📖 What could a “Local Government Centre for Digital Technology” actually do? 🤔

(Previously published on LinkedIn and in my newsletter.)

In the LGA’s recently published white paper on the future of local government, there’s a very interesting line about digital. Just the one line, admittedly, but I think it is fair to say that it is doing a lot of work.

We are calling for… [a] Local Government Centre for Digital Technology: using technological innovation to deliver reform and promote inclusive economic growth across councils.

There’s no more detail in the document, and little in the news article about it in UKAuthority either.

Now, I’ve been chatting with Owen Pritchard, who I would guess is the person behind this line, for a few years now, and I don’t doubt that he has his own, very long list of things he thinks the centre should do – so I’m pretty excited to find out in due course what that looks like.

In the meantime though, let me toss around a few ideas… what could this centre do?

1) Coordinate procurement

The first thing for me would be to start investigating how the buying power of the sector could be consolidated to produce economies of scale, and better contracts.

I’d start in the bottom right of a Wardley map, the commoditised digital gubbins that keeps councils running, and where it makes no sense to have that stuff duplicated 300 odd times across the country.

Laptops, phones, broadband connections, hosting services… all these things have councils up and down the country running procurement exercises, negotiating contracts, managing those contracts… all this could be done once nationally, or a few times regionally, with no negative impact on local service delivery.

Once that’s done, how about we move on to using that collective buying power to:

  • demand better products from suppliers, particularly in the line of business system market
  • consolidate social value across contracts, to create meaningful, large scale opportunities for suppliers to support local public services
  • Invest in the development of new products and services, either through existing or new companies, or even local authority trading organisations

This stuff is pretty boring in many ways, but I’m putting it first in this list because I think the actual opportunities are vast.

2) Fill the security gaps

With the cyber assessment framework and the LGA’s own cyber 360 reviews, there is plenty of advice out there in terms of best practice on security. However, many councils are lacking the capacity and the capability to implement this guidance. It’s nobody’s fault, just the result of many small organisations, who through years of austerity have been unable to invest in their technical infrastructure.

This could be sorted by having support available to councils to put in place the measures needed to ensure that data and information is kept as safe as possible from a technical standpoint. Flying squads of security experts who understand the local government environment, are knowledgeable about the frameworks and guidance, and can put in place the necessary steps to make all councils as secure as possible.

3) Education, education, education

One of the most important things that a centre like this could do would be to put a lot of effort into increasing the knowledge of digital across local government. Despite various efforts in recent years, the level of digital confidence within the general workforce in the sector is remarkably low.

We need people in leadership positions to understand what is possible and what they can do to unlock this potential. We need politicians who understand the strategic levers they need to pull to ensure the right long term decisions are being made in councils around technology strategy. We need the specialist teams within local government to be up to speed with the latest developments in cloud, development, security, and data, depending on their role. We need council teams to be way more confident in utilising user-centric service design approaches.

All of this could be advanced really quickly through a properly funded and planned out strategic learning programme across the sector.

The second strand is less about formal training and more about curating existing good practice case studies and examples, and creating ones that don’t exist but really should. Part of the problem of a fragmented sector of over 300 organisations is that it is really hard for anyone to know what is going on everywhere else.

The standard of documenting the good stuff is really poor. Case studies are dominated by vendors, announcing deals and anticipated outcomes, but with no follow up. We have councils going through the process of turning into unitaries, for example, but no documented playbook on how to successfully aggregate the IT in these situations. Why the hell not!? A local government dedicate centre could have a team of researchers and content designers producing useful, findable, actionable content that would help spread the word on how to get things done.

4) Data and standards

Everyone knows about the untapped potential of data within local government, but nobody so far has had the right mix of time, money, and intestinal fortitude to get it done properly.

It means taking on the line of business system providers to open up access to the data; to help navigate the arcane table structures of these creaking software behemoths; to have in place the data platforms to aggregate, transform, and usefully visualise data; to have data engineers and scientists able to formulate the right questions and figure out how to get the answers; and to have service managers who are open and willing to become data informed, and to change a lifetime’s habit of going by hunches and guesswork.

It’s a big ask, and it’s no wonder that progress has been slow. But so many of these problems are shared by every single council in the country. A centre such as the one being propose could come up with a whole host of replicable and scalable answers to these problems.

Alongside this kind of support, there’s also a need for standards around data and a centre could help coordinate and manage standards where they exist, and support the development of them where they are needed. Just as importantly, though, the centre could provide some teeth, ensuring that councils and their suppliers are meeting these standards to enable the safe use of data to improve outcomes for local areas. The use of coordinated, collective buying power would definitely help with this!

Another area of standards where a centre could help would be to produce re-usable data sharing agreements and policy documents, to help councils collaborate with other parts of the local public service system, without the need to reinvent the wheel at significant cost, over and over again.

5) Innovate at scale

Finally, I’d want to see some collective effort at innovating in a coordinated, replicable and scalable way. Pooled resources that can reduce the risk exposure for individual councils, bringing together the best brains and ideas with the people best at delivering results, to experiment, test, iterate and improve on radical ideas for local public services.

