An online notebook
Get posts sent to your inbox:
An online notebook
Following the announcements last week of the shape of local government arrangements in various areas, I’ve had to rethink things a bit. The move is clearly towards merging and empowering districts over centralising into unitary counties. This means an increase…
Will Callaghan shares A new flatpack collaborative model for the public sector: The goal was to identify a ‘flatpack model’ which would make collaboration as easy as going it alone. There are currently 317 councils in England still building or…
I have had the pleasure over the last couple of years of being a member of Woking Council’s Digital Design Authority. This is a group made up of a few senior members of the digital team at the Council, the…
Missed this first time around, but there’s some interesting stuff to think about in here – Courage is required for GDS Local to succeed. There is currently both a real opportunity and a grave danger facing local government in England…
New post from Atika on the Luton blog – Full steam ahead! New posts filled, skills assessments, meeting room envy, change agents and champions and AI Club. What a start to 2026!
January has felt like a looooong month, and I haven’t really enjoyed it. Doesn’t feel like I am remotely up to speed after the festive break, still! So tired. So very tired. This week’s worky highlights: Getting some of the…
Mahad Kalam – The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site: The UK Government recently unveiled its ‘AI Skills Hub’, which wants to provide 10 million workers with AI skills by 2030. The main site was delivered by PwC…
Laura Czapiewski – Why human trust shapes AI success: The psychology of digital has never been more important than now, in the age of AI. There are countless examples of where AI has proved to be far more reliable than…
A roadmap for modern digital government: Our plan to build a modern digital government that works for you – making life easier, driving growth and delivering smarter, more efficient public services
Terrific list of recommended posts from Steve Messer.
AI is not a strategy, it’s a tactic. Once all the fuss has settled down, we will be in a position where specific AI tools are useful in specific circumstances – it won’t have “transformed” anything. We had exactly this…
Gavin Beckett – Harnessing the changing landscape of local government to create internet era organisations: Effective responses to complex, long-standing social challenges need to be co-designed and co-produced with people and community organisations that grow from the ground up. Modern…
Richard Pope – Preventative healthcare: designing for the service loop: # – micropost 23148 Katherine Wastell – Every organisation has some madness: If everyone spots the problems but no one takes responsibility, things will only get worse. Accountability is the…
Ash Mann – The discipline of focus, what makes a digital strategy work: Good digital strategies aren’t long documents or laundry lists. They’re about ruthless focus – choosing a clear direction and sticking to it, even if that means letting…
Find and reuse digital service elements is a website put together by some folk at the Ministry of Justice that signposts the user to examples of publicly available guidance and patterns for digital work. Am not entirely sure what I…
Building understanding of software markets in local government from the Local Digital team: We’ve also identified through roundtable discussions and feedback from partners that managing effective procurements and successfully exiting technology contracts is a challenge, particularly where internal capacity or…
This is the content of the ‘article’ element of the email newsletter I sent last week. Publishing here for posterity. 2025 has been a pretty tumultuous year in local government digital, largely due to the impact of the Localism bill…
Giles Turnbull: The strategy is enquiry What I’m suggesting is a new approach for the times when there’s a perceived need for a document called a “strategy”. It shouldn’t be a document full of “we will”; it should be a…
Have sent out my first newsletter on Email Octopus. It’s a nice system to use. # – micropost 23038 From daunting to demystified: The evolution of Service Assessments in DBT. # – micropost 23039
Brent’s Innovation Journey: Building a ‘Base’ for Local Government Innovation by Ryan Hamilton on the LOTI blog: At Brent, we’ve been trying to rethink how we tackle problems in a way that makes ‘innovation’ not just a buzzword, but a…