strategy – Page 6 – Dave Briggs

Six principles for good local government technology

May 5, 2017

As part of the work putting together a Technology Strategy (think IT + digital) for my current employer, I came up with six principles of good technology. The idea is that each of these principles must be met by any piece of technology the organisation wishes to buy or to build.

(The purpose of the strategy is to develop what was a fairly traditional IT team into a rebranded ‘Technology Services’ team; and to bring them out of ‘maintenance mode’ and into more proactive space, where technology can be used to drive improvement and efficiency in the way that services are delivered. To my mind, IT in this sense cannot be worked around or ignored in a JFDI sense if you’re serious about transformation in your organisation – it must be tackled head on, otherwise you’re doomed to failure. More on this in a future post.)

Anyway, here are the principles, in case they are useful.

Cloud native – to ensure all the systems we use are designed for the internet age

Core to the Technology Strategy is for the Council to become a ‘cloud native’ organisation, making use of commoditised utility computing wherever possible. A district council has somewhat limited resources, and those resources are best spent where we can add most value, and to my mind, that isn’t in upgrading firmware or patching servers.

Our preferences when investing in systems is as follows:

Software as a Service – where possible, we prefer to use a SaaS solution to minimise the responsibility we have to support and maintain a system’s infrastructure
Platform as a Service – for bespoke workflows and requirements, we develop using a cloud-hosted, capability-based, off the shelf PaaS
Infrastructure as a Service – where the market is yet to deliver an acceptable SaaS solution and the requirement is too complex to deliver via PaaS, then a more traditional application will be hosted within a public cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure

Mobile ready – to ensure all the systems we use can be accessed anywhere, from any device

Legacy software was built for desktop based computing and thus doesn’t work well with the new style of devices that have emerged in the last decade.

We want staff to be able to make use of easy to use devices such as smartphones and tablets while working away from the office.

Any software we purchase, renew or develop must be enabled for mobile working out of the box, without the requirement for middleware or extra investment in specialist hardware.

Interoperable – to ensure the data our systems use is easily shared between people and applications

Legacy software makes exchanging data between systems difficult and expensive.

Cloud native systems and software offer freely accessible and publicly document application programming interfaces (APIs) and web services, which can be used to link systems together very simply, often with very limited programming required and use of ‘drag and drop’ style interfaces.

We will insist that all technology we invest in offers this ability to share data across systems.

Flexible – to ensure we make good use of shared platforms and capabilities across our services

Many of the systems we use are made up of the same common capabilities – booking , reporting, managing cases, payments, assessments and so forth – however they are trapped in service specific silos.

We wish to tackle this inflexibility by investing in flexible, generic capabilities that give us the building blocks to design our services, and the systems they run on, in the way we want to, and not be beholden to system suppliers.

Enabling customers – to ensure all the technology we deploy helps our customers enjoy a consistent journey across our services

We want to put our customers at the centre of the way we do things. This means two things:

Any system we purchase or develop must have online self service as a foundational part of its design, to ensure as many as possible choose to take this option
Service and system design should be based upon evidence generated through user research and take a customer-centric approach

Proportionately secure – to ensure that the Council’s and our customer’s data is as safe as it needs to be to enable us to deliver our best work

Information security is extremely important and we must be vigilant in looking after the data we hold, particularly that which belongs to our customers.

However, with our move to internet based technology, we can follow best practice guidance from central government to classify our information assets to enable us to work flexibly when it is appropriate to do so.

We want to encourage colleagues to think for themselves around information security, rather than relying on one size fits all policies that often are not adhered to.

The strategy graph

July 15, 2014

I rather like this diagram that appeared in a post talking about Microsoft (which is well worth reading in and of itself).

strategy-graph

It describes all the elements that make up what an organisation is and does. At the top, there are fewer words and they don’t change very often. At the moment, there are a lot more words and they are subject to regular change.

Strikes me as being a useful model to use to think about this stuff.

So, you think you want social media training?

March 17, 2014

whiteboard Increasingly, following a bit of a chat, it turns out you don’t.

I’ve been delivering training on digital tools, including social media, for a fair few years now. I’d like to think I’m quite good at it, and that those who leave my training sessions get a lot out of it.

One of the most frustrating things, though, is when at the end of some training, a learner will ask ‘so, will we actually be able to use this stuff?’ or ‘this has been great, but until I get these websites blocked I won’t be able to use anything I’ve learned’.

Gack!

What’s happening is that there is an acknowledgement within an organisation that they need some additional digital capacity, so they send people on a course. Trouble is, the strategy, or vision, isn’t in place for the organisation – so those skills are going to go to waste.

Instead, if you want to spend some money on this stuff, it’s better to spend it first on developing some idea of where digital fits into your organisation.

One of the first commissions WorkSmart has received has been to do just this. The original brief was for a series of workshops explaining how to use the popular social media tools. Discussing it, though, everyone became aware that there was a piece of work to do first.

So, we’re running an agile little project, made up of a couple of workshops and some online deliberation and collaboration. The aim at the end will be to have a draft strategy document, outlining how the organisation can use digital tools and techniques – including stuff like agile project management and user centred design.