It’s far too big a risk for individual councils to take on, and no surprise that transformational change in local government is often so incremental. The exploration of new operating models in the internet era – companies like Uber, AirBnB, Netflix and so on – have been funded by billions in venture capital. But somehow we expect councils do be able to do it, alongside running the existing services, on a shoestring?

Imagine a centre, with enough resources to be able to pull together the best service design folk, the best data people, the best technologists, the subject matter experts for specific services, all able to identify the biggest challenges facing the sector and to innovate their way through to workable solutions that can be adopted across the sector. With this kind of scale and authority, such a centre could have the clout to agitate for legislative reform where it is needed, to call for the establishment of new institutions to deliver specific outcomes, or to work alongside existing council teams to help them adopt the new models.

There’s 5 ideas I had. Any thoughts?

Help me save the Knowledge Hub (in some form)

An email from the Knowledge Hub team at the LGA:

As Knowledge Hub user I felt it necessary to contact you with this news. You may have read in today’s press due to cost the LGA are proposing to close the Knowledge Hub facility. There is statutory 30 day consultation period (consultation closes on 23 June) on these proposals. As project lead I am very sorry to have to bring you this news. Many of you have invested time and effort in the platform and we as a team have worked extremely hard to deliver what we feel is a valuable and vital service for local government at this difficult time.

The organisation has decided that in the face of further cuts funding is unsustainable.

This is a terrible shame for local government. Cross sector sharing of knowledge and learning is vital if councils are to meet the challenges they face.

I know I could make the Knowledge Hub work: with a change of technology, a new business model, and some great community management.

I think we can make the Knowledge Hub – or whatever it might be called – like LocalGovCamp – only all the time and everywhere.

I suspect I need to convince the LGA to let me do this. After all, I want the existing content on the Knowledge Hub to import into the new system, and the user data too. Otherwise, starting from scratch will most likely make life extremely difficult.

So, I’d like some help. The best form is probably in expressions of support, perhaps publicly on the comments of this post. If you think local government needs a knowledge sharing platform, and you think I might be the person to make a decent fist of it, then do please let me, and the LGA, know.

Thanks!

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

What happened to November?

April may well be the cruellest month, but for me November was the busiest – and the illest (as in, I’ve been poorly. I’m not starting to talk “street”, you’ll be pleased to know*) as well.

Kind of Digital seems to have had time to get settled in now, and we’ve so much work on it’s meaning that I have no time for blogging or emailing any more, which is a real shame – even with the team growing all the time. I’m looking forward to some time over Christmas to get my thoughts together and start publishing here a bit more often.

Here’s a quick run through some of the stuff we’ve been doing this month:

  • I had a lovely trip to Oslo and met with representatives from all the ministries making up the central government there to talk about how we do digital in the UK and what the two sides could learn from each other. There’s a proper blog post brewing on this one.
  • UKGovCamp tickets were released and sold out in a matter of minutes. The two day format seems to have gone down well with most, and we should see some real outputs from the event this year. We still need sponsors, and if you are interested in being involved, do drop me a line.
  • We’ve been beavering away on a great project for Consumer Focus which will hopefully emerge soon. It’s an online database of digital engagement methods, which we will be developing to include case studies and links to examples. Searching will be done by choosing various variables from dropdowns and sliders, so you can choose the type of interaction you want, the demographics you want to reach and so on, and a list of the best methods for you will then be presented.
  • We’ve also been covering some events for the LGA as part of their healthy communities programme. This involved live blogging keynotes speakers, video interviews with various people involved, taking photos of the action and tweeting updates as well. All the content is presented on a microsite which we developed and hosted, and having done two events in Bristol and London, we’re next up at the late event in Leeds on 8th December. If you’d like to get your events documented in this way, you know where I am.
That’s probably about it. We’ve another couple of busy weeks in December coming up and then things wind down for the festive period. I’m looking forward to it!

* Yes, I know. I’m turning into Alan Partridge.

Events, dear boy…

Quite a few events coming up in the next couple of weeks that I should probably let you know about.

Next week I’m attending a few things: on Monday, the Clay Shirky lecture on Cognitive Surplus at the LSE, followed by the Learning Pool steering group meeting on Tuesday. I’ll be talking to the group about our plans for further engagement work along the lines of our Let’s Talk Central project with Central Bedfordshire Council, as well as some updates to our Modern Councillor service, which I hope to be able to tell everyone about real soon.

Then on Thursday I am going to be talking to the Centre for Public Scrutiny conference about engaging with local communities online. I will be particularly looking forward to this as my second job in local government was as a scrutiny officer at a district council.

I’m ending the week in Bristol, at NALC‘s conference celebrating local democracy. I’ll be showing some local council clerks and councillors how they can be spending a little bit of time and no money at all on cool ways of engaging with their communities online.

After a rest – or should I say, chance to catch up on email – over the weekend, I hit the road again, or rather the train, heading down to NESTA’s ‘Digital Disrupters‘ event on Monday 5th.

Then it’s Wednesday at the LGA conference in Bournemouth where I’m facilitating a fringe session, optimistically titled “A thoroughly modern council”. You can sign up for it here.

Finally, on Friday I travel again to the south-west, this time to Cheltenham to the Institute of Local Council Management summer seminar. I’ll be talking about “using social networking technologies for mobilising political and community action”.

Busy times! I shouldn’t complain though, if it were any different I would probably be quite bored.