📅 Daily Note: October 6, 2025

A roadmap for successful AI adoption in Higher Education, from dxw:

Higher education institutions are actively experimenting with AI to improve operational efficiency, yet approaches vary significantly across the sector. Institutions face complex issues including output accuracy, data privacy, and academic integrity – with some organisations establishing centralized AI task forces while others maintain department-led initiatives that risk duplication and inconsistent policies.

Given this landscape, strategic engagement with AI requires drawing on experiences from across the sector and beyond. This is the first in a series of blog posts discussing the different aspects of AI implementation. Here we present two complementary frameworks – EVR’s 4D strategy and dxw’s iterative approach to grounded experimentation – that together provide a comprehensive roadmap for successful AI implementation in higher education.

Useful for any sector.

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Via Neilly, Project vs Product Funding by Jennifer Pahlka:

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Scott Colfer writes Most of What We Call a ‘Service’ Isn’t One (and Why That Matters for Product People)

In government and the wider public sector, we’ve built our identity around “services.”
Digital teams design them, measure them, apply the Service Standard to them.

But most of what we call a service isn’t actually a service.

More often, the work we label as a “service” is really something else:

  • An experience (like applying, enrolling, or updating).
  • A capability (like payments, case management, or publishing).
  • Or a technology system (like a website or platform).

The Service Standard itself, our flagship guidance, is rarely been applied to a true end-to-end service. Most of the time, it’s applied to fragments: experiences, capabilities, or tech.

And that mislabelling matters. You can end up treating a website like a whole service, or expecting a tech platform to deliver a citizen journey.

 

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Interesting take: hands up people who’ve ever said “i cant wait for my local council to build an AI chatbot”

do residents actually want this?

wouldn’t they rather use their chosen AI – which already has access to and understands the internet, their preferences, their context? instead of our RAG bot that knows nothing about them and only works within our little bubble?

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OpenReferralUK show and tell. I wrote on LinkedIn about it:

I genuinely believe there is a golden opportunity in the open referral stuff to use the service directory concept to flip the local public service operating model to matching people’s needs with those that can meet with – with local government getting out of the way.

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LINK: “The Importance of Product Management in Government”

…the approach taken to build and deliver digital products needs to evolve to take advantage of modern software development methods including agile iterative development, human centered design, and continuous delivery. Despite fancy design labs and alleged “digital transformation” capabilities, most vendors and government agencies continue to deliver digital products using traditional project management and waterfall development methods.

Original: https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/the-importance-of-product-management-in-government-b59933d01874

Bookmarks for March 30th through April 5th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

  • The Collapse of Complex Business Models « Clay Shirky – Awesome stuff from Shirky.
  •   Reflecting on my MSc research by Michele Ide-Smith – "By researching the attitudes and perceptions of authorities and citizens I hope to gain a better understanding of perceived barriers, threats and opportunities of using social media for community engagement"
  • Cinch – "Cinch is a free and easy way to create and share audio, text and photo updates using your phone or computer. Cinch enables you to capture and report on your experiences in a way that simple text just can't do. Using a simple interface, you can make and broadcast your content creations through Facebook, Twitter, CinchCast.com and more."
  • The State of the Internet Operating System – O’Reilly Radar – "Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet?"
  • Penval’s Digital Inclusion Manifesto – Well done Paul Nash. This is what the digital inclusion debate needs – proper, thought through ideas. Genuinely constructive contributions. Not just people bleating about the problems.
  • tecosystems » Forking, The Future of Open Source, and Github – Is the future of open source going to be based on communities such as Apache and Eclipse or will it be based on companies that sell open source? Neither.
  • Dr Dennis Kimbro & his views on recruitment – Really interesting and thought provoking piece on talent management, and attitudes to it, in local government.
  • In quest of simplicty – "We expect IT to be complex and costly, but the lesson of the past 5 years in IT – where we’ve seen the consumerization of enterprise IT (“enterprise” is often a coy way of saying “this has to be complex and expensive – no questions!”) – is that IT can be both simple and cheap."
  • Law and social media – dull but important – "Social media throws up issues of privacy and identity which are far more complex when you have a complete record of someone’s time online and a also a need to balance the personal with the professional roles of an individual. "
  • Powerful petitions with real teeth set to bite – "Local people can now demand their councils take action on underperforming schools and hospitals, drink disorder, anti-social behaviour and other concerns under new rules giving real power to local petitions, announced Communities Secretary John Denham today."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Bookmarks for March 16th through March 18th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.