service design

📅 Daily Note: July 14, 2025

Experiences of moving websites to LocalGov Drupal from the Essex Digital Service.

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Ben Holliday: New ways of organising:

What’s most interesting to me in 2025 is that we still need new ways of organising. It’s hard to point to places that we can truly call service organisations, at least outside of individual policy areas or transformation programmes.

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Jukesie – The Open Continuum:

Working in the open can seem scary and a bit all or nothing. I suspect I do not help with this with my stories of the extreme ups and downs of the practice and certainly there is some risk…not as much as is often feared but it is there.

Being open is not one size fits all though. There are levels to it and significant benefits at each of them – plus you build your muscles, instincts and a thicker skin if you work your way up to going all-out.

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📅 Daily Note: May 21, 2025

Eddie Copeland writes helpfully and convincingly on the future of local government digital leadership following the mention of it in the government digital blueprint. Tried to pull out a bit for a quote but couldn’t it was all good.

In all the research work I have done in the last year or so, leadership comes up time and time again as being one of the biggest things holding local government back from making the most of the digital opportunity.

 

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The Somerset Council target operating model is quite nice, I think.

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Phil ‘The Rumenator’ Rumens on service patterns:

A lack of common service patterns can prove costly within a single organisation too. We’ve all read reports of spiralling costs and lengthy delays in pubic sector IT projects, and in part this can be attributed to the desire for bespoke functionality resulting in tweaks or even wholesale redesign of how a platform functions to meet the unique service designs of that organisation.

He isn’t wrong to flag this. I’ve been noodling around with this idea a bit in the last few months, which I need to blog about at some point.

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📅 Daily Note: December 18, 2024

Ed Zitron:

The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.

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The English Devolution White Paper.

That is why I am wasting no time in finally giving local leaders and communities the tools they need to deliver growth for their area and raise living standards in every part of the country.

Need to read it through properly.

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Denise Wilton writes One for all and all for none:

You can look for available GP appointments using the NHS app. Pretty cool. Unless your local surgery has opted to use a different system. If that’s the case, you need to make sure you don’t click the ‘Check for available GP appointments’ button in the app because it will just say ‘No appointments available’. And when you phone the surgery, you’ll get a recorded message which says to use the app. So you’ll try again of course and get the same result: No appointments available. Perhaps you’ll feel bad for being a burden – because it’s flu season and the surgery must be flat out. Perhaps you’ll wait another day and when you try again you’ll find there are still no appointments available.

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Rachel Coldicutt, Words Matter:

Digital technologies require a strange combination of seemingly unconnected things, including (but not limited to) big material things like data centres, small things like phones and computers, even smaller things like chips and processors, and a bunch of invisible processes and protocols that conjure tools and services and apps and web pages and all the rest into being. What we see at the end tends to look quite neat and tidy, but many decisions and things are hidden behind those icons and dashboards and shiny cases, so they need great big stories to talk them up and make them feel exciting.

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📅 Daily Note: December 12, 2024

It looks like – thanks to some heavy debugging and re-developing from Steph – the new way of creating the Daily Notes is working! I’ll write up the thinking about it and how it works shortly.

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One issue with my new blogging workflow is its dependence on a WordPress custom post type – and my editor of choice, MarsEdit, doesn’t currently talk to such things.

So, am testing a bit of code to get around this. In effect, I send a ‘normal’ post to WordPress from MarsEdit, only as a draft, and in a particular category.

When WordPress receives this, it spots it, copies the content and tags to a new micropost in the custom post type.

Currently the original post is left in drafts for me to delete manually, but I’ll probably automate that once I’m confident it’s working ok.

So, a bit janky and duplicative, but it ought to work ok. Will see if there’s any unforeseen repercussions on performance or anything like that. Code is on Github, if you’d like to make use of it.

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Jeremy’s 5 reflections on his year at Homes England are interesting, wise, and definitely worth thinking over.

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