It’s been a while since I sent one of these, and I have to admit that the primary driver of sending this one is just to let you all know about an upcoming series of online events I’m doing with Carl.

It’s been a busy time, and the last month more than ever! We decided to move home on Christmas Eve - and it isn’t something we would recommend! Sausage sandwiches were a filling but not exactly festive Christmas dinner.

I need to have a think about this newsletter and whether I restart it as a regular thing or if I just use it now and then to highlight something specific. Any ideas you have, just let me know 🙂

Join The Change Makers!

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 and our experiences of it.

Carl has recently started his own business – Relationships for Change – and I have been busy in the last few months rebranding what I do workwise, from SensibleTech to Localise. So it seems a good opportunity to bring our respective perspectives on change in local public services together.

We will be taking a change related topic every month, having a chat between ourselves and inviting all those who join us to offer their perspectives as well. We will flag up on our blogs what subjects we will be tackling each month, but it will always be something relating to change, and how the people and the digital elements can sometimes conflict, but can also combine well to create lasting, positive change.

We weren’t sure whether to do a podcast or a live online call, so we’ve decided to do both at the same time – a monthly online call that anyone can join and contribute to, that we record and publish afterwards.

If you would like to take part in the sessions, they are run on Zoom on the last Tuesday of every month at 11am for an hour. You can sign up for all the sessions on TicketTailor – slightly annoyingly, you have to do each one individually – but we promise it will be worth it!

To enable us to share useful things with those that join in or catch up with our discussions, we have also created a space on GovGroups which anyone can join. Just visit GovGroups, create your account, and then visit our Change Makers groupand join it!

We both look forward to seeing you there, and to grow our community of change makers in local public services!

This issue’s links

• 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.

• 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 thinkingto 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.

• Dave Rogers answers the question Just what is ‘Test and Learn’?

• Anything that helps me (and others) understand Wardley Mapping better has to be a good thing. Here’s Will Larson’s Rough notes on learning Wardley Mapping.

• The Foundations of Great Product and Service Design by Carrie Swatten (via Roger).

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

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it!

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

Have had a rotten cold for a couple of week - seems like the same thing is affecting lots of folk - which means that energy has been a bit lacking lately.

However, still managing to have some interesting conversations about what digital local government might look like under a new administration at Westminster, and making some good progress on my various professional engagements.

Also: the sun is shining! Always puts a spring in my step.

Town Hall 2030

Tonight is the Town Hall 2030 launch, which I’m pretty anxious about. It involves leaving the house, travelling to London, very warm weather, and speaking to an audience likely full of bigger wigs than I am used to. So, stomach is churning a little as I type this.

As a treat for you, my most loyal fans, here’s a sneak peek of what I will roughly be saying later on:

• Local councils are facing an existential challenge around demand and finances and ‘digital’ suffers from that as much as anything else - there’s too much to do, and not enough (good) people to do it. It cannot be stressed enough just how much some councils are struggling with the real basics.

• Attempts to fix this issue around digital alone potentially leaves us in a position where we are doing the wrong things righter - any change around digital must be aligned to wider structural reform within the sector

• Given the existential nature of the crisis the sector faces, a grown up discussion about what localism actually is in 2024 is needed. How can we improve the quality of local services to the people that really need them; while making efficient use of digital skills, products and services in a harmonised way at the back end?

Enjoy the newsletter!

What could a "Local Government Centre for Digital Technology" actually do? 🤔

In the LGA's recently published white paper on the future of local government, there's a very interesting line about digital. Just the one line, admittedly, but I think it is fair to say that it is doing a lot of work.

We are calling for... [a] Local Government Centre for Digital Technology: using technological innovation to deliver reform and promote inclusive economic growth across councils.

There's no more detail in the document, and little in the news article about it in UKAuthority either.

Now, I've been chatting with Owen Pritchard, who I would guess is the person behind this line, for a few years now, and I don't doubt that he has his own, very long list of things he thinks the centre should do - so I'm pretty excited to find out in due course what that looks like.

In the meantime though, let me toss around a few ideas... what could this centre do?

1) Coordinate procurement

The first thing for me would be to start investigating how the buying power of the sector could be consolidated to produce economies of scale, and better contracts.

I'd start in the bottom right of a Wardley map, the commoditised digital gubbins that keeps councils running, and where it makes no sense to have that stuff duplicated 300 odd times across the country.

Laptops, phones, broadband connections, hosting services... all these things have councils up and down the country running procurement exercises, negotiating contracts, managing those contracts... all this could be done once nationally, or a few times regionally, with no negative impact on local service delivery.

Once that's done, how about we move on to using that collective buying power to:

• demand better products from suppliers, particularly in the line of business system market

• consolidate social value across contracts, to create meaningful, large scale opportunities for suppliers to support local public services

• Invest in the development of new products and services, either through existing or new companies, or even local authority trading organisations

This stuff is pretty boring in many ways, but I'm putting it first in this list because I think the actual opportunities are vast.

2) Fill the security gaps

With the cyber assessment framework and the LGA's own cyber 360 reviews, there is plenty of advice out there in terms of best practice on security. However, many councils are lacking the capacity and the capability to implement this guidance. It's nobody's fault, just the result of many small organisations, who through years of austerity have been unable to invest in their technical infrastructure.

This could be sorted by having support available to councils to put in place the measures needed to ensure that data and information is kept as safe as possible from a technical standpoint. Flying squads of security experts who understand the local government environment, are knowledgeable about the frameworks and guidance, and can put in place the necessary steps to make all councils as secure as possible.

3) Education, education, education

One of the most important things that a centre like this could do would be to put a lot of effort into increasing the knowledge of digital across local government. Despite various efforts in recent years, the level of digital confidence within the general workforce in the sector is remarkably low.

We need people in leadership positions to understand what is possible and what they can do to unlock this potential. We need politicians who understand the strategic levers they need to pull to ensure the right long term decisions are being made in councils around technology strategy. We need the specialist teams within local government to be up to speed with the latest developments in cloud, development, security, and data, depending on their role. We need council teams to be way more confident in utilising user-centric service design approaches.

All of this could be advanced really quickly through a properly funded and planned out strategic learning programme across the sector.

The second strand is less about formal training and more about curating existing good practice case studies and examples, and creating ones that don't exist but really should. Part of the problem of a fragmented sector of over 300 organisations is that it is really hard for anyone to know what is going on everywhere else.

The standard of documenting the good stuff is really poor. Case studies are dominated by vendors, announcing deals and anticipated outcomes, but with no follow up. We have councils going through the process of turning into unitaries, for example, but no documented playbook on how to successfully aggregate the IT in these situations. Why the hell not!? A local government dedicate centre could have a team of researchers and content designers producing useful, findable, actionable content that would help spread the word on how to get things done.

4) Data and standards

Everyone knows about the untapped potential of data within local government, but nobody so far has had the right mix of time, money, and intestinal fortitude to get it done properly.

It means taking on the line of business system providers to open up access to the data; to help navigate the arcane table structures of these creaking software behemoths; to have in place the data platforms to aggregate, transform, and usefully visualise data; to have data engineers and scientists able to formulate the right questions and figure out how to get the answers; and to have service managers who are open and willing to become data informed, and to change a lifetime's habit of going by hunches and guesswork.

It's a big ask, and it's no wonder that progress has been slow. But so many of these problems are shared by every single council in the country. A centre such as the one being propose could come up with a whole host of replicable and scalable answers to these problems.

Alongside this kind of support, there's also a need for standards around data and a centre could help coordinate and manage standards where they exist, and support the development of them where they are needed. Just as importantly, though, the centre could provide some teeth, ensuring that councils and their suppliers are meeting these standards to enable the safe use of data to improve outcomes for local areas. The use of coordinated, collective buying power would definitely help with this!

Another area of standards where a centre could help would be to produce re-usable data sharing agreements and policy documents, to help councils collaborate with other parts of the local public service system, without the need to reinvent the wheel at significant cost, over and over again.

