platforms

📅 Daily note for 30 October 2024

Am thinking again about the structure of my blogging here. I’d much rather than the individual paragraphs in these daily notes existed as posts in their own right, as well as being collected together for the whole day. That way I could publish each item as soon as I type them in, rather than waiting til the end of the day. Main inspiration here is Dave Winer⬈, while Coté⬈ does it but keeping the posts separated rather than presented as daily collections. #

Richard Pope (again!) on services that work harder⬈. #

Dave Rogers: Toxic Technology⬈. Not come across this before (how!?) but Sarah Drummond⬈ linked to it so thanks to her 🙂 #

Paul Maltby: Why public sector procurement needs a serious rethink to deliver on the promise of AI and tech⬈. #

Sharon Dale⬈ shared TidyCal⬈ on LinkedIn – basically Calendly⬈ but more flexible and a lot cheaper. I have set mine up here⬈. #

LINK: “The Bill Gates Line”

‘A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.’

Original: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/

Five for Friday

Am going to try and get a quick link roundup post out every Friday if I can, pointing out some interesting stuff I’ve seen during the week.

  1. Management is not about asking people to do stuff – really interesting article on being a better manager. Something that’s really been brought home to me in the last few years is that being successful in stuff like digital transformation or modernising IT relies on your ability to manage well as much as being some kind of epic visionary.
  2. Enterprise-wide Agility: Doing versus Being – I love the “doing versus being” idea and want to explore it more in a future post here.
  3. Council frontline staff lack digital skills competence – not just frontline staff I’d say and a lack of basic understanding of the role of technology and digital operating models is holding back transformation work in lots of organisations, no matter what the sector. I’m tempted to dust down my digital passport work of yesteryear to see if it could be refreshed to help fill this gap.
  4. Head of Technology Services – I’m moving on from my interim job at Horsham soon, and this is the advert for my permanent replacement. It’s a great job.
  5. Mark Thompson on platforms and government:

https://vimeo.com/216550724

These have all been tweeted during the week, and you can find everything I’ve found interesting and bookmarked here.

Use what you already have

When planning a new project or activity, it’s easy to decide to get something new.

For instance, you might see it as the perfect opportunity to buy a cool web service to help you deliver this piece of work.

Or maybe you know that you could do a great job customising WordPress to do exactly what you want.

Hold on for a minute, though. What have you already got available to you that you could use to make this happen?

It might not be the perfect fit you would like in a perfect world, but it might be good enough. It might also come with a few advantages:

  • you can start work right away
  • no problems with access or other IT issues
  • your users will be more likely to be familiar with the way it works
  • there will be internal knowledge of the system to help you get stuff done

I’ve an example to share in a future post, where I resisted the temptation to do something new, and instead used what was already there and already familiar, in my work at the Department of Health.

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