Have sent out my first newsletter on Email Octopus. It’s a nice system to use.
š Daily Note: September 9, 2025
The hidden fundamentals of digital transformation in healthcare: how to roll out nationally in a local system – by Jane Maber on the dxw blog:
Thereās no question that the technical challenge is real. Designing digital services that work for a national screening programme in a local environment isnāt easy.Ā You have to integrate with diverse existing systems, handle local variation and consider patient safety.Ā Not to mention managing, and often decommissioning, legacy systems alongside.
But whatās become increasingly clear is that technology alone doesnāt drive transformation. As more decision-making power is devolved to Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), national teams canāt assume one-size-fits-all delivery. Success is really all about the people impacted by the new product ā the admin and clinical staff who use it, and the screening participants who experience it.
Change doesnāt land just because itās technically sound. Or even operationally sound for that matter.Ā It lands because people trust it, understand it, and feel part of it.Ā So development needs to be done in partnership, and the quality of the relationship with those partners is critical.
I stopped sending out my email newsletter this year – it lost its place on my todo list in the madness of moving house and so on.
However, am minded to kick it off again, but wanted to move away from Substack for a variety of reasons including nazi-friendliness and increasingly user hostile behaviour.
So, taking some advice Steph gave me a while ago, I’ve moved to Email Octopus, who seem very friendly and the system is easy enough to use. I’ve also changed it to be Localise branded – I’m terrible about marketing my company so thought this might be an easy way of reminding people how I earn a living.
If you’re curious, you can sign up on the landing page.
Have updated my about page which was very long in the tooth!
WordPress and email
I’ve been moving a few of the sites that I manage away from a simple shared hosting arrangement onto something a bit more proper, with Steph’s advice (this blog, being incredibly simple albeit with a fairly hefty archive going back to 2004 or something, remains on the shared hosting for now). The new ‘platform’ is made up of using SpinupWP to manage the setup of the servers and WordPress itself, which is all hosted on DigitalOcean, with all the benefits that come from having this kind of control over the environment.
One area that has been causing me some worry is around sending emails out of these sites. The emails that WordPress sends, like password resets etc, can be a bit flakey in getting delivered at the best of times, but to make it more complicated, SpinupWP doesn’t install a means of sending emails itself, you have to configure your own, using an email sending provider like Amazon SES or Mailgun. It sounds complicated – and it is, in a way – but there are plugins and things to make it easier.
I’ve played with a few ways of doing it, but think I have settled on one, that I will now move all the sites onto over time. I’m going to be using the WP Mail SMTP plugin to get everything set up and working, and linking it up with SendLayer to do the actual emailing. When setting these things up, you need a domain to use, and each one needs configuring in SendLayer. To make life easier for myself, I have registered a specific domain to use for this, and so emails will come from sitename@davesemaildomain.notreal, which hopefully will keep things simple.
Daily note for 16 November 2023
Ouch, nearly a week since my last note on here.
Iāve been having a quiet week this week and it has done me a lot of good. Slowed down the pace a bit, spent a (little) bit more time outside, made some space to work on some things that are starting to come to fruition.
The main example of that is the Local Government Digital Quality Framework, which is my attempt at coming up with a scalable framework for councils to be able to figure out where they are at with digital design, data and technology. Most importantly, it also helps them decide where they want to get to, and how.
Iāll write a dedicated post about it though, as thereās a fair bit to say.
Was feeling sad about the dying art of social bookmarking reading this by Howard Harold Jarche. In the comments someone recommended Raindrop.io which looks neat and I am going to have a play.
Am finding my Google-powered emails are struggling to get through some organisationsā spam filters all of a sudden. Shane and Steph recommended taking a look at DKIM records and things like that, so I did.
The different āflavoursā of service design – by Emma Parnell (subscribed!).
The Future of the Blogosphere – āYet, despite its very different political-economic DNA, the blogosphere has become enshittified as clearly as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Not just at the level of aging software, but at the level of the aging people who inhabit it, maintain it, and continue to churn out content on it, though at a rapidly decelerating rate.ā Ouch.
Trustworthy AI in Government + Public Services ā A self assessment tool from Oxford Insights.
Five for Friday (16/6/17)
Another week in which technology seems the least important thing in the world. Still, I’ve got nothing else to give, so here goes.
- Join the DH digital communities and channels team – two great jobs going on a great team at the Department of Health.
- Slack is raising another $500 million ā and has attracted interest from a range of big buyers like Amazon – Slack is a really interesting tool. I swing wildly from thinking it’s not really that signficiant to considering it the harbinger of a new way of doing technology within organisations. As ever the truth is somewhere in the middle. The idea of Amazon buying it does not make a huge amount of sense to me. Amazon have inroads into big enterprise IT through their web services division of course, leading the way in the infrastructure as a service bit of cloud. They don’t have much (any?) of a footprint in software as a service – tools that actual users actually use. Do they want to get into that space? I’ve no idea but surely Google would be a better fit for Slack, and it would help out with the moribund and confusing state of the G Suite’s communications tools (Hangouts seems to have stagnated for years now).
- Survey points to digital skills gap in civil service andĀ Public sector struggling with cloud due to skills shortage – to both of which my response is “yes, and?”. Seems to me that we see a lot of reporting of the problem with digital skills/confidence/mindset but very few examples or ideas around how to tackle it. If you’ve ideas to share, then please do so in the Digital Skills in the Workplace group on LinkedIn.
- History by lawsuit: After Gawkerās demise, the āinventor of e-mailā targets Techdirt – fascinating mixture of computer history combined with out and out oddness. The man who wrote a program called EMAIL claims this means he invested the generic tool e-mail.
- Minimum Viable Architecture ā good enough is good enough in an enterprise – nice bit of myth-busting around the supposedly special requirements of IT in a larger organisation. The word ‘enterprise’ is used to justify all sorts of crap: higher prices, costly maintenance agreements, hard to use and complicated tools. The fact is that the only difference is one of time – bigger organisations have existed longer than most small ones and thus have built up baggage around infrastructure and process. Achieving change in such organisations means trying to reduce that cruft… as James notes in his post “If enterprises are going to drive a successful digital transformation, and develop a culture that supports agile development and devops, then they need less architecture, not more of it.”
These have mostly allĀ been tweeted during the week, and you can find everything Iāve found interesting and bookmarked here.