5) Innovate at scale

Finally, I'd want to see some collective effort at innovating in a coordinated, replicable and scalable way. Pooled resources that can reduce the risk exposure for individual councils, bringing together the best brains and ideas with the people best at delivering results, to experiment, test, iterate and improve on radical ideas for local public services.

Finally, I'd want to see some collective effort at innovating in a coordinated, replicable and scalable way. Pooled resources that can reduce the risk exposure for individual councils, bringing together the best brains and ideas with the people best at delivering results, to experiment, test, iterate and improve on radical ideas for local public services.

It's far too big a risk for individual councils to take on, and no surprise that transformational change in local government is often so incremental. The exploration of new operating models in the internet era - companies like Uber, AirBnB, Netflix and so on - have been funded by billions in venture capital. But somehow we expect councils do be able to do it, alongside running the existing services, on a shoestring?

Imagine a centre, with enough resources to be able to pull together the best service design folk, the best data people, the best technologists, the subject matter experts for specific services, all able to identify the biggest challenges facing the sector and to innovate their way through to workable solutions that can be adopted across the sector. With this kind of scale and authority, such a centre could have the clout to agitate for legislative reform where it is needed, to call for the establishment of new institutions to deliver specific outcomes, or to work alongside existing council teams to help them adopt the new models.

There's 5 ideas I had. Any thoughts?

This issue’s links

• Amazing job going Tewkesbury Borough Council - a great opportunity at one of the most interesting councils in the country

• LocalGovCamp is coming back this September!

• Thoughts on leaving local government from Rob Miller (you’ll be missed, Rob!)

• Digital transformation - the missing government mission? - wise words as always from Jerry Fishenden

• Multidisciplinary Team Building Game (another Miro template) - I love Emily Webber’s templates that she is so willing to share. Super useful!

• The sustainability of digital services in the third sector - lots to learn from this post by Harry at dxw.

• Cracking long read about the history of Psion’s handheld computers. I loved those things!

• Well done for making it this far! Reward yourself with a fun game of Woodworm.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it!

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

Just a quick newsletter this time round, as my main objective is to share details of an exciting free event coming up towards the end of June.

Town Hall 2030: local government for the digital era is an event convened by Public Digital, kicking off a really interesting new project:

Town Hall 2030 is a project about local, place-based digital public infrastructure. The work aims to engage local government, civic society and place-focused practitioners in developing actionable ideas for influencing wider national policy and practice. By way of background, it takes inspiration from The Radical How by Nesta and Public Digital, bringing a critical place-based lens to the discussion, and will hone in on specific policy and delivery areas such as employment and health.

Theo Blackwell and Andrew Greenway published a piece in the MJ outlining some of the ideas the project hopes to explore.

I’ll be there amongst other luminaries such as  Cate McLaurin (Director, Public Digital), Hamida Ali (Future Governance Forum, former leader of Croydon Council), and Rachel Coldicutt (Executive Director, Careful Trouble). Oh, and me!

It’s taking place at 6:30pm on Tuesday 25th June at the Old Sessions House in London - but will also be streamed online. You can get your. ticket for real life attendance or a virtual invite from the event page - remember, there’s no cost.

Get your ticket!

Poor Merlin had a rather, er, delicate operation last week. Fair to say he’s feeling a little less manly than he did previously. However, he does now get to sport this rather natty baby-grow type outfit, so it’s not all bad news for him.

Time to share some links!

This issue’s links

• Project vs Product Funding, by Jennifer Pahlka (via NeillyNeil)

• The LGA has published a local government white paper. The headline bit on digital expresses the need for “A Local Government Centre for Digital Technology: using technological innovation to deliver reform and promote inclusive economic growth across councils.” I need to read the full document to get my head around what that means.

• Steph on avoiding monkey tennis syndrome.

• Do you enjoy reading bloggers blogging about blogging? I do.

This video from Sharon O’Dea is fun, useful and true:

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

Blogging still isn’t coming naturally to me this year - I posted a few links back in April but that groove I was in last year just isn’t with me again yet.

LinkedIn seems to be where a lot of the action is and I am spending what would have been blogging time over there. It’s definitely the winner from the Twitterpocalypse, at least for me, being a work- rather than personal life-related social media person.

A couple of weekends ago we went to the north Norfolk coast for a few days. We were very lucky with the weather and had a glorious time. A genuine break from the day to day hullabaloo of life. I think it did us a lot of good. Seasides are lovely.

The big news in the last week is the calling of the general election of course. I’m hoping that the new government, whichever flavour it is, comes in with some new ideas about how local public services can be protected and delivered. The current model is just broken and is, as I think I have probably said many times before, facing an existential crisis.

One last thing for this intro bit: last week I convened a small group of councils that are using WordPress for their corporate website CMS. There’s actually about 30 councils out there doing this at the moment, and I lured 5 of them onto the call, where we were joined by WordPress luminary Simon Dickson. Don’t get me wrong, I think LocalGovDrupal is great, but it can be expensive for smaller councils. One district council on the call’s total website bill with WordPress is measured in hundreds, not thousands, of pounds. Given the existential crisis, it has to be a consideration surely! Interested? Sign up!

Anyway, onto the newsletter proper.

Where can councils start sharing effectively?

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 I mean: technology, data, and online experience). Those problems are capacity and capability.

An answer to those problems is sharing of services. Now shared services often have a bad rep (in a lot of cases they are neither shared nor a service). But that doesn't mean the model can't work. It just means you have to do it right, and that doesn't mean munging two or three teams together, sacking a couple of managers, then bagging the savings and carrying on exactly as before.

The right way is to methodically plan what functions are suitable for sharing, that will deliver benefits like efficiency and economies of scale, and not forcing into a shared arrangement something that just doesn't belong there - or at least, not yet.

It strikes me that Wardley mapping could be very helpful here. I've been a massive fan of the approach for years, but have never actually used it in anger, largely because my brain is too small to cope with it. Here's a video where Simon calmly explains it all.

The broad points are this:

• there are no one size fits all approaches to any kind of business capability, but especially not technology ones

• The more established and commoditised a capability, the better suited it is to things like shared services or outsourced arrangements

• The more innovative a capability, the more suited it is to being kept close to the organisation

• Likewise, the closer a capability is to affecting the experience of your end user, the closer you want to keep it to the organisation. If it is back-end gubbins, then that's more suitable to being handled by someone else.

• It is also possible for capabilities to move as they mature or become commoditised. So the way things are today don't have to be the way they are tomorrow.

OK! So bearing that in mind, how could we think about applying this thinking to digital capabilities within a Council?

I've produced a dumbed down Wardley map to help guide this thinking. It isn't comprehensive by any means, but hopefully has enough in it to get the point across!

I find having a grid approach helps organise my thoughts around this a bit. It means you lost a bit of the elasticity of the original Wardley approach, and if you find that annoying, no worries! You don't have to do this the same way I do.

So the darker orange box in the bottom right is where sharing of digital capabilities ought to start on day one. These are utility-like components that have little impact on the end user and where real economies of scale can be achieved by organisations joining together.

After that, councils could start exploring the other boxes, depending on their context and ambition. There are some areas that should be left well alone, at least until they can be shifted rightwards in some way - either the market and the organisation's experience matures, or the organisation is able to change the way it works to facilitate a rightward shift for that thing.

Now, we could all have an arm wrestle about which of these capabilities fits in what box, and I dare say that some local customisation will be required depending on context (some councils have insanely complicated bespoke arrangements around laptop builds, for example). But it feels like a handy tool to use when planning collaborative endeavour, whether formal shared services or not.

It would be great to know what you think!

This issue’s links

• 5 habits of innovative councils - Eddie Copeland at LOTI

• Validating user needs as part of our research process - Adam Spencer at Essex County Council

• What comes after AWS? - Alex Chan (good question!)

• The UnProduct Person - Matt Jukes

• Public services need better leaders - dxw

• A framework for thinking about team memory, joining up and serendipity in hybrid organisations - Emily Webber

• 20 Things I've Learned as a Systems (Over) Thinker - John Cutler (via Neilly)

Finally, I’ve been checking into the live stream of the Post Office Horizon scandal inquiry a fair bit lately, as was delighted to be watching just at the moment this caption error happened. Luckily for you, I was very handy with the screenshotting. Enjoy!

