch and go live in April next year.

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A podcast episode featuring Dave Winer on “Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing”:

Today we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the “walled gardens” of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

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Now this looks interesting! Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block Developer:

Telex is an experimental tool from the Automattic AI team that turns natural-language prompts into working WordPress blocks. You simply describe what you want, and Telex generates the block.

Telex is free to try out.

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Harry Metcalfe writes All policy constrains good action, as well as bad:

Like Shadow IT, pulling what’s currently done in the shadows into the light would teach us a lot about how teams work, what they need, and how we as organisations and leaders can enable them better.

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Lloyd Davis:

And I imagine that there are people who are still working like this, blogging regularly, having creative conversations in the fediverse and using all of that learning and knowledge-sharing to create new things, have new thoughts and find people to collaborate IRL.

But many of the people around me have walked away from writing in public – I have too, it’s hard to write this post without second guessing the responses. But to not write in public feels like a really sad resignation and failure. It feels like letting the bad guys win, and since a lot of bad guys seem to be winning quite often these days, I’m still tempted to believe that there’s a responsibility to put away the closed platforms and only do things that are on the web and controlled by me and to help the people in my communities to do the same.

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Richard Pope writes What the NHS Single Patient Record can learn from India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission:

Part of India’s National Health Authority, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was founded in 2021 to design, build, operate and scale digital public infrastructure for India’s health system. Among the products and platforms it is responsible for are the Unified Health Interface, which provides open protocols for linking medical records, making bookings and managing consent; and the ABHA App which lets patients maintain a copy of their health records, access services and manage consent.

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On ‘the single view of the customer’

“We need a single view of the customer!” Well, no you don’t, and you can’t have one anyway.

‘Single view of the customer’ is one of those easy to trot out phrases that sounds brilliantly simple and impossible to argue with when uttered with confidence. But just the slightest digging under the surface reveals a plethora of issues, whether technology, governance, ethics, data quality, affordability… the list goes on.

If anyone offers to sell you a single view of the customer for anything less than many millions of pounds, and needing at least 5 years to get working, then they are fibbing.

Instead, try bringing together the data you need about a certain type of customer, for a particular use case. All the debtors, for example. Then see if you or your software can spot trends or commonalities in that. You don’t need ALL the customer data to be able to make a difference, and trying to do so will slow you down so much that you’ll end up making no impact at all.


Another little LinkedIn post / rant, which I am saving for posterity here.

📅 Daily note for 22 November 2024

Whoops, forgot to hit publish on Friday. #


Another kerr-azy week of having too much to do and too little time and energy to do it. #


A short post I put up on LinkedIn (and published here and on Localise⬈ as an archive) blew up in a modest way. It even attracted a comment on a blog post! Good heavens. Does feel like there is a gap here to be filled by something. #


Atika has started her CDO type role at Luton Council and she’s published the first blog post⬈ on the Council’s brand new blog in her first week! An inspiration to us all – this is how you impact on culture early. #


Ben Holliday: Analogue because of digital⬈:

My concern is that the default solution to this type of reform will be more technology. However, we still have a greater need for more joined up systems that make better use of existing technology. This includes recognising that not all legacy technology is bad. Dare I say, even some of the pagers and the fax machines.

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Alan Wright’s favourite tools for analysing user and product data⬈ #