local government

📅 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.

 

# – micropost 22893

The Somerset Council target operating model is quite nice, I think.

# – micropost 22907

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.

# – micropost 22908

📅 Daily Note: December 18, 2024

Ed Zitron:

The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.

# – micropost 22871

The English Devolution White Paper.

That is why I am wasting no time in finally giving local leaders and communities the tools they need to deliver growth for their area and raise living standards in every part of the country.

Need to read it through properly.

# – micropost 22873

Denise Wilton writes One for all and all for none:

You can look for available GP appointments using the NHS app. Pretty cool. Unless your local surgery has opted to use a different system. If that’s the case, you need to make sure you don’t click the ‘Check for available GP appointments’ button in the app because it will just say ‘No appointments available’. And when you phone the surgery, you’ll get a recorded message which says to use the app. So you’ll try again of course and get the same result: No appointments available. Perhaps you’ll feel bad for being a burden – because it’s flu season and the surgery must be flat out. Perhaps you’ll wait another day and when you try again you’ll find there are still no appointments available.

# – micropost 22874

Rachel Coldicutt, Words Matter:

Digital technologies require a strange combination of seemingly unconnected things, including (but not limited to) big material things like data centres, small things like phones and computers, even smaller things like chips and processors, and a bunch of invisible processes and protocols that conjure tools and services and apps and web pages and all the rest into being. What we see at the end tends to look quite neat and tidy, but many decisions and things are hidden behind those icons and dashboards and shiny cases, so they need great big stories to talk them up and make them feel exciting.

# – micropost 22875

📅 Daily note for 4 September 2024

Charlie Fountaine kicked off⬈ one of those conversations on LinkedIn:

Why isn’t there a cookie-cutter website for local councils in the UK?…Imagine if we had a common system, similar to central government’s approach, with shared components and a unified content management system. Councils could save time and money, focusing on improving services rather than reinventing the wheel.

I couldn’t help but dive in, naturally…

I think the days of individual council websites are probably numbered – it isn’t justifiable for 300 organisations to be recreating – mostly quite poorly – the same website over and over again when they are cutting funding on social care and housing, etc. It’d be lovely if there was the money for each and every council to have their own, high quality website, but sadly that isn’t the reality and the sooner decision makers get their heads around that the better.

Do I think all local authority websites ought to be folded into GOV.UK? Probably not. There is a place for some sense of local identity I think for council run services.

But I do think that having 300-odd organisations spending public money building, designing and writing content for websites over and over again is not the best way to be doing things. LocalGovDrupal is a start when it comes to sharing software, but there are still too many costs involved in running it if you don’t have a well stocked tech team. We need a turnkey solution that any council of any size can just start using.

Content needs a focus – so much of the words on council websites are basically the same. Write it once, write it well, and let – or make councils reuse it.

Then move onto online services – establish patterns, build them out in a handful of common platforms, and then make councils use them. If it means standardising some process, so be it, was long as local policy can be reflected in configuration.

There’s a bunch of middle ways between the current fragmented, duplicative, and poor quality mess we are currently in, and a fully centralised single website for all local councils, and in that middle ground the answer will be. Maybe it’s regional working, maybe it’s allowing councils choice between several competing platforms, based on clear and open standards for service patterns, content, and layout etc. #

Another great video from Mark Thompson on how public services can benefit from radical reform in the way they use technology:

#

📅 Daily note for 3 September 2024

August was not the chilled out month I was hoping for! Took a week off for staycationing but otherwise was nose to the grindstone on really exciting work, but work nonetheless. Hoping to be able to poke my head up above the parapet more over the next few weeks! #

One of the things I have been working on is a rebrand of my consultancy business, SensibleTech. I’ve never been hugely keen on the name, and the current website is basically an embarrassment!

So, am rebranding it to Localise, emphasising my almost-total devotion to local public services, and with an awful lot of help from Steph⬈, I’ve been wrangling with WordPress to give a better account of what I actually do these days – embedding stuff like the digital quality model and my strategy framework into something vaguely coherent. Launching soon, but here’s a sneaky peak:

Localise preview.

Of course, I know that most people don’t care one jot about this – for the meantime Localise will remain very much Dave Briggs Incorporated – but I think this new brand gives me more of a chance to grow the business, should I choose to in the future. #

Working with a client last week, I ran a new exercise in a face to face workshop which I called Empathy and Efficiency.

It combines producing an empathy map⬈ for a person using a service with an ‘efficiency map’ which looks at things from the council’s perspective. Once both are complete, you are able to compare them and spot areas of alignment, and – perhaps more importantly – where the clashes are.

It is obviously incredibly important to consider user needs, and design around them. But it’s also vital that the organisation’s needs are also met – whether statutory, financial, or political. Otherwise, what’s the point?

