Blog I think we need an “Institute for Digital Public Services” 21 November, 202421 November, 2024 Where’s the centre of gravity for conversations about how we can and should be leveraging the digital revolution for the benefit of society through our public services? I think about the flurry of activity when James Plunkett kicked off a debate a few months ago⬈ about ‘local GDS’ or the more recent excitement caused by the…
Library Introduction to OKRs Roger Swannell's excellent introductory talk about Objectives and Key Results: "OKRs aren’t about recording and tracking all the work your team is doing, only the most important work, the stuff that contributes to the big strategy and priorities."
Library Local Government Service Design Maturity Model "The Local Government Service Design Maturity Model has been developed for service designers in local authorities to use with council staff. It helps councils to explore how well they support and grow service design practice. Councils can use the model to ascertain where service design approaches are already adding value or could add more value, and to identify opportunities to develop the capabilities and conditions for service design to thrive."
Library The Government as a Platform Playbook A guide to help digital government practitioners implement common digital infrastructure successfully, written by Richard Pope, the author of Platformland. The PDF linked to is not quite the same as the online content, but is near enough.
Library Toxic technology Dave Rogers discusses the concept of 'toxic technology' in this series of posts. He defines it as the threat organisations face from the legacy technology they accumulate.
Library AI risk assessment A very useful draft risk assessment for a range of AI use cases, shared by the Wildlife Trust.
Article Where can councils start sharing effectively? 1 September, 202420 September, 2024 Following on from previous posts during the Great Local GDS Flurry from a few weeks ago (has everyone else moved on? Well I haven't!), I thought I would follow up on one of my ideas for what I see as the central problems facing local authorities wanting to make the most of digital (by which…
Resource Matching needs to tasks to tech capabilities 12 August, 202420 September, 2024 Something that I have found helps an awful lot is having a simple way to match identified user needs with the technology capabilities needed to meet them. It helps in two main ways: by encouraging people to consider the user needs they are trying to meet before thinking about technology solutions (always tempting, but dangerous!)…
Blog Is there a role in reformed public services for ‘system navigators’? 7 July, 202420 September, 2024 I’ve been mulling a bit on what could be funded at the front line of local public service delivery, were we to save a bunch of cash at the back end by harmonising some bits of IT and digital spend. The driving force, remember, for this drive for consolidation is not some techno-utopian centralised vision, but…
Article Our framework for (digital) strategy 3 July, 202420 September, 2024 We are doing a fair bit of strategy work with councils at the moment, and have hit upon a framework for putting them together which seems to help keep strategies strategic, and thus make them more useful. I’m typing here about the work we're doing on digital strategies specifically – although this stuff may well…
