Harry Metcalfe: Governance happens in foggy weather
We need to reclaim human judgement, subjectivity and the primacy of direct experience as vital skills for leadership
Brilliantly interesting stuff from Bill Thompson: Writing the Public Internet.
leadership
📅 Daily Note: May 21, 2025
Eddie Copeland writes helpfully and convincingly on the future of local government digital leadership following the mention of it in the government digital blueprint. Tried to pull out a bit for a quote but couldn’t it was all good.
In all the research work I have done in the last year or so, leadership comes up time and time again as being one of the biggest things holding local government back from making the most of the digital opportunity.
The Somerset Council target operating model is quite nice, I think.
Phil ‘The Rumenator’ Rumens on service patterns:
A lack of common service patterns can prove costly within a single organisation too. We’ve all read reports of spiralling costs and lengthy delays in pubic sector IT projects, and in part this can be attributed to the desire for bespoke functionality resulting in tweaks or even wholesale redesign of how a platform functions to meet the unique service designs of that organisation.
He isn’t wrong to flag this. I’ve been noodling around with this idea a bit in the last few months, which I need to blog about at some point.
📅 Daily Note: December 11, 2024
Digitisation, politicisation and the civil service by Martha Lane Fox:
Today’s reality is clear: digital skills are no longer optional extras. Data analysis, digital service design, agile project management, let alone the nuance needed in understanding new AI tools, have become as essential to governance as policy writing and stakeholder management. This shift creates real tensions within our supposedly neutral institutions.
AI product management in high stakes domains – Alan Wright shares a bunch of approaches that have worked well for him.
Our positions on generative AI – Steve Messer details a sensible set of stances on the ethical and effective use of LLMs and so forth.
AI is more of a concept, but generative AI as a general purpose technology has come to the fore due to recent developments in cloud-based computation and machine learning. Plus, technology is more widespread and available to more people, so more people are talking about generative AI – compared to something even more ubiquitous like HTML.
Lloyd has written up how he is using Micro.blog and a custom script to deliver a daily summary of his micro-posting to his WordPress blog.
There’s more than one way to skin this cat!
Daily note for 30 August 2023
I wrote a post about simple things for leadership types to bear in mind when thinking about technology.
WordPress for Enterprise looks a very useful guide. Strange it’s a PDF though and not also available as web pages (although as Steph mentioned to me, PDFs are very ‘enterprise’).
What is inclusive design and why is it important? “‘Inclusive design’ and ‘accessibility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are different things.”
5 simple rules for organisational leaders to keep in mind about technology
Commenting on James Herbert’s sensible post about approaching AI in local government, I came up with 5 statements of the bleedin’ obvious that all senior people ought to have in their minds whenever technology is being discussed.
- If something sounds like a silver bullet, it probably isn’t one
- You can’t build new things on shaky, or non-existent, foundations
- There are no short cuts through taking the time to properly learn, understand and plan
- There’s no such thing as a free lunch – investment is always necessary at some point and it’s always best to spend sooner, thoughtfully, rather than later, in a panic
- Don’t go big early in terms of your expectations: start small, learn what works and scale up from that
Increasingly, I tend to speak about digital being different from previous approaches to technology because it includes a healthy dose of cynicism about the ability of technology to improve anything, ever. Perhaps these points reflect that!