I think it worked well, and at some point I’ll tweak it and share some templates, etc. #

Shape the market and buy better stuff⬈ by Catherine Howe – a proper digital leader if ever there was one:

I am constantly struck by how often we in local government are forced to buy poor technology. For all the brilliant digital work done over the last decade we as a sector seem remarkably content to put up with badly designed stuff that is built on legacy architecture which is badly translated to the cloud.

It’s simplistic (though tempting!) to blame client side skills gaps for our purchasing decisions and I think thats part of it. I think it’s also down to us not creating an internal appetite for better technology – once you give people an awareness that something better is possible then they will be more demanding.

It’s an important point, brilliantly made, and one I have been wrestling with over the summer a great deal. #

📖 A framework for (digital) strategy

This post and all its contents is published under a creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Find out more⬈.

I’m doing a fair bit of strategy work with councils at the moment, and have hit upon a framework for putting them together which seems to help keep strategies strategic, and thus make them more useful.

I’m typing here about the work I’m doing on digital strategies specifically – although this stuff may well work for other kinds of strategies too. Also, this isn’t a ‘do you need a digital strategy?’ kind of post – it assumes you’ve decided you do need one. Finally, when I say digital, I mean it as a shorthand for technology, data, and online experience. OK, let’s get into it!

Strategy sometimes has a bad reputation – and that’s probably because a lot of strategies aren’t very good!

  • They don’t align with any other strategic vision
  • They are too detailed
  • They are written in weird corporate speak and fail to engage people
  • They try to do too many things
  • They date really badly
  • Nobody reads them, or refers to them

What does good strategy look like?

  • Good strategies provide a destination for organisations. They describe why things need to be different in the future.
  • With that vision, individual teams can use them to plan what they will do, when they will do it, and how they will deliver.
  • Strategies aid decision making, prioritisation, architectural decisions, team structures, culture, ways of working… pretty much everything! But, importantly, they don’t need to include the details of those things.

My approach to making this all a lot easier is to do the following:

  • Really focus on what exactly the strategy needs to do. Keep it short, high level, outcomes focused
  • Resist the temptation to put operational details or project plans into strategies – ie the stuff that’s likely to change
  • Have proper documents where that stuff can go, to ensure it still gets thought about and written down
Strategy framework showing the 4 levels: strategy (why), blueprints (what), playbooks (how), and roadmaps (when).

Explaining the framework

The way this works is that all the stuff that often (wrongly, in my view) ends up in strategies is actually published in 4 separate documents (or not documents – could be any format depending on the content).

It also ensures we can be flexible with the bits that need to be flexible. Plans change, technology changes, stuff happens. That shouldn’t affect your strategic vision, themes, and principles – but it will and should change your choices, pipeline of work, and approaches to doing work.

  • This strategy is high level and long term. It outlines the outcomes expected from the strategy and answers the question ‘why?’. The strategy is the formal document, which is formally adopted by the Council and will rarely if ever change.

    I’m thinking of this as a maybe 6 page document (maybe more to allow for the senior person’s introduction, etc etc). It is vital that it is properly socialised across the entire organisation and referred to all the time. Maybe find a way to pull bits out of it to go on posters and things, to keep them in folk’s minds.
  • Blueprints are created individually for different elements of the strategy, such as core ICT, applications, data or online experience. They provide a link between strategy and delivery. They answer the question ‘what?’. They are likely to change as decisions are made around the issues involved.

    Blueprints are likely to come in a variety of formats. Could be enterprise architecture type diagrams, could be statements of approach, could be policu documents, could be organisation charts. All depends what bits of the mechanisms of strategy delivery you’re articulating.
  • Playbooks define the ways of working and approaches to delivering the work. They answer the question ‘how?’. They ought to be truly living documents that evolve as the organisation gets better and more mature in their approach to doing digital related work.

    I think the best playbooks tend to be online and easy to refer to. So, could be on the intranet, or on a blogging platform, or using something like Gitbook⬈. It’s important that it’s easy to access and easy to update and add to.
  • Roadmaps are created individually for each theme. They describe the activities to deliver the strategy outcomes, in other words, the ‘when?’. It’ll be updated all the time, as prioprities switch around, things take longer to deliver than expected, or where emergencies arise.

    The nice way to do a roadmap would be with some nice software to make it pretty – there are loads out there. But it could be a Gantt chart type thing, or a simple portfolio list that shows when things are planned in to be done.

Hopefully that makes sense. The idea is simple – keep the strategy strategic, and make sure everyone understands it. All the detail still needs documenting, but in the appropriate place and in an appropriate format.

Let me know what you think!

Load more posts!