policy

📅 Daily Note: September 30, 2025

Ouch: Europe’s largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more:

Elected representatives of Birmingham City Council’s audit committee vented their frustration this week after hearing that the rollout of the IMS – designed to replace the council’s banking reconciliation system (BRS), which went so badly wrong after the April 2022 go-live of Oracle Fusion – is to be postponed again.

The council’s financial management has been unable to file auditable accounts since it replaced an aging – but functioning – SAP system with new cloud-based software from Oracle. Although the council had expected to implement the system out-of-the-box, it made customized modifications including the introduction of the BRS, which failed to function as planned. The council was declared effectively bankrupt in September 2023, because of the ERP disaster and outstanding equal pay claims. It is now working to reimplement Oracle from scratch and go live in April next year.

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A podcast episode featuring Dave Winer on “Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing”:

Today we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the “walled gardens” of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

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Now this looks interesting! Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block Developer:

Telex is an experimental tool from the Automattic AI team that turns natural-language prompts into working WordPress blocks. You simply describe what you want, and Telex generates the block.

Telex is free to try out.

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Harry Metcalfe writes All policy constrains good action, as well as bad:

Like Shadow IT, pulling what’s currently done in the shadows into the light would teach us a lot about how teams work, what they need, and how we as organisations and leaders can enable them better.

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Lloyd Davis:

And I imagine that there are people who are still working like this, blogging regularly, having creative conversations in the fediverse and using all of that learning and knowledge-sharing to create new things, have new thoughts and find people to collaborate IRL.

But many of the people around me have walked away from writing in public – I have too, it’s hard to write this post without second guessing the responses. But to not write in public feels like a really sad resignation and failure. It feels like letting the bad guys win, and since a lot of bad guys seem to be winning quite often these days, I’m still tempted to believe that there’s a responsibility to put away the closed platforms and only do things that are on the web and controlled by me and to help the people in my communities to do the same.

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Richard Pope writes What the NHS Single Patient Record can learn from India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission:

Part of India’s National Health Authority, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was founded in 2021 to design, build, operate and scale digital public infrastructure for India’s health system. Among the products and platforms it is responsible for are the Unified Health Interface, which provides open protocols for linking medical records, making bookings and managing consent; and the ABHA App which lets patients maintain a copy of their health records, access services and manage consent.

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Daily note for 14 December 2023

Not been looking forward to today really. I have to go to see a foot specialist about an ulcerated wound on the balls of my right foot. It’ll be good to start getting it sorted, but it involves going somewhere I have never been before, not sure about parking etc, and the whole thing fills me a bit with worry.

I had no idea that Sarah Lay was back working in local gov, but am delighted she is.

A reflective, open and personal post from Carl. People – including ourselves – are not perfect, and that’s just the way it should be.

The challenge now for design in policy – I like a lot of the stuff in this post, which includes lessons that work for many relatively new disciplines, not just design.

LINK: “Making public policy in the digital age”

When the policy is broken, the service fails. And when the service fails, trust in the institution providing the service diminishes. More often that not, high-profile breakdowns are seized upon as a failures of technology or implementation. The truth is that policy is often the culprit.

Original: https://medium.com/digitalhks/making-public-policy-in-the-digital-age-1900a248578c

Five for Friday (29/9/17)

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Five for Friday took a little break for a month or so while I settled into my new job(s). If I’m honest, I am still not completely settled – it takes time getting used to a little portfolio having concentrated on a single role for several years – but I am getting there.

Enjoy the links.

  • Mapping service design and policy design – terrific post by Andrea Siodmok on how service design and policy design meet. Quite a lot of the focus on digital transformation misses out the policy element, and understanding what an organisation’s approach to an issue, and why it has that approach, is vital to defining services that deliver the intended outcome.
  • Digital transformation, or digital fossilisation? – good stuff from Andrew Larner talking about the need to use the opportunity of digital transformation to address big strategic issues around the manner in which organisations operate – not just hard baking inefficient and user unfriendly processes using new technology.
  • Defining Aggregators – you are probably bored of me banging on about Ben Thompson and how good he is, but this is another great piece, pulling together his recent thinking on digital operating models, diving deep into the concept of the aggregator. Now, the aggregator model might not be a good fit for public services, but it’s a great way to get thinking about this operating model malarky.
  • Designing for democracy – Catherine Howe applies the ladder of participation model to designing services in the digital age. Making this activity democratic involves the political, of courses, and also links up with Andrea’s post linked to above, where understanding the political and policy context is vital to achieving desired outcomes. There’s loads and loads in here (like does an iterative approach mean the big picture can get missed?) and it needs a good read and mull.
  • YC’s Essential Startup Advice – always take stuff like this with a pinch of salt (one shouldn’t ignore the pervasive Silicon Valley ideology that startups will save the world) but there’s some really good advice in here about launching new services. Much of it focuses on keeping things small and not worrying about scale until you know you have a thing that enough people like to require scale.

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

You can also sign up to get them delivered to you by email, if that’s your thing.

Five for Friday (30/6/17)

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Quite a mixture of stuff this week – plenty to dig into over the weekend.

  1. Interesting job at GDS, promoting the use of gov.uk Verify in local government. You have until the end of Sunday 2nd July to apply – so better get cracking if you fancy it. If you’re on the lookout for a digital-ish job, then I’d thoroughly recommend Matt Jukes’ weekly listing.
  2. Startup SaaS Stack – this is a nice way of looking at the small number of software as a service tools that a new organisation might need to have. Not just relevant to startups but any organisations – certainly community, voluntary and charity groups could look at this and get a cutting edge tech stack in place in minutes and almost no cash. It also is an effective introduction to thinking about capabilities rather than systems in planning what technology you need.
  3. User-centred digital strategy – a really nice set of slides from Sophie Dennis that explains why strategy is helpful and what good and bad strategy looks like. While you’re there, why not check out her other deck on ‘Adventures in policy land’ which looks at service design in government, and is equally excellent (both via Strategic Reading).
  4. Paul Maltby followed up the crowd sourced reading list that I shared last week with three posts on how digital teams and policy teams can work better together, titled ‘A short guide to policy for government digital professionals‘, ‘What digital and policy can learn from each other‘ and ‘Prototyping a One Team Government manifesto‘. All are worth reading and mulling over.
  5. Who is responsible for effective, efficient and secure digital government? – watch the video of a wide ranging discussion of the progress made in digitising government. There’s more on the Institute for Government’s work in this area in this blog post, including a link to their report on the topic. I think it’s pretty clear to most people that the wave of enthusiasm for the work of the GDS in particular seems to be waning, not least following the departure of a number of leaders from that team, but also as they start to get stuck into some of the more intractable problems around culture and the back office IT stack. I’d argue that what is needed is not so much management, or even leadership (whatever the hell that is) but authority – someone or some people with the mandate to make change happen and the ability to force it through when bureaucratic (on the government side) and kleptocratic (on the vendor side) intertia starts kicking in.

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

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