Along with that there will also be a process defined for rolling this kind of capability out across the organisation, using internal expertise rather than bought in training. Hopefully this means that the learning activity will be scalable and sustainable, and most importantly of all, everyone will know why they are doing it.

Strategising digital engagement

April 4, 2013

Do you need a digital engagement strategy to get it right? Perhaps you don’t, but it can’t not help, surely.

Start with a vision. What do we want to achieve? Where do we want to end up? Pick an arbitrary date in the future – say 2015 – and imagine how you’d like things to be done then. What steps to get there?

One way I’d look at it would be that with budgets under lots of pressure, a digital by default (or design) approach has a load of advantages for organisations. You won’t reach everyone online, but you will get to plenty of people in a cost effective way.

Next, think organisationally. We want everyone we work with to get the benefit of this new digital way of working! How can we achieve that? It might be by having digital enthusiasts in each department talking regularly to their colleagues about how putting information and opening up services online can help improve things and make them more efficient.

Think about how having lots of people on Twitter and Facebook might affect the organisation. What training might they need? How can we know about all the profiles and pages that have been set up? How can you support people to keep up the momentum, or to help them make the right response to a question? How to help them not cock something up and get the organisation into hot water – or how to get them out of trouble if they do?

Consider breaking down activity into different types, such as having business-as-usual digital activity (ie ongoing), digital campaigns (ie time limited) and the difference between communicating, engaging and collaborating.

Now, write this stuff up on a sheet of paper. It shouldn’t take more than a side of A4. Show it to your boss, their boss, the chief exec. Get the most senior person you can to endorse it.

Start doing stuff yourself. Play with some tools. Find which ones work for you in your role, and for your team and service area. Monitor responses, successful interactions, not so successful interactions. Get your colleagues involved, ask them to cover for you when you’re on holiday, or off sick. Then encourage them to do their own thing once they realise it’s really not that bad. It’s actually fun!

Next, identify the willing. Find those digital enthusiasts, show them your bit of paper and the signature on it. Get them to show it to their bosses, and their bosses. Do talks at team meetings about it. Show people what you’ve been doing and how it worked. Tell them what went wrong and how you fixed it.

Get your digital enthusiasts to meet up every so often to share experience and stories. Maybe have an online community of practice so you can keep discussions going, even when you’re not in the same room. Encourage them, support them, cajole them, replace them when they leave.

Show other teams your community of practice. Show them how they could have one too, to share their learning, experience and problems with one another.

Revisit your strategy. Are you closer to achieving those goals? Is the organisation becoming more digital? Is the use of online tools for communication, engagement and service delivery becoming embedded in lots of people’s working lives?

What needs to change? What could be improved? Change it. Improve it.

Make it happen.

Need help getting the skills and knowledge to make this stuff a reality? Check out our online Successful Digital Engagement course now!.

What I’m talking about when I’m talking about digital engagement

November 3, 2012

I do a fair bit of training on digital engagement to public sector bodies up and down the country and most of the time it means very different things to very different people.

To some, it means running a corporate Twitter account or Facebook page – which, of course, it does.

To others it means teams delivering services making use of digital tools to engage with service users, to improve the quality of the service being provided – which, of course, it does.

To another group, it means bringing social technology into the organisation, to improve the way people work, learn and generally get stuff done – which, of course, it does.

Then there are those to whom it means an approach to consultation on a particular decision, policy, campaign or project – which, of course, it does.

So all of these things, and a fair few others as well, are a part of what digital engagement means. Often the trouble is that they aren’t always considered by those looking to implement digital engagement.

So, if people bring me in to deliver some training on this, it’s usually because they have one of the above things in mind.

Rarely do they want to take a step back and put into place a kind of framework so that everything that digital engagement can mean can happen, in a sensible and well-governed way.

In other words, setting up and maintaining corporate Twitter and Facebook presences matter and are important. Equally important, however, is the use by people in service delivery roles, and indeed the other forms of engagement I mention above.

One shouldn’t preclude the others, and nor should they necessarily take precedence over others.

So what does this mean for organisations wanting to start to engage digitally?

As part of the book I’m still writing, I’ve broken digital engagement down into three main elements which should be considered by anyone undertaking some digital engagement work.

The first is strategy – whether organisation-wide, within a team or teams, partnership working with other organisations or even as an individuals. External or internal is another strategic consideration.

The second is tools and techniques, which includes the big platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but also non platform-centric stuff like blogs, email newsletters, web chats, crowdsourcing, mapping and so on.

Finally there are the skills such as curation, community management, social reporting, user centred design approaches etc.

Overall, organisations need to take an approach where:

Every piece of work undertaken is encouraged to have a digital element unless there’s a good reason not to
Anyone within the organisation can make use of a documented suite of digital tools and techniques to support this
A policy sets out people’s responsibilities and what they ought to be doing
Training is provided to fill in skills gaps

It just seems a shame to me when so much effort is put into working out how just one part of an organisation can make effective use of digital tools. Building a framework that the whole organisation can use strikes me as a much better use of time.

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