📅 Daily Note: July 11, 2025

Digital and mission-driven government: digital, burdens and networks – Richard Pope’s first essay of three looking at how his Platformland thinking “can provide a unifying role in the successful delivery of the government’s missions”.

In the digital age the answer is more subtle: using technology and digital-age design to systematically eliminate ‘administrative burdens’, one by one.

# – micropost 22941


How is it that I keep seeing these posts where people have made all these cool things with image generation AI, and I only ever get absolutely terrible results?!

# – micropost 22953


Is it worth bothering with LinkedIn articles any more? Seems easier and more engaging to just whack even longer form content into posts, as long as it fits into the character limit (3,000 or 500 words or so).

# – micropost 22954


James Plunkett: How to save bureaucracy from itself

I’m struck by how common it is these days to hear people working in government say some version of ‘bureaucracy is broken’, ranging from senior civil servants to political appointees.

These are thoughtful people, so their point isn’t that everything in government is broken. They’re just saying that the problem runs deep — that it’s not enough to try harder, or to run things better, because at least part of the problem relates to the logic by which bureaucracy functions.

If that’s right, what do we do about it? A principle I find helpful is the idea from systems theory that when a system fails we need to work at the level of the problem.

# – micropost 22957


Tom Loosemore: behind the scenes of the Universal Credit Reset – really interesting podcast episode.

# – micropost 22960


đŸ–„ïž Join the Change Makers – every month, online!

My good friend Carl Haggerty and I are really pleased to be kicking off a new monthly thing – The Change Makers.

The first one is on Tuesday, 28th January 2025 at 11am and you can sign up for it now. We’ll be having a fairly open conversation about the broad topic of organisational change and our experiences of it.

Carl has recently started his own business – Relationships for Change – and I have been busy in the last few months rebranding what I do workwise, from SensibleTech to Localise. So it seems a good opportunity to bring our respective perspectives on change in local public services together.

We will be taking a change related topic every month, having a chat between ourselves and inviting all those who join us to offer their perspectives as well. We will flag up on our blogs what subjects we will be tackling each month, but it will always be something relating to change, and how the people and the digital elements can sometimes conflict, but can also combine well to create lasting, positive change.

We weren’t sure whether to do a podcast or a live online call, so we’ve decided to do both at the same time – a monthly online call that anyone can join and contribute to, that we record and publish afterwards.

If you would like to take part in the sessions, they are run on Zoom on the last Tuesday of every month at 11am for an hour. You can sign up for all the sessions on TicketTailor – slightly annoyingly, you have to do each one individually – but we promise it will be worth it!

To enable us to share useful things with those that join in or catch up with our discussions, we have also created a space on GovGroups which anyone can join. Just visit GovGroups, create your account, and then visit our Change Makers groupand join it!

We both look forward to seeing you there, and to grow our community of change makers in local public services!

Daily note for 26 September 2023

Rather terrifyingly, I was invited to chat on this podcast, which came out yesterday, on all things local government, technology and digital.

Nice practical tips on Outlook etiquette from top localgov blogger Tass.

Two great jobs at City of Lincoln Council, joining a team that’s really going places under the awesome leadership of Emily Kate Holmes. Choose between being a Business Intelligence Officer or a Business Analyst in a beautiful city in the best county in the country.

Because we didn’t meet the threshold of complaints last time, the innovation igloo is coming back! MARVEL at my lengthy and rambling monologues on digital and technology. DELIGHT in the willingness of the igloo inhabitants to share their experiences and knowledge. BOGGLE at where the hell Nick might have disappeared to for the last 15 minutes after looking so uncomfortable for the previous 45. SIGN UP using the absurdly tiny register button on this web page.

Visit a National Trust place for free this autumn – why on earth wouldn’t you?

How to cultivate a writing culture – “Convince an engineering team to care about docs”.

I left a lengthy comment on Benjamin Taylor’s post on LinkedIn, which I will paste below for posterity:

My focus as you know is particularly on local government, but will try and be inclusive as possible with these comments!

I think you’re spot on with a lot of your commentary Ben… I like others have been guilty in the last 10 years or so as seeing the technological and cultural shift of ‘digital’ as being a way to genuinely transform entire organisations, but I accept now that this isn’t possible, or indeed terribly helpful.

What I do think is that for genuine systems-based change to happen – the type you rightly advocate – we need the institutions within that system to be operating as well as they possibly can be, and we are a long way from that. I think it’s ok for folk like me to focus on the digital/tech side of things, because it’s vital that we get it right, to build the platform for fixing the bigger, more complex issues.

Organisations have been starved of funding for over a decade now, and that is being felt particularly in the digital/tech space where leaders have been told that technology doesn’t really matter. Only, now you have infrastructure that’s falling to pieces, teams that can’t get their heads around doing anything differently, a supplier market that effectively holds its customers hostage – maybe, actually, we should have been paying more attention.

We need leadership types to understand their responsibilities here. We need middle managers to take ownership of the tech/digital elements of their services and not ‘outsource’ it to the IT team and then moan about them. And we need all public servants to understand that technology is an absolutely vital means to an end. It may not be, and should never be, the end in itself, but that doesn’t mean we don’t take it very seriously.

Finally (sorry) it has to be acknowledged that there are very few efficiencies in ‘digital’. The efficiencies are in the services themselves, or in the prevention of the need for those services in the first place. Yes, reducing duplication of effort, enabling those that can to self serve through the transactional stuff, bringing datasets together to identify meeting needs are all enabled by doing digital and tech better, but the efficiencies – if they come at all – will be from service budgets, not IT budgets. This is often weirdly unacknowledged and can lead to some pretty awkward conversations.

Daily note for 18 September 2023

If I had one bit of advice for ‘IT’ people it would be to stop referring to “the business”. It’s just so WEIRD.

I newslettered again.

Laura Hilliger, Doug Belshaw and Matt Jukes all on the same podcast? 😍

This seems an interesting approach to sharing capacity and capability around digital stuff in local gov.

I have enjoyed every John le CarrĂ© novel I have read, with the exception of A Perfect Spy, generally considered his best, which I have never managed to even get a third of the way through. I tried again at the weekend and gave up. No idea why it doesn’t click with me.

Lauren Pope on how to do a content audit (thanks Steph!):