records

📅 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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Week note for 12 January 2024

A slow start to the year, blogging wise, been getting other stuff up straight. So here’s a bunch of things I’ve spotted during the last few days or so…

The delightful people at Lincoln Council are hiring a Web / Digital Officer. Lovely place to work on exciting local government things!

The Disturbing Impact of the Cyberattack at the British Library. Ouch! If organisations still aren’t currently taking this stuff seriously, here’s another reason to start.

One dimensional pacman. Curiously addictive. (I see Neil also linked to this!)

I have had to replace my several years old Apple keyboard, and couldn’t justify to myself the nearly £100 cost of the official one, so picked up a Logitech version for a third of the price. It is taking a bit of getting used to and the resultant loss of productivity is alarming.

Let’s make the indie web easier – sensible post (and follow up) from Giles.

“How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu”

“How we’re making it easier to access government forms online”

“How can we get to a single shareable patient record?”

Recording and transforming

Some great stuff recently from Public Strategiest.

Firstly, on records management in the digital age:

Finding things again remains a challenge: Rosenberg’s argument about entropy and Lapping’s about the need to manage not just current formats but obsolete ones and those yet to be invented are both powerful ones. Even there though, the quality of search tools and the availability of the computing power needed to make them effective strongly supports the shift from the old approach to the new. It doesn’t matter how big the haystack is, if a search for ‘needle’ always returns the needle you are looking for.

History will, of course, look after itself. It always has. But the future history of our time will be different from our histories of past times, and that will not be because we have an eye to the future, but because we are always relentlessly focused on the present.

Second, on technology in big orgs:

The real question, of course, is not whether I should be allowed to create my working environment and link it with the department’s systems. I am pretty clear that I should – but equally sure that that puts me in a pretty small minority (but in five years? ten?). Big organisations tend not to be good at catering to small niche requirements, so that wait will continue. But that does not mean that the subversive impact of what ostensibly started as a routine and unavoidable technology update will not be powerful and ineluctable. The introduction of new tools always gives more power to those best able to use them – and they are rarely those who were the masters of the previous toolkit. That much is standard innovators’ dilemma territory.