An online notebook
This from Dai Vaughan is really excellent on how technology failures keep damaging people’s lives, and how frustrating it is that the answers to this problem are well known, but unevenly implemented.
Mike Bracken’s take on Horizon.
Still noodling on what to do with the newsletter. Feels increasingly icky to keep using Substack but it is just so easy, and so free! Gah, ethics.
“One by one, England’s councils are going bankrupt – and nobody in Westminster wants to talk about it.”
CIPFA have published a report entitled Exploring blockchain technologies for collaboration and partnerships [PDF warning].
The very first statement of the executive summary is problematic.
Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution for collaboration and partnerships, providing a secure and transparent way for multiple parties to interact and transact without intermediaries.
Has it? I’m not sure myself.
Anyway, they include a helpful decision tree to help you decide whether you should use the blockchain or not:
Which I am happy to simplify for everyone:
All snarking aside, I think this is a massive waste of time, money and attention for everyone concerned.
Across the public sector, technology and digital budgets are being salami sliced away, leaving organisations facing critical levels of risk and failing to grasp the opportunities that better investment in these areas would unlock.
What would be really helpful would be some practical advice around fixing that problem, not farting around with blockchain.
Original post from Gavin Beckett
With a very small number of exceptions, the established local government technology market is populated by companies that fundamentally do not understand user research.
They do not start with user needs or design great user experiences. And they do not use the tools and techniques of the internet age to deliver working software rapidly, so that real users get value from it quickly and iteratively.
I wrote a little while ago that the software market for local government is one of the things holding back the success of transformation in the sector. Gavin argues the point well in this post – it’s a fairly long read but worth the effort.
Why is local government software bad? Let me count the ways…
I’m a little glum on this topic. My fear is that there are a couple of things holding back progress. The first is that the market for local government software isn’t big enough to provide the necessary reward for the investment needed to fix it. Second is that the develop challenge isn’t particularly exciting and thus the vendors struggle to attract the talent needed to make really great software.
One solution is for government to write its own software, although that would mean organisations bringing resources together in a way that hasn’t been particularly productive in the past.
Alternatively, councils could make a shared commitment to bring budget together to pump prime an incumbent or a new supplier. This though would almost certainly mean paying twice for a while whilst the new system is developed.
I’m not convinced either of the above are going to happen soon though. In the meantime, we must try to procure as well as we can, and try to hold suppliers to the standards we set ourselves for our own services.
The end of the week and time to do some more linkery. Hope you enjoy them, and don’t forget to pass them along to anybody who might benefit.
https://fast.wistia.com/embed/iframe/9iri4scbcw
As always, these have mostly all been tweeted during the week, and you can find everything I’ve found interesting and bookmarked here.
So, a little while ago I posted about government as a platform, and mentioned three main components that matter, particularly to us at Adur and Worthing with our approach.
However, I’ve been involved in various conversations where I’ve been confused about how other people define platform thinking, which I think goes to the root of the lot of the issues around the wider digital agenda – issues brought to prominence recently in the debate following several key folk from GDS deciding to leave recently.
For me, I defer to Mark Thompson‘s thinking on a lot of this stuff, which Sean Tubbs neatly summarised with the benefit of some of his practical experience.
This piece from Thompson is required reading on the two different approaches to platform thinking, and which he – and I, as it happens – think is the right one. He characterises GDS as a ‘web agency’ – which I think is a little harsh, but gets to the heart of the debate around whether digital is more front end design than fixing the back office line-of-business IT stack (hint: a great website is lovely, but real change can’t happen until the legacy is fixed, which itself can’t be achieved without thinking more widely about how your organisation works).
Effectively the proposition is this: that digital describes not a set of specific technologies or even approaches to technology, but rather the age in which we are currently living, and the appropriate operating models for that age. It also describes the way in which an ever increasing number of our customers want to interact with organisations.
Thus digital, and the strategy for delivering on the digital opportunity that is government as a platform, is not around technology but rather rethinking how organisations work.
Technology is a convenient way to practically start delivering on government as a platform, but it is very much the start of the process. This is slightly unfortunate as it does provide the opportunity for people to put digital, and platforms, into the box marked IT project, which is a massive mistake. Platform technology without a platform operating model will never deliver on the opportunity.
So, the key elements for me when it comes to platform thinking are:
This is what has been so frustrating about some recent discussions – rather than focusing on the big picture of rethinking operating models, folk go straight into IT mode and start discussing which booking system is best, or who has the payment engine everyone should be using. The concept of capabilities is grasped, but only at the level of technology, not any further.
So, at Adur and Worthing, we are at the very beginning of delivery of platform thinking and operating models. We starting, as is customary, within the domain of technology – but we are not limiting ourselves to that, and are constantly challenging our thinking to ensure we don’t continue to work in non-digital age ways outside of tech.
With technology, we build or buy capabilities that can then be used and re-used many times to deliver appropriate solutions to needs, both by us and by others, and we are also able to consume on the platform too – so if someone else has something neat we’d like to use, we can slot it into our systems. This way of working can happen with other assets, as well as tech, though – people, knowledge, skills, buildings, open spaces, vehicles – anything.
The key is to construct our organisation in such a way that all our assets are effectively capabilities that can be used in different ways by different people – and indeed so that we can bring in assets from elsewhere on the ‘platform’. Often this this supported by digital technology, but that isn’t the starting point, nor the outcome.
For example, I’ve recently been thinking about how ‘people as a platform’ might work in the local area. How can we make the most of the people who work at the Council – and their expertise and skills – as well as those who don’t work here but nonetheless might help us make things happen?
The capability here might be an effective time banking system, enabling people and organisations to trade knowledge, skills, time spent etc without the need for money to change hands – borrowing in expertise as needed, paid for via hours donated to the wider system previously, without the need for costly administration to link people up, make the transactions and so forth.
(On a side note, how exciting would it be for such a time-trading system to work via some kind of blockchain technology, as Lloyd talks about in this post?)
Hopefully this example is useful – a non technology asset being shared across a system, (re-)usable in a number of different contexts, supported by a digital platform, built upon off-the shelf utility technology, which cuts out the need for central bureaucracy. That’s where we need to be with government as a platform.
So, to recap: digital is not about technology, and government as a platform is not about IT. It is instead a way of rethinking the operating model of an organisation to meet the current and future needs of its customers, in the digital age. The technology is an important enabler, but it is the means rather than the end.
It is not about fixing on a single solution for everything, but creating an ecosystem of innovation, where different solutions can compete to deliver the right capability needed by the people using the platform.
It is not about making everyone use computers to do everything, but instead is about making use of modern, internet enabled tech to run a sufficiently minimal back office that enables us to maintain, and potentially grow, front line delivery of what customers need (see Buurtzorg – and see if you can spot me and Mary McKenna in that video).
Hoping to have a chat about this at LocalGovCamp. Come along – it’ll be a blast.