Am pretty sure I’d recall that myself.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

I haven’t really found my blogging groove again in 2024. Partly this is due to busy-ness, and partly due to just getting out of the habit.

In recent week’s I’ve been able to put some words down though - there was the post about the whole ‘Local GDS’ thing that I newslettered to you all last time, and today I’ve produce the missive below.

What’s more, as a result of the work I am doing, I have loads of stuff that I could blog about. It feels like every project I do improves my practice, and the results get closer and closer to being the ‘right’ thing. Sharing that process is important and I need to find a way to take the time out to extract the learning from the work outputs and share them.

I’ll work on it!

Anyway, onto the newsletter proper.

Countering the AI hype

Summary: all this tech called 'AI' is genuinely exciting. But the impact of it is unlikely to be felt for several years. Don't expect quick results, and don't expect them to come without a hell of a lot of hard, boring work first.

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 stuff and thinking to myself, 'why the hell aren't my people doing this already?'.

In fact, I am hearing from digital and technology practitioners in councils all over the country saying that this is happening. That the AI hype is putting pressure on teams to start delivering on some of these promises, and to do so quickly. I find this troubling.

It's always worth referring to my 5 statements of the bleedin' obvious when it comes to technology in organisations:

1. If something sounds like a silver bullet, it probably isn’t one

2. You can’t build new things on shaky, or non-existent, foundations

3. There are no short cuts through taking the time to properly learn, understand and plan

4. There’s no such thing as a free lunch – investment is always necessary at some point and it’s always best to spend sooner, thoughtfully, rather than later, in a panic

5. Don’t go big early in terms of your expectations: start small, learn what works and scale up from that

How does this apply to using AI in public services? Here's my take on the whole thing. Feel free to share it with people in your organisation, especially if you think they may have been spending a little too long at the Kool Aid tap:

• The various technologies referred to as 'AI' have huge potential, but nobody really understand what that looks like right now

• Almost all the actual, working use cases at the moment are neat productivity hacks, that make life mostly easier but don't deliver substantial change or indeed benefits

• Before we can come close to understanding how these technologies can be used at scale, we need to experiment and innovate in small, controlled trials and learn from what works and what doesn't

• Taking the use of these technologies outside of handy productivity hacks and into the genuinely transformative change arena will involve a hell of a lot of housekeeping to be done first:

  • accessing and cleaning up data, being a big one.

  • Ensuring other sources for the technology to learn from is of sufficient quality (such as web page content, etc) is another.

  • Bringing enough people up to the level of confidence and capability needed to execute this work at scale, for three - and there's a lot more.

• The environmental impact of these technologies is huge, and many organisations going ham on AI also happen to have declared climate emergencies! How is that square being circled? (Spoiler - it isn't.)

• The choice of AI technology partner is incredibly important and significant market testing will be required before operating at scale. There's an easy option on the market that is picking up a lot of traction right now, because it's just there. This is not a good reason to use a certain technology provider. Organisations must be very wary of becoming addicted to a service that could see prices rocket overnight. More importantly perhaps is whether you can trust a supplier, or those that supply bits of tech to them, to always do the right thing with your data. There's always going to be an element of risk here: but at least identify it, and manage it.

• Lastly, the quality of the outputs of these things cannot be taken on trust, and have to be checked for bias, inaccuracies and general standards. Organisations need to have an approach to ensuring checks and balances are in place, otherwise all manner of risks come into play, from the embarrassing to the potentially life-threatening.

This ended up being a lot longer than I first imagined. But I guess that just shows that this is a complex topics with a whole host of things that need to be considered.

Just remember - any messages you see claiming that AI is a technology that takes hard work away for minimal investment or effort, is at best just guesswork and at worst an outright lie.

This issue’s links

• Camden have a good job going as Chief Data Officer

• Here’s the recording from last week’s LocalGovDigital Live! discussion about structural reform in local government. Book onto future events so you don’t miss out!

• This explainer video about ‘community power’ from NewLocal is pretty interesting

• Nick is running a cool-looking event in London in June.

• James Plunkett on ‘Future building’ (via NeillyNeil)

• “Doing user research to inform strategy”

• “Should you have a button on your website that says ‘translate’?” - very interesting take by James at Essex County Council’s Service Transformation team.

• I absolutely love this - a Chrome browser extension that lets you play Breakout against your Google Calendar - bash the ball into the appointments to destroy them! There’s even an option to automatically decline the meetings you destroy! 😂 Tempting….

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

Long time no speak, have been busy and battling various ailments. Seems to be a lot of it about at the moment.

There’s lots of good stuff happening at the moment though. LocalGovDigital is getting a bit of a reboot, with monthly online meetings kicking off, and a new steering group being put together. If you work in or around local government digital, then please consider joining in.

There’s been quite a lot of interest in the media about the state that local councils find themselves in. It’s a bleak picture but I am glad it is getting some focus. It seems like people are starting to look at the challenges seriously, which is very necessary, and I don’t doubt this is linked to the fact that there’s a good chance we might have a new government before the year is out.

Today’s newsletter picks up on some of the chatter around this, and where digital might fit into it all. Hope you find it interesting! There’s some links down at the bottom as usual too.

Structural solutions for structural problems

If you find this stuff as interesting as I do, you might want to join the LocalGovDigital Live! online event on Tuesday 2nd April at 11am. It's free and you will definitely get your money's worth!

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 of practitioners in the space.

Phil keeps a handy list of all the articles, and there have been recent additions from the likes of Mark, Richard, Theo and James, as well as Phil himself (I don't think you have to be a white man to comment on this topic, but it clearly helps).

Of course nobody really agrees what a local GDS is or looks like, but also lots of people do agree on a lot of things even when they are disagreeing about other things. Pretty much everyone thinks Phil is right: local government has done some great stuff by having facilitated collaborations, and more of that ought to be done and properly supported. But some people think that isn't enough, the pace is too slow, too many councils aren't involved, and we need institutional fixes to these problems.

For me, some kind of agency or agencies providing support to the sector in this space is an answer to a question. But it's worth digging a bit more into the real, underlying problems to be solved.

Problems

For me, the biggest issue facing local councils in terms of their ability to deliver good digital work is capability and capacity.

• by capability I mean that the skills just aren't there at the right level in the vast majority of local authorities. This is across the board: leadership, strategy, architecture, development, design, delivery and so on. Of course there are great people working in local government digital, but too many councils don't have them.

• capacity leads on from capability - there aren't enough of those good people. They are spread too thin, they take too much on, they burn out. What's more I suspect that within the current model of local public service delivery, there will never be enough people for every council, certainly not with the right level of capability and affordability.

However, the problems currently facing councils aren't just about digital. The sector is facing an existential crisis that is profoundly structural, in that councils are coping with issues that are not in their control to fix currently:

• the population is aging and putting huge pressure on adult social care services

• the cost of children's social care is rocketing, due, amongst other things, to the market in which councils must operate

• the housing market is broken with too few affordable homes to either rent or buy in huge swathes of the country, particular the areas where people want to live

• roads are falling apart all over the place, not helped by the fact that cars are getting a lot heavier thanks to the massive batteries in an increasing number of them (to name a minor thing, but an interesting one for fans of unintended consequences)

These are just four things. There are others, but I am far too lazy to type them out.

Is consolidating digital capability and capacity the answer?

So what's the answer here? Clearly, an awful lot of councils aren't brilliant at digital stuff, one way or another. A lot are good at some things, but many are scraping by, crossing their fingers that nothing catches fire this week.

Now, obviously it would be better for each individual council, and the sector as a whole, if we could do something about this. Better digital does generally mean better organisations - when it is user centred, delivered in an agile way, is proportionately secure, and well managed and maintained (etc). But focusing solely on this element of things is potentially a bit of a distraction and it is in danger of putting the digital cart before the public service reform horse.

