government

📅 Daily Note: August 7, 2025

AI in Adult Social Care – guidance for adult care providers on the use of AI.

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Giles shares “examples and links about working in the open and agile communication”.

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Service mapping: building transparency, trust and transformation together on the Public Digital blog.

Service maps aren’t just tools – they’re catalysts for transformation. They clarify complexity, foster collaboration and enable informed decision-making. They help organisations navigate the challenges of transforming and continuously improving their services. We worked with Defra’s Farming and Countryside Programme (FCP) to develop a service map and a set of service outcomes.

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Blood, Sweat and Roadmaps by Maarten Dalmijn:

Your roadmap is like an indicator species that reveals all the organizational dysfunctions in your organization. The roadmap is where business and tech meet, where your vision and strategy collide with your execution and teams. The roadmap is where departments and business units compete with your teams and other organizational priorities.

via Steve.

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Steve Messer: Don’t just keep the lights on, shine bright:

Platform products, built by government for public sector organisations, are intended to be better, cheaper and preferable to competitors. If an arms-length body or small government organisation has to choose between a private-sector platform or a platform built by government, both of those platforms are in a market. The arms-length body will choose which platform to use based on the features offered, the price, the complexity of integration, design, accessibility, and loads of other factors.

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Alan Wright – Jobs to be Done surveys:

As a product manager, one of my favourite ways to prioritise problems to solve for users is to understand their Jobs to be Done (JTBD). The best way to get this data is by having conversations with many users, but this is not always something users have time for. Surveys are a great complimentary method to gather this data quantitatively and quickly. In this post, I share the thinking behind the Jobs to be Done survey I have been running with users in my current role.

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📅 Daily Note: July 11, 2025

Digital and mission-driven government: digital, burdens and networks – Richard Pope’s first essay of three looking at how his Platformland thinking “can provide a unifying role in the successful delivery of the government’s missions”.

In the digital age the answer is more subtle: using technology and digital-age design to systematically eliminate ‘administrative burdens’, one by one.

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How is it that I keep seeing these posts where people have made all these cool things with image generation AI, and I only ever get absolutely terrible results?!

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Is it worth bothering with LinkedIn articles any more? Seems easier and more engaging to just whack even longer form content into posts, as long as it fits into the character limit (3,000 or 500 words or so).

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James Plunkett: How to save bureaucracy from itself

I’m struck by how common it is these days to hear people working in government say some version of ‘bureaucracy is broken’, ranging from senior civil servants to political appointees.

These are thoughtful people, so their point isn’t that everything in government is broken. They’re just saying that the problem runs deep — that it’s not enough to try harder, or to run things better, because at least part of the problem relates to the logic by which bureaucracy functions.

If that’s right, what do we do about it? A principle I find helpful is the idea from systems theory that when a system fails we need to work at the level of the problem.

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Tom Loosemore: behind the scenes of the Universal Credit Reset – really interesting podcast episode.

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📅 Daily Note: December 13, 2024

Dave Rogers answers the question Just what is ‘Test and Learn’?

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Lloyd writes up his experience of new, location based social network thing Mozi. Just like it’s 2008 all over again!

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Anything that helps me (and others) understand Wardley Mapping better has to be a good thing. Here’s Will Larson’s Rough notes on learning Wardley Mapping.

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💡 How the Institute of Digital Public Services could get started

A lot of people seemed to like the idea of the ‘Institute of Digital Public Services’ (IDPS) – admittedly a few didn’t, but not enough to convince me it isn’t an idea worth pursuing!

How on earth to get something like that off the ground though? I must admit I am well outside my comfort zone with things like this. Findings funders, setting up governance arrangements, creating legal entities. Not really my wheelhouse.

So, as is often the case with one of my ideas, I think about how it could be bootstrapped with minimal effort and risk. Of course, that means there’s a higher chance of it not being as effective, but I have to work with what I’ve got, right?

So how about this:

  • The IDPS is a website. People join, which means they are added to an email list
  • Every other month, a clever digital government type is asked to pen an article that sets out a big idea, and it gets published via the site and the email list, and all the social get a ping. Comments on the article provide a space for discussion
  • A few weeks later, an online session is run where the author gets to explain their idea, an expert panel quizzes them, and a Q&A happens with the attendees
  • Rinse and repeat every couple of months
  • Maybe – maybe – an annual in person get together where the speakers discuss their ideas in person and everyone gets to meet each other, which might be nice

So, cost = low, risk = low, impact = probably also low. But it would be a start and maybe enough to get serious people interested in doing it properly.

Thoughts?

💡 I think we need an “Institute for Digital Public Services”.

Where’s the centre of gravity for conversations about how we can and should be leveraging the digital revolution for the benefit of society through our public services? I think about the flurry of activity when James Plunkett kicked off a debate a few months ago⬈ about ‘local GDS’ or the more recent excitement caused by the publication of Richard Pope’s <a href=“https://anatomyofpublicservices.com/”>Platformland⬈. Going back a few years, Mark Thompson has tried to get conversations going with a number of different analogies, whether Lego⬈, Heart FM, or Tesco⬈.

But these discussions are never sustained, and they never seem to make it past conversations and into ‘test and learn’ (to quote Philippa Newis⬈!) to identify which of these ideas might work better than others.

It feels like an institutional gap that an ‘Institute for Digital Public Services’ would fill. A home for the discussions. A place for convening and curating of ideas and practice. A way to consider the full breadth of public service, from central government to local government, with health and blue light services and everything else in-between.

Most importantly a place where the concepts and the theories can be prototyped, experimented with, and new things learned, with practice being developed and adopted along the way – turning ideas into reality.

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