service design

šŸ“… Daily note for 18 September 2024

Am looking into intranets at the moment for a customer. If you have any good stuff to share, please do let me know! Have already heard from Essex County Council and of course Eleanor’s wonderful postā¬ˆ on the topic too. #

Also I’m really interested in stories from local government folk about their experiences trying to implement GOV.UK components like Notify, Pay and so on. Am keen to learn more about what sorts of things are more likely to work than others… #

Kate Tarling has a free email based course called “From silos to servicesā¬ˆ“. Sounds like something you’d be mad not to take advantage of. #

“3 non-tech principles for decommissioning legacy systemsā¬ˆ”:

Decommissioning and replacing a legacy system is notoriously challenging. You need some serious technical credentials to navigate a complex legacy landscape and create a new solution that is both flexible and future-proof. All while maintaining business as usual for the people that use them.

But technical prowess is not the whole story. Replacing an existing platform is only as successful as the people who will be operating the new solution. And thatā€™s often forgotten.

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“Blame culture isnā€™t what I used to think it isā¬ˆ”:

Blame culture exists when people feel like they have to explain their actions, and always their failings, as caused by something outside of themselves. This thing happened because that person didnā€™t do something, they say. Or some other thing didnā€™t happen because thatā€™s just how it is around here. None of this was caused by my actions, they suggest. That is a culture of blame.

The opposite of a culture of blame isnā€™t a culture of accepting mistakes, itā€™s a culture of accepting responsibility. You can see the absence of a culture of blame in the sense of agency people have. When people show initiative and take risks, when they approach problems with ways they can contribute to solving them, when they take control of things within their influence, thatā€™s when there is no culture of blame.

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šŸ“… Daily note for 9 July 2024

Some machinery of government changes starting to come through. DLUHC is now MHCLGā¬ˆ (the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) again, which is good. Also all the digital stuff (GDS, CDDO etc) is going into DSITā¬ˆ (the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology) which is potentially exciting.

It will be interesting to see where the Local Digital programme ends up – staying in the policy department or moving across with all the digital teams? #

UK Authority reportsā¬ˆ on Birmingham City Council extending their contract with Oracle, despite it being a pretty disastrous relationship thus far. I commented on LinkedIn, and am pasting here for posterity:

Am not sure what their alternative was, to be fair. They have to have a system to do this stuff, and signing with another supplier would mean starting the whole implementation process again on top of the licensing costs – and I canā€™t see how that would offer better value for tax payers.

Also we have to bear in mind that Birmingham has a budget of Ā£3.2 BILLION – using the standard ERP estimate of 1-3% of budget, means anything in the range of Ā£12 – Ā£36 million.

This is an exceptional case and the numbers have to be huge. I personally think a big issue here originally was the fact that the budget was nowhere near big enough in the first place – which of course means that the original business case was fantasy stuff…

Personally, I would be glad if no council ever bought Oracle ever again. But in this specific case, the reason things went so badly wrong were not entirely the fault of the technology vendor:

  1. the decision to replace the existing system, chasing a highly speculative ‘transformation’ dream – based on a recommendation made by a certain consultancy firm that ought to have known better
  2. a budget and timescale for implementation that were pure fantasy
  3. a lack of understanding of the need to redesign processes to enable the new software to work properly
  4. massive over customisation of the system by the systems integrator, which nobody else could understand
  5. a decision to go live despite the system not having been tested and with multiple vital integrations not properly working.

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How Rushmoor Borough Council have saved money on printing and postingā¬ˆ. #

This is really interesting from Richard Popeā¬ˆ:

Designing the digital account for the Universal Credit digital account, it was abundantly clear that the approach to design that worked for GOV.UK and was spreading across government was fundamentally unsuited to services that used automation, intentionally placed burdens on the public through policy choice, and used data from across government. As was the need for greater transparency and accountability. But as design practice spread across government, the focus on simplicity took on a life of its own, developing into what, at times, felt like a tyranny of design, where anything that distracted from the proximate user need was impossible to justify. The idea that digital public services needed to be more than transactional was lost.

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Daily note for 22 January 2024

I am running a 6 week online course about making a success of digital in your organisation. You can find out more and book on the SensibleTech website.

Neil Lawrence’s GovCamp write up (Medium, meh).

AI, data, and public services from Jerry Fishenden:

But technology alone canā€™t solve complex political, social, and economic problems. And that includes AI. Its evangelists conveniently overlook significant problems with accountability and discrimination, the inherent tendency of some AI models to hallucinate and falsify, and an eye-watering environmental impact. And then add into this toxic mix the inaccurate and derivative nature of systems like ChatGPT…

…Along with the need for a less hyperbolic and more scientific approach to AI itself, the current state of government data isnā€™t exactly ideal for implementing AI given it relies on access to high quality, accurate data and metadata. But the National Audit Office reports that government ā€œdata quality is poorā€ and ā€œa lack of standards across government has led to inconsistent ways of recording the same data.ā€

“User Centred IT: Why ‘best practice’ isn’t good enough in the domain of IT” (via NeillyNeil).

“Sharing our learning from SDinGov 2023” – some lovely nuggets in here from the service transformation team at Essex County Council.

The stuff Jukesie uses.

Daily note for 19 January 2024

A minor innovation in these daily notes – pulling out the occasional quote from some of the links, and then using a horizontal line to provide some separation. Also using the lines to make it clear when a multiple-paragraph comment from me is over.

Like this!:

“I Made This”:

In its current state, generative AI breaks the value chain between creators and consumers. We donā€™t have to reconnect it in exactly the same way it was connected before, but we also canā€™t just leave it dangling. The historical practice of conferring ownership based on the act of creation still seems sound, but that means we must be able to unambiguously identify that act. And if the same act (absent any prior legal arrangements) confers ownership in one context but not in another, then perhaps itā€™s not the best candidate.

“Designing service at scale” – loads of good reflection and advice in here.

Cool? No. Useful? Probably!

Daily note for 16 November 2023

Ouch, nearly a week since my last note on here.

Iā€™ve been having a quiet week this week and it has done me a lot of good. Slowed down the pace a bit, spent a (little) bit more time outside, made some space to work on some things that are starting to come to fruition.

The main example of that is the Local Government Digital Quality Framework, which is my attempt at coming up with a scalable framework for councils to be able to figure out where they are at with digital design, data and technology. Most importantly, it also helps them decide where they want to get to, and how.

Iā€™ll write a dedicated post about it though, as thereā€™s a fair bit to say.

Was feeling sad about the dying art of social bookmarking reading this by Howard Harold Jarche. In the comments someone recommended Raindrop.io which looks neat and I am going to have a play.

Am finding my Google-powered emails are struggling to get through some organisationsā€™ spam filters all of a sudden. Shane and Steph recommended taking a look at DKIM records and things like that, so I did.

The different ā€˜flavoursā€™ of service design – by Emma Parnell (subscribed!).

The Future of the Blogosphere – ā€œYet, despite its very different political-economic DNA, the blogosphere has become enshittified as clearly as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Not just at the level of aging software, but at the level of the aging people who inhabit it, maintain it, and continue to churn out content on it, though at a rapidly decelerating rate.ā€ Ouch.

Trustworthy AI in Government + Public Services ā€” A self assessment tool from Oxford Insights.

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