Insights – Localise

Podcast

Join the Change Makers – every month, online!

15 January, 2025

My good friend Carl Haggerty and I are really pleased to be kicking off a new monthly thing - The Change Makers. The first one is on Tuesday, 28th January 2025 at 11am and you can sign up for it now. We'll be having a fairly open conversation about the broad topic of organisational change…

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…

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

Pens, stickies and annotated briefing document

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…

Article

Structural solutions for structural problems

19 June, 202420 September, 2024

There have been several articles published in various locations over the years about whether some kind of GDS type agency might help local councils get better at digital (by which I mean technology, online experience, and data). It was when the question was first posed back in 2012 that saw LocalGovDigital emerge as a community…

Article

It’s the agile mindset that matters for local government

8 May, 202420 September, 2024

Local authorities need to be more agile – it’s pretty much axiomatic. Particularly in our technology and digital related work, the success that many organisations have had in adopting agile delivery approaches seems to indicate that it’d be a good thing for councils to do more of. The local digital declaration advocates it, for example, by committing…

Resource

Free resource: service discovery template

27 April, 202420 September, 2024

This is a nice and easy framework to use when you find yourself needing to do a quick service discovery to find out some basic details about a service and how it can be transformed. The point at which you might want to use this is right at the start of your digital work, when…

Blog

Countering the AI hype

10 April, 202420 September, 2024

It’s hard to look at LinkedIn these days without being instantly confronted by AI enthusiasts, almost foaming at the mouth as they share their vision for how the public sector can save millions, if not billions, of pounds by simply using AI. It sounds so easy! As a chief executive I would be reading this…

Resource

Free resource: project management template

26 February, 202420 September, 2024

There are so many projects on the go in local authorities in particular that require a certain amount of documentation, no matter how old school it might feel. Often though it just doesn’t get done, and that’s largely because there’s often a gap between project document templates, which tend to be large and overblown, and…

Guide

Good decision making

8 January, 202420 September, 2024

Decision making is a key part of our approach to good digital work. In this guide, I walk you through why it matters so much, what bad and good decsion making looks like, and suggest a simple model to use to improve the way you do this in your organisation. Download the slides: Good decision…

Article

Meeting of people with laptops covered in stickers in a highrise boardroom

5 things for local leaders to know and understand about digital and technology

8 November, 202320 September, 2024

This quote from an article by the always insightful Jerry Fishenden really stuck out for me: With apologies to the late scientist and author Arthur C Clarke, to those who don’t understand technology, any sufficiently advanced marketing bullshit from snake oil merchants peddling their cryptocurrency, NFT, blockchain and Web3 potions is indistinguishable from magic. Computer Weekly, 13…

Article

Three levels of digital change

13 October, 202320 September, 2024

Even if we adopt Tom Loosemore’s definition of digital – and we probably should – it’s still necessary to interpret it in the context of the service you are looking to digitise. I’ve worked out a really simple framework for thinking about this, by dividing the options into three distinct levels, or approaches to, digital change.…

Blog

Was the local digital declaration too ambitious?

8 August, 202320 September, 2024

There have been a few posts flying around the bits of the internet with an interest in digital and technology in local councils recently, reflecting on the local digital declaration, which is now 5 years old. Here’s one from the Local Digital team themselves, Tass’ excellent post about Warwick, another from the nice folk in Stockport, and a good…

Article

The roles you really must have on your digital team

6 August, 202320 September, 2024

The ideal The GDS service manual is very clear on the roles required to run a proper multidisciplinary team to deliver digital services. It states that you must have a product manager service owner delivery manager user researcher content designer designer developer And this is, of course, quite right. Doing good digital work means taking it seriously,…

Blog

Should you develop a single customer account?

8 July, 202320 September, 2024

Carrie Bishop’s rather well-known post on this subject was published in 2016. In the 7 years that have passed, have things changed? Not really. I dare say that if you were to stand in a town centre and ask passers-by whether they would find it useful to have everything they interact with their local council about…

Article

Why big programmes suck – and what you can do about it

8 March, 202320 September, 2024

A lot of the time digital and technology work doesn’t produce the hoped for results because it’s part of a big programme. Lots of organisations love a big programme. They are useful ways of unlocking money from capital pots, they can make those involved feel pretty good about themselves when talking about big numbers and…

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