The danger of talking about consolidated digital capability and capacity for me is my experience with shared services in local government. In theory, these things ought to make sense. But in practice, in so many cases, they just don't work.

I used to joke about one IT shared service that it was neither shared nor indeed a service. The punchline was that I wasn't actually joking. The four councils involved couldn't even agree on a single supplier of laptops! It makes me shudder just thinking about it.

Why do these things often go wrong? Because they tend to take the concept of economies of scale and apply them without any of the thinking being done around changing the organisations themselves. So what happens is, two teams are munged together, a couple of management posts are deleted to make a saving, and everyone carries on as they did before. Nothing gets better.

Now, again, obviously I am over-egging this slightly. Am sure there are local government shared services that manage to align their member council's policy and service design approaches to enable them to achieve some of the desired outcomes of these arrangements. But I suspect they are quite rare.

So the danger for me with some kind of 'GDS for local government' (appreciating that there are many different forms that such things could take and probably nobody promoting the idea is thinking of traditional share services!) is that it would mean councils end up merely doing the wrong things righter. Digital stuff would improve, but in the meantime councils slide into bankruptcy anyway.

I know, I know... it's not a binary either/or situation - but the danger in promoting 'local GDS' is it puts it front and centre and will be seen by many as the end in itself, rather than the means to the real end of local public service reform.

Getting things the right way round

So let's start with structural solutions for structural problems. The core problem facing local government is not the quality of its digital services - although it is true that in most cases they suck quite badly.

The core problem is that an organisational model that worked(ish) for several decades is no longer effective now, and the currently favoured approach to reorganisations - unitary councils - are just making things bigger, which isn't always the right answer.

Councils are made up of a bewildering array of services that have almost nothing in common except for the fact that nobody else wants to do them. Trying to apply a single operating model to all these services is a fool's errand. After all, maintaining environmental health standards, running an election, and picking up dog poo are three very different activities - and that's only three of the things Councils do on the regular.

There are many ways that local public services could be radically reimagined and it isn't the purpose of this post to list them. I think for me though, the days of councils as currently organised ought to be numbered: I think some services could be delivered on a bigger scale, and others ought to be delivered even more locally than they are now.

What is needed is proper conversations about radical structural reforms of local public services, with space, time and money given to experimenting with new models. Only that way will the sector have a chance to reverse the decline that has been going on for over a decade now.

Of course, this isn't something that a single council can do alone, and the necessary structural change would only be possible with the involvement and commitment of a variety of public sector players (including central government and health). There are radical reforms that can be achieved just within the sector, but I don't think they will be sufficient to solve the existential crisis we are facing.

So digital isn't important then?

Wait, hang on, I can hear you. thinking. Aren't you one of those digital utopians who thought this magical elixir was going to solve all the problems all the time? Well, maybe I was once. Am a bit more grizzled these days.

Nonetheless, digital is and will always be a vital element of successfully delivering the necessary structural reforms, and right now councils lack the capacity and capability to make that happen.

It is, I think, inevitable that some kind of reorganisation within the profession is going to be necessary. But what that looks like is utterly dependent on what the operating model looks like.

Mark is spot on when he points that that every Tesco store doesn't have its own HR system and so on. Depending on the new model, there will definitely be opportunities for scale and bringing things together. But this should never be seen as a one size fits all centralised solution.

After all, centralisation without clear strategy doesn't always deliver transformational change. I would never want to do down the amazing work that GDS has done in the last decade and a half, but the underlying issues of legacy operating models supported by legacy technology are still there. A best in class team is vital, but not enough on its own.

Building capability and capacity in digital at the core of the sector will have a lot of benefits in many areas of work. But it isn't a panacea, and having the debate around it without first demanding that major structural reform of the local public service landscape is designed and initiated, is in danger of missing the point, and turning an opportunity into yet another barrier to significant, positive change.

Remember: if you find this stuff as interesting as I do, you might want to join the LocalGovDigital Live! online event on Tuesday 2nd April at 11am. It's free and you will definitely get your money's worth!

This issue’s links

• Cyber, digital, data, and technology (CDDaT) skills framework consultation - well worth taking a look at this, a lot of work has gone into it by the LGA team. Personally, I think they are being very optimistic about people outside of digital and IT using it, but would love to be proved wrong!

• Eddie Copeland explains how LOTI works

• Giles’ “Doing Weeknotes” website is a perfect little guide to, well, you figure it out

• There’s a lot of good sense in Jukesie’s ramblings about digital government

• The GOV.‌UK Design System is iterating more quickly

• Government must invest in people over technology to improve services

• Well done for making it this far! Enjoy a game of dog poo golf as a reward!

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

I had a gloriously Partridge-esque start to the year with a 3 night stay in Slough’s Holiday Inn. I wonder where I shall end up next?

Making better digital decisions

I made this video to help explain my take on decision making and governance in digital work within councils and other similar organisations. It’s something a lot of places struggle with, and I hope it helps.

Most of the time, decision making (particularly around digital) doesn’t work.

• People don’t understand how to ask for things, or how to get them approved

• There are onerous forms, things take too long to decide, and then get prioritised away into the distant future

• There’s a lack of understanding of exactly what is being worked on, and why it is being done instead of 100s of other things

• People in digital are making prioritisation decisions that ought to be made way higher up the food chain

• People do their best to avoid it and do their own thing, which usually doesn’t work either.

What does good decision making look like?

• It’s proportionate

• It’s open and transparent

• It involves the right people

• It’s based on commonly accepted principles

• It helps to achieve strategic goals

• It’s future-proofed

• It produces the right results and outcomes

Find out the rest on the video. You can download the slides, if you want to repurpose them. By all means do, but please credit me back!

6 week online digital success course – only £299!

I’m running an online course about making a success of digital in your organisation, which will start in the next few weeks. There are still some places available, and if you might be interested, have a look and book your place!

This unique learning experience takes place over 6 weeks, and will give all participants an engaging overview of the key elements of improving their digital, design, data and technology offer within their organisation.

Each week features an online seminar, lasting an hour, which will deliver high quality advice and guidance from the course leader, and opportunities for discussion, sharing and collaboration.

Additionally, every learner will get the opportunity to have 2 half hour one to one conversations with the course leader to enable them to receive individual coaching.

This will be backed up with a private online community, where resources can be accessed, further discussions held, and exercises shared for learners to complete.

The programme:

• Week 1 - Strategy and leadership

• Week 2 - Technology and data

• Week 3 - Design and delivery

• Week 4 - Culture and skills

• Week 5 - Teams and structures

• Week 6 - Next steps and making things happen

How much?

This is the first time the course is being run, and so is available at a discount. 

The course costs £299 per person. This gives:

• Access to the 6 weekly 1 hour online seminars, and the 2 half hour individual one to ones 

• Lifetime access to the learning materials, including presentations, templates, guides and videos

• Access to a dedicated online learning community with the rest of the cohort for 12 months following the end of the course with the full participation of the course leader

Book your place!

This issue’s links

Giles thinks learning materials in organisations ought to be better quality, and of course he is right.

“Not another ‘is design thinking dead?’ blog post”

Simon Wardley shares some thoughts on project delivery that are well worth reading.

The Future Councils Playbook is a “set of tools to help you understand complex problems and their impact”. These are useful of course, and as much good practice support we can get out there the better. But a step change in local government digital quality is unlikely to result from such things – we need more.

“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.

“How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu”

“How we’re making it easier to access government forms online”

“How can we get to a single shareable patient record?”

The stuff Jukesie uses.

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

This from Dai Vaughan is really excellent on how technology failures keep damaging people’s lives, and how frustrating it is that the answers to this problem are well known, but unevenly implemented.

Mike Bracken’s take on Horizon.

Well done for making it this far! Here’s your reward: one dimensional pacman.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

After my last newsletter, in which I spent this introductory paragraph beating myself for my lack of regularity, several of you got in touch to say that I shouldn’t worry about it so much. Thank you! I won’t mention it again.

On what we should call the folk who engage with local public services

Bit of an old chestnut, this, that I referred to in another post and I have been mulling on for a while.

User feels a bit techie, a bit too transactional, and sometimes like somebody who indulges in illicit substances. However it is delightfully generic.

Customers tend to have somewhere else to go, unlike many of those who engage with local public services. It does have it’s benefits though - it works for businesses and communities as well as individuals, and it is helpful to get colleagues to take improving the ‘customer’ experience seriously.

Citizens is a very complicated term in the UK, and besides, many of the people we work with are citizens of other places, not the UK.

Residents is one that I have liked for a while, but it doesn’t cover people who commute in, or visit for other reasons.

Businesses and community groups need to be factored in and the more individual terms don’t really cover this base. In work in the past, I have used the long and rather awkward ‘residents, communities, and businesses’. I now look on this period with a sense of shame.

On LinkedIn, Craig Hervey from Solihull asked why we don’t just use ‘the public’ - and he had a point. On mulling this though, I find the need for the definitive article a bit clumsy sometimes, and often plain old ‘public’ sounds just a bit weird.

On a current project working on digital strategy for a small local authority, I’ve needed to come up with a term to use, and this time I am trying to stick with ‘people’. Sometimes it can appear vague, which is a problem, but I then do a bit of work on the rest of the sentence to try and provide any additional context that is needed.

So that’s that, for now, for me. Those who engage with local public services are people.

Workshops and training days work brilliantly with small cohorts of people - but if you want to get your whole organisation on board with digital, what do you do? One option might be my 'Digital Essentials' e-learning course!

Find out more

This issue’s links

Lovely bit of LocalGov blogging: Nature’s Genius: Service Innovation through Biomimicry.

Working as a community to iterate the task list pattern.

This is a great story, about the wonder that was Yahoo Pipes, beautifully told… and now I am really interested in Retool, so I guess it did its job (tech marketers, take note)!

I had no idea that Sarah Lay was back working in local gov, but am delighted she is.

A reflective, open and personal post from Carl. People – including ourselves – are not perfect, and that’s just the way it should be.

The challenge now for design in policy – I like a lot of the stuff in this post, which includes lessons that work for many relatively new disciplines, not just design.

Am rather liking the challenging nature of some of dxw’s blogging these days: Service delivery is broken – it’s time to join it up.

Why Neil Williams writes weeknotes.

CAPE is quite interesting, collecting data and plans from councils on climate stuff.

Jeremy weeknoted. It really is just like old times.

GOV.UK Cookie banner and why it “won’t go away”.

The struggles of the web browser.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

First newsletter for nearly a whole month. What can I say? I’ve been quite busy on other things, which I will explain a bit about below. But I’ve also been having some health ups and downs and they have slowed me down a bit, and made me go into my shell as well.

Still, am here now, so let’s crack on.

I’ve been beavering away recently on a thing I am calling the Local Government Digital Quality Model. Don’t call it a digital maturity model… but that’s basically what it is.

Other companies have created such things in the past, so why do we need another one?

For me, it’s about providing an open framework for improvement in digital design, data and technology within councils, and then wrapping a collaborative community around it.

The aim is to foster quality conversations in and between councils about the different elements of digital, and to help them decide which areas require their focus, and what realistic aims are.

It isn’t about getting the highest score possible, but instead about identifying areas for improvement, using a common model that can be compared and benchmarked with other councils.

The model is made up of 10 dimensions, which are rated at 5 different levels. These then produce a level for the councils overall.

Councils either self-assess, or get another council to do it (peer assessment) or can pay someone to do it (I guess). This is done by completing an assessment pack, basically considering various prompts around each dimension, then rating the council as it currently stands, giving reasons and evidence to back up those choices.

When that is done, the council should then decide where they want to get to next for each dimension during the next period (could be a year, I guess that’s down to individual choice). It could be that a council chooses just one or two dimensions to focus on, or perhaps would prefer to be more broad in their approach.

All these numbers get entered into the very simple calculator spreadsheet to produce the overall ratings for the council.

The next step is action planning. An action plan template will be produced along with a community maintained library of action items. These action items will be examples of things that councils can do to progress within each dimension.

So, if a council wants to make an action plan around the culture dimension, action items could include “Start a community of practice” or “Get your team to start blogging” or “Run some show and tells”, for example.

That is basically it! I think it would be good to fine a way to collect scores and some details about the councils, so benchmarking is possible.

Watch the video!

I apologise for any cringe that results from watching this.

There’s a website now, which isn’t terribly sophisticated but gives me something to point people to, and it has a form on it which enables people to apply to join the community (it’s open to anyone with good intentions!).

So far we have a great gang of around 15 different organisations who are getting involved, and we had our first online meet-up last week, where feedback, ideas and challenges were shared.

Broadly speaking, this is where the model is at, and what happens next:

• I have brain farted out v0.1 - the initial draft

• It will be full of howlers. Please check and feedback via community or email. No point is too small to make.

• I’ll then produce 0.2 based on that.

• When that it done, we will role play an assessment online, picking a ‘volunteer’ to be our guinea pig.

• We will iterate again based on feedback and how it flowed. 

• 0.3 will then be produced. That will be effectively the beta.

• We then have a go (quietly) at peer reviewing to test it again.

• More feedback, more iterating, and maybe then we will be at 1.0

If you would like to be involved with this project, in whatever capacity, just hit reply and let me know!

This issue’s links

I blogged about blogging a bit again, sorry.

Raindrop.io is a very good tool for social bookmarking, it turns out. Mine are here.

Some awesome advice here on how to write a blog post.

Anne McCrossan is great at lots of things and one of those things is data. Found this post from her about data as a utility really interesting.

OpenAI’s Misalignment and Microsoft’s Gain – Ben Thompson’s take on the ongoing OpenAI kerfuffle. All this stuff just makes me nervous about the whole AI thing. Potentially game-changing, yes, but currently stewarded by bozos.

The different ‘flavours’ of service design – by Emma Parnell (subscribed!).

Trustworthy AI in Government + Public Services — A self assessment tool from Oxford Insights.

This is great, from Audree at Public Digital: Changing how we change in the public sector. Business cases, big programmes and all that stuff can really hamper good work.

Lauren Pope’s sharing is just amazing. Take this latest belter as an example: Prioritisation for content teams: a guide.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

When I opened this draft to get it edited and sent, it was dated October 13th. It’s now 1st November. I appreciate the rubbishness of this, but I’ve just not been in a very newslettery sort of mood lately. Busy-ness with my day job, a few health things to contend with, and then the general messiness of life have got in the way. Let’s see if I can get back into a rhythm now, though.

On Friday - that’s in 2 days time, calendar fans - Nick and I are hosting an innovation igloo about blogging and working in the open. Do please sign up if it is something you might be interested in.

At LocalGovCamp last week, Jukesie ran an impromptu session on this topic, which was lightly attended due to it’s slightly delayed appearance on the schedule, but even so, was very interesting and there was some great discussion.

My good friend Neil Williams made a welcome return to the blogosphere (I’m not sure anyone says that anymore) recently, and it is great seeing him getting back into that groove of talking out loud about the stuff he is doing.

Neil is following a kind of weeknoting style (albeit monthly), which is very popular with public service blogging types, particularly since being promoted by Jukesie via the web of weeknotes. Basically an individual or sometimes a team summarises what has been going on that week, often following a template of sorts, and often involving a bit of reflection as well as description.

I think weeknoting is a great format to use if having a format to use for your blogging is useful to you. I’ve just never been able to stick to it myself. When chatting to Neil about blogging styles, I wrote in a text that:

I think it’s just a case of finding a rhythm that works. I find posting little snippets – or aggregations of snippets – works well for me at the moment. As soon as I try to write 500 words on one topic I seize up.

One of the things that came out of the LocalGovCamp session for me was that while the above quote is true for me now, it wasn’t always. I went through a period of writing irregular, lengthy posts that I’d probably now classify more as ‘articles’ than blog posts, which I’d frankly agonise over before hitting publish. I wouldn’t recommend this approach now.

Workshops and training days work brilliantly with small cohorts of people - but if you want to get your whole organisation on board with digital, what do you do? One option might be my 'Digital Essentials' e-learning course!

Find out more

We did talk a bit at the LocalGovCamp session about technology, and Jukesie seems to agree with me that Medium is not a great place for open working. It’s a lovely experience for writers, less so for readers, as it can demand that you log in to read content, and sometimes even asks you to pay.

A thing in Medium’s favour though was that it was quick and easy to get going, which is a big part of the reason that I put localgov.blog together for people and teams in councils to have a place to experiment with blogging where they would never be charged, never have ads served against their content, and never have paywalls or anything like that. West Northants are the latest council to take me up on the offer.

I suspect the fundamental question about blogging is: why? The answer to that depends on who is answering, I think, but for me these are the big ones:

• My blog acts as a scrapbook for me. Stuff others have written, stuff I have written, all gets posted there for posterity. Sometimes I write something in an email and I think, “oooh, this is good stuff” so it gets a quick copy and paste into the blog so I can find it, use it, and point to it later.

• Blogging helps me figure out what I think. By writing for a public audience, I am forced to explain myself, to ensure as much as possible that the point I am trying to make is understandable and as correct as possible. Taking half-formed thoughts and writing about them is a brilliant way of refining your thinking

• I like signposting stuff to people. There’s an awful lot of content on the web and sifting through it is something not many people have time for. I don’t really have time to do it, but over the years, I have managed to come up with ways of doing it that speed it up. I’ve mentioned in these pages before that there’s a dearth of decent sharing of good practice in our sector, and I like doing my bit.

Come to the igloo on Friday to have your say on all this stuff, and see if blogging might be a way of helping you!

This issue’s links

Hackney are recruiting for an Assistant Director - Customer Services, Digital & Data. I would love this job, but it just isn’t the right time for me, even if I were to be considered a suitable candidate!

I have been putting together a kind of minimum viable project documentation thing in Google Spreadsheets. 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 just keeping a list in a notebook, which sometimes turns out to be inadequate.

“Full Stack Service Design is a model to help people break services down into the parts that make them and understand how all of these parts impact the user experience.”

Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software.

Abort Retry Fat is a brilliant newsletter about the history of various bits of IT. This one on Lotus, from 1–2–3 to Notes, is a belter.

How to run a daily stand-up – very useful from Alan Wright (as always).

Internet Artefacts - a delightful, whimsical trip down internet memory lane.

The Tyranny of the Marginal User – this is excellent:

What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user – the billion-plus-first user – and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

Monday this week was spent in the marvellous surroundings of Newark and Sherwood Council, a district in Nottinghamshire, just a short hop over the border from my home county of Lincolnshire.

I’d been invited by the lovely Dave Richardson and Kristin McIntosh to come and deliver a talk about all things digital to the council’s network of digital champions - volunteers from across the organisation who give up their time helping colleagues, spreading the good news, and learning new things themselves.

My talk centred on the 5 things everyone needs to know about digital (what digital actually is, user centred service design, agile delivery, data, and technology) from my e-learning course. It was a good summary of where things are at in the sector, I think, and outlined what we have learned, and what the emerging good practice is for councils both large and small.

(If you think people in your organisation could benefit from this talk, just let me know! It’s easy enough to deliver remotely and at just an hour out of my diary, I wouldn’t need to charge for it.)

Workshops and training days work brilliantly with small cohorts of people - but if you want to get your whole organisation on board with digital, what do you do? One option might be my 'Digital Essentials' e-learning course!

Find out more

What was so nice about the atmosphere in the room was the friendly, confident nature of the champions and their relationship with the central digital and IT people. On the way home, it gave me a chance to think a bit about why these networks are so useful - and therefore why every organisation ought to have them - but also what we can do to make them successful.

Here’s a few of the things I thought about, in no particular order:

• I must admit, I think if I was launching one of these things now, I would avoid the word ‘champions’ - it’s been over-used over the years and does have the vibe of people being forcibly volunteered to do things nobody else wants to. ‘Advocates’ is quite nice as an alternative.

• There’s a real trick in not letting this activity become a victim of ‘milk monitor syndrome’. You want your digital volunteers network to be something people want to do. It can’t just entail a load of busy work that nobody else wants to do.

• Part of the answer to that lies in making it somehow exclusive. This network should confer privileges that ordinary norms don’t have. It could be something really simple like a special laptop sticker. It could be early access to new technology. It could be getting opportunities to learn new skills. It could be getting to go out and about to visit different places to find out how they do things.

• Running the network events is really important. I think a mix of remote and in person works well (not at the same time! I don’t mean hybrid…), using each for different things they are most suited to. Use in person events to try out workshop formats, to introduce some new ways of working, or even to get some additional brains onto a real problem. The remote meetings are good for show and tells, guest speakers and so on.

• Particularly for smaller organisations with limited numbers of digital / technology professionals, these networks are a great way to build up some capability, capacity and confidence that you can tap into. Next time you want to run a design sprint at a problem, instead of being limited to picking from your own exhausted, overworked team, you could recruit some people from your network, who by this time will have some experience in what you’ll be doing, and probably chomping at the bit to get the chance to exercise these skills in real life!

This issue’s links

Local Digital evaluation study: A snapshot of our initial findings – I have views, will write them up at some point. But there’s some things in here presented at positives that could be seen in another way entirely. As just one example - “We were pleased to hear that nearly three-quarters of responding councils (51 out of 71) reported having an identified leader responsible for technology.” I am not sure how pleased I am that 20 councils surveyed don’t actually have anyone in charge of this stuff!?!? My mind boggles 🤯

People. Process. Product – Three lenses to improve your digital strategy - more great stuff from We Are Open.

How we’re opening up access to GOV.UK Forms – access isn’t being opened to local government just yet, which is probably fine for now. Beyond ‘free’ I’m not sure what else GOV.UK Forms would bring to the party at this stage in its development. One important consideration for me is what it spits out once a form is submitted – am guessing some kind of XML or JSON maybe. Organisations adopting these forms will need the in house capability to do something useful with that output, which isn’t always the case.

Stacks of really, really useful stuff in this guide to digital transformation in HE from Jisc. Lots that can be applied to other sectors.

Future directions for design and public policy.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

I spent some time wondering last week whether we have lost a bit of our ambition in the last few years. I remember thinking - around the time I started working at Adur & Worthing - that this cultural, technological thing called ‘digital’ was going to completely transform, maybe even disrupt, the way organisations like councils work.

I saw what had happened to the music industry, news media, taxi firms, hotels, retail and other sectors and thought that some of it must rub off on local government at some point.

I rattled off blog posts about it. Even years later, at Croydon (before the wheels well and truly came off) I was pitching new digital operating models to anyone that would listen, in the hope that they might help stave off the commissioners.

But none of this has happened, at least not yet. In the meantime, most people, including me, are focusing on the day to day, fixing the basics, working with the art of what is possible right now. We aren’t spending much time wondering if, in fact, we are just doing the wrong things righter.

It was during some conversations with the marvellous Mark Thompson last week that reminded me of the ambition that I used to have - still do have, really, only it’s a bit buried at the moment - about the potential to completely reinvent local public services, using internet era culture, processes technology and operating models.

I think we need to start talking more about this again, perhaps with a little less techno-utopianism, and a little bit more ‘we need to do this before the whole sector goes bankrupt'. Councils up and down the country are cutting back services: closing swimming pools, reducing funding to local community organisations; but they are still all writing their own website content, running myriad procurements for similar things to meet every-so-slightly different rules, writing variations on the same strategies repeatedly, paying multiple times again and again for the same software.

Mark’s rallying call around this stuff - that digital age operating models that make use of what computers are good at, and what the private sector is good at, in order to free up public servants to do what they are good at - feels increasingly like an idea whose time is now. At the very least, it should be part of the conversation. We should not take localism to mean doing things in exponentially ineffective and inefficient ways for the sake of it. There has to be a point where local configuration of nationally adopted standards kicks in at the delivery level as well as at the policy level.

Workshops and training days work brilliantly with small cohorts of people - but if you want to get your whole organisation on board with digital, what do you do? One option might be my 'Digital Essentials' e-learning course!

Find out more

So I spent a bit of time thinking Big Thoughts. Then I looked at my emails and saw the reality of the world as it exists. I sent a text or two to Mark, bemoaning the gap between where we are now and where it needs to be in the future. How people can barely start to think about the revolutionary when everything is on fire.

Then I saw a quote emerge from the Service Design in Government conference, which took place in Edinburgh last week, from someone, who I don’t know but who sounds very interesting, called Julian Thompson. The quote was:

While we are thinking about the future, the present is still happening.

And that’s completely true, isn’t it? But it’s not a one sided message. It’s not saying, we can only focus on the present - it's saying we must, and can, do both.

So there’s a balance here, that I want to try and put in place for myself, of continuing my current trend of being practical, pragmatic, useful in the here and now; but combined with some bigger, more optimistic thinking about what the future needs to look like. Even if that might take a long time to realise.

This issue’s links

The innovation igloo is coming back on Friday 6th October at 1pm for an hour. We are hoping to talk about service patterns, but could well get derailed.

Regular correspondent Tass Smith helps to run the LocalGov Apps Managers Network. If you, or anyone you know, is involved in managing, supporting and maintaining the software used by a council, signing up would be a good idea!

Rather terrifyingly, I was invited to chat on this podcast, which came out the other day, on all things local government, technology and digital. I did my best.

Weeknotes rules by Giles Turnbull - helpful because they ‘set expectations about what good weeknote behaviour should look like’.

Two great jobs at City of Lincoln Council, joining a team that’s really going places under the awesome leadership of Emily Kate Holmes. Choose between being a Business Intelligence Officer or a Business Analyst in a beautiful city in the best county in the country.

How to cultivate a writing culture – “Convince an engineering team to care about docs”.

Can’t remember if I have shared it here before, but I was reminded of the Local Government Service Design Maturity Model earlier this week.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Also, if I can help you with anything, you can hire me!

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

Increasing the confidence of an organisation in all things digital is a tricky thing to do at scale. It’s possible to run workshops with your senior managers every now and then, and you can do similar things with different teams. But it’s hard to scale that across large numbers of people, because of the usual problems of time and capacity.

I really believe that for sustainable culture change, as many people as possible need to know the basics of digital. Just to get everybody on the same page. But as well as being scalable, it also needs to be relevant. For my niche, local public services, that means that a lot of the learning stuff out there is just too generic for our peculiar (in both senses of the word!) circumstances.

I’ve been mulling over it for literally years, and now I have actually done something about it.

The thing I have done is called Digicademy. It’s a way of blending traditional learning approaches such as workshops and coaching - which work great for small teams and individuals - with a unique online learning package - which works just as well for much larger groups.

The online learning course is called ‘Digital Essentials’ and it covers the 5 things that everyone in local public services needs to understand about this thing called ‘digital’. They are:

• What digital is, and what it means for local public services

• User centred service design

• The agile delivery mindset

• The importance of data and using evidence to make decisions

• Technology

Each lesson is made up of a video presentation, an audio only version for podcast fans, a transcript of the content, a copy of the slides, links to further reading and watching on that topic, and a quiz to help ensure the learning has been retained.

As well as this, it also includes a self-reflection workbook, enabling learners to take the time away from their screens to think about how what they have learned applies to them and their roles within their organisation.

Everything has been created with the benefit of my experience working in and around local public services. It acknowledges the unique aspects of the sector, and the ways in which compromises have to be made when adopting new ways of working and delivering services. It focuses on what really matters, rather than being dogmatic and inflexible.

The final bit of special sauce is the impact measurement tool. Before and after the course, learners are asked to rate how confident they feel in each subject area. These are then compared at the end to show progress, and can be reported on across an organisation to demonstrate the impact the learning has had.

This course can be hosted on your own learning management system, or I can host it on my own community LMS.

The costs are straightforward - it’s an annual subscription that will include updates to the content to keep it fresh and relevant. Smaller councils like districts and boroughs pay £5,000 a year; larger counties, unitaries and London boroughs pay £10,000 - and that’s for as many learners as you like, and whether you host it yourself or ask me to do it on your behalf. More courses are planned, and they will form part of the same subscription.

Has your organisation made a commitment to increasing the digital confidence of your staff? Not quite sure how you can do it at scale? It might be that Digicademy and the Digital Essentials e-learning course will help.

Get in touch if you think it might!

This issue’s links

Redesigning the DDaT Capability Framework. Worth digging into around how specialist digital skills are developing. Much of this though will be way beyond the reach of many organisations.

Can data help me solve this problem? Eddie always writes well about data stuff.

Dorset Council claims progress with roll out of digital social care records.

Undertaking GOV.UK's largest software infrastructure project - big, difficult things can be done without too much fuss, if approached in the right way.

Elon Musk: Social media platform X could go behind paywall - shoulda woulda coulda. People need to stop reporting on what this man says and focus on what he does.

Why Voice Failed as a Platform - definitely feels like the buzz around voice has dropped off massively. Good for setting timers, and… not much else? I guess the genuine use case is probably around accessibility, particularly in a care-tech context. Less so for mass adoption.

I added a ‘now’ page to my personal website, explaining what I am working on at this moment in time. Thanks to Steve for the idea.

Lauren Pope on how to do a content audit (thanks Steph!):

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

I got a little pushback on my last newsletter for not mentioning the obvious thing you can do about legacy technology - which is to replace it with something better. I probably should have started with that, rather than taking it as read and diving headlong into what you can do if you can’t replace it - either right now or ever.

It’s a point worth making though - there are suppliers out there trying to make better, modern software, and we should all make the effort to see how they might be able to help us solve our problems.

A question was asked about structures in the LocalGovDigital Slack group last week, and I thought maybe it would be worth me sharing and elaborating on my response to you lot.

The initial question was around where ‘digital’ sits - is it with ‘IT’? Or on its own? Or with customer services? Or communications? etc.

My thinking on this has evolved just a little bit over the last few years. Some of this is about organisation design, and some of it is about semantics.

First - I don’t think there should be a ‘digital’ team at all. Interpreting the definition of digital as being about how we do work and how we think about work rather than specific roles or activities, as I do, means that it works best more as a descriptor of culture rather than an organisational unit. A bit like how I sometimes prefer to talk of D:DDaT rather than plain old DDaT.

So:

• Absolutely your traditional IT function has to be integrated and fully aligned with your new, ‘digital’ roles. In terms of which takes the lead - ideally you have a person who has a foot in both camps. If you don’t, then whichever area best embodies the new culture you want to embed should take the lead.

• In terms of vertical structures, put in place collections of disciplines or practices. My preferred breakdown would be technology, design, data, and delivery.

• The purpose of these groups are to develop great practice in all of these disciplines. They are not units of delivery of work however! The ‘Heads of’ stop apportioning work to their teams and instead focus on developing people and practice.

• Instead, work happens in horizontal delivery teams, made up of people from across the various disciplines.

• Some of these teams will last longer than others. Some will exist for a short period of time: come together, do a thing, move on. Others will stick around for longer, maybe even permanently - such as if there’s a genuine product that needs managing long term (oh which there are not many in local gov).

• There’s no ‘web team’. The website is a product (see above bullet).

• If you’re a smaller council, have two teams - technology and design. Bits of data and delivery go in each one (don’t just squidge all of data into technology, and delivery into design, for example).

• Each bullet (and I am bound to have missed some) in the chart above are capabilities rather than jobs. It’s best to have dedicated expertise in these things, but not every organisation is big enough to justify it. But you do need people who do this stuff.

• Also - the work you do, particularly in the technology space, will impact on the numbers of people in each practice as you progress. For example, application teams are often very large, however, as software-as-a-service applications replace traditional ones, your need for those people will reduce. Similar cases will exist for other disciplines too. Make sure you design for that.

I’m always delighted if the things I write about are of use to people. Sometimes folk need a bit more help - in which case my advisory services might be just the thing they are looking for.

Hire me!

Key to making this work is a fundamental shift in terms of thinking about what teams are, what vertical organisational hierarchies are good at, and what autonomous multi-disciplinary delivery teams are good at.

As well as getting the structure in place, you’re also going to need to finally get round to tackling one or two pesky issues:

• Governance - for this to work you have to get a grip on the pipeline of work, how it is triaged, assessed, prioritised and resourced. You need to land on a approach to decision making that is lightweight enough so people don’t try and avoid it, but heavyweight enough to ensure things don’t become a free-for-all.

• A big part of this is getting the funnel right - the way into making requests. This has to be designed to ask for the right amount of information at the right times. Lots of teams ask for service areas to produce business cases to accompany requests, which feels far too heavy handed to me. Ask for the minimum viable amount of detail at each stage.

• BAU - ‘business as usual’ work has been the bane of my life for several years now. It’s like a magic formula which means a bit of work has to be done right now, no matter what. Being asked to work on project X, which you don’t fancy and would rather tinker with project y instead? Just claim it’s BAU and nobody can do a thing about it!
  
  The delivery team driven model is based on the vast majority of work being classed as projects, and prioritised accordingly. Very little work should ever be classed as BAU, outside of things that literally take minutes. Someone in a service area wants a new field creating? Or a report generating? Triage it and prioritise it, don’t just let individuals take the burden of deciding this stuff onto their own shoulders.

So an awful lot of this isn’t about the structure itself, but how people work within the structure. A huge part of this is breaking the link between vertical practices and horizontal delivery teams.

Let me know if this helps, or if you have some challenges to my theory!

This issue’s links

I’m organising a little collaborative project, called the New Council Website Playboard. Am aiming to put together an open, freely-accessible Trello board listing all the stages and the steps within the stages that a council ought to go through as it puts together a new website. If you would like to join in, just send me an email.

The Local Digital team at DLUHC are running a thing called Future Councils, and that work has produced some shared problems statements that they believe are facing the local government sector, and holding back its ability to modernise using digital and technology etc. You can feed back on them here.

Laura Hilliger, Doug Belshaw and Matt Jukes all on the same podcast? 😍

I wrote up a quick note about why I am cautious about the use of AI / LLMs in local government (in particular).

“Focusing on just outcomes leads to whacky tech decisions” – more along the ‘it’s not not about the technology’ lines.

“Lessons for implementing digital health technologies”

I quite like this distinction: “Federation vs Small Pieces Loosely Joined”

Lots of stuff coming out about how Chrome is increasingly unethical as a browser, what with its data collecting and whatnot. Mark, amongst others, is using Firefox, which as a suggestion feels delightfully old school to me. Handily, Mozilla have just published a guide to switching from one to the other.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

As if producing informative and entertaining newsletters wasn’t hard enough already, I am typing this with my right hand wrapped in a ludicrous amount of bandaging, thanks to a futile attempt to stop a door from slamming by inserting my pinkie finger between it and the doorframe.

Said pinkie finger is now fractured, and operating a mouse and keyboard is absurdly inconvenient. Learn whatever moral you like from this episode.

So last week Nick and I ran the ‘innovation igloo’ - an absurd name for what is, in effect, a Teams meeting. We had a great group of 20-odd folk from in and around local government, and in amongst the japes, we had a good conversation about ‘legacy technology’ - what it is in local government, why it causes problems, and what can be done about it.

‘Legacy’ is an interesting word in the local government context, because we don’t have much of the COBOL or FORTRAN code running on virtualised ancient mainframes. Generally speaking our systems are a lot younger than that, and to be fair to the people that supply them, they are regularly updated and patched, and the sticky-tape holding them together gets reinforced every now and then.

What we do have though is a lot of technology that is old fashioned, built to obsolete paradigms and architectures, which doesn’t do a great job of meeting user needs in the internet age.

I’m always delighted if the things I write about are of use to people. Sometimes folk need a bit more help - in which case my advisory services might be just the thing they are looking for.

Hire me!

Which is why I love a definition of legacy that Coté shared not long ago: that legacy is “[s]oftware you need to change, but are afraid to change”.

The local digital declaration emerged 5 years ago, as I have mentioned previously, with the laudable aim of ‘fixing the plumbing’, by which it meant giving the sector the means to overcome this fear. To a certain extent it has worked - there is stuff happening in housing, in planning, and of course in web publishing. What has also been made clear is that it’s really, really hard to fix this stuff, because of reasons like:

• risk aversion

• market failure

• procurement

• resistance to change

• risk aversion*

But there’s always something you can do! I do feel like a grumpy old man sometimes, shaking my fist at the clouds and bemoaning the fact that nothing ever changes. But that isn’t quite true - yes, I am cynical about the ability of technology alone to fix problems, and I am dubious about anything purporting to be a quick fix for systemic issues - such as the local government software market.

But what I am optimistic about is the ability for people to do something small, to move the dial just a little, to make things a bit better than before. And we heard some great examples of that inside our igloo. Sarah from Swindon Council, for instance, told us about how they are innovating around the edges of traditional line of business systems, using a bit of RPA here, a bit of Amazon-powered translation there, some extracting, sharing, transforming and visualising of data where it’s possible and useful. The systems remain the same, but the outcomes are different. This is a way of successfully living with ‘legacy’.

We also got to hear from Tass - the one-woman transformation team - about what she has managed to achieve through dogged persistence, creativity and not a little personal brilliance. Despite all the challenges, and the seemingly intractable problems, progress can be made, no matter the size of your team, or the tools you have to work with.

As I have mentioned before though, we need these stories to be collected, codified, made reusable, and shared. As much as I love it, I suspect the answer to that is unlikely to be igloo-shaped. You just can’t fit enough people in, for a start.

We will definitely be doing it again though!

* did I mention risk aversion?

This issue’s links

“It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy” – somewhat concerning.

Love this, eccentric bringing back to life of ancient, almost useless technology. Beautiful.

Improving the SEND local offer – always impressive to see Stockport blogging away about the work they are doing. I don’t think I know anyone there, need to fix that.

Lovely reflections from Tim Davies, someone I don’t speak to much these days but remember very fondly from the wild west early days of social media and whatnot.

Lloyd on networks, connections and location – and why we need Dopplr back, or at least something a bit like it.

Lambeth are in the seat for this Local Digital Fund project on building control. Worth keeping an eye on. (Again, though, why oh why Medium?)

James Herbert reflects on recent engagements around data, and what lessons can be drawn. Definitely worthy of a mull.

As Rob on Twitter says, these five points from TechUK about ‘care tech’ feel a bit sticking-plaster-y.

Postmarks looks interesting. Like a single-user but federated del.icio.us style bookmarking site.

A pair of wonderful videos from Russell Davies about presenting:

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

Continuing a recent theme here, I was at the weekend mulling over the - perfectly correct - narrative that “technology isn’t the most important thing”.

To my mind, this has unfortunately been interpreted by many as “technology doesn’t matter at all”, which has left many organisations in a bit of a pickle.

Gavin Beckett pointed me to this article, sadly only available now via the Wayback Machine - but then, at the same time, hooray for the Wayback Machine! - in which Andrew McAfee helpful put this more pithily - “it’s not not about the technology”.

Note that he wrote that in 2007.

To be absolutely clear, I am not saying that we need to start putting tech at the forefront of all our discussions around change. Just that, in the classic triumvirate of transformation, the focus must be balanced across people, process, and technology equally.

As Ben Unsworth put it in on Twitter/X, “nuance is hard”. And to be fair, it is. As we can see from the rise of populist politics across the world, people like a simple answer to a complex problem.

People who, for one reason for another, struggled to get their heads around technology problems within their organisations heard the “tech isn’t the most important thing” and interpreting it as meaning they didn’t need to bother with it.

I’m always delighted if the things I write about are of use to people. Sometimes folk need a bit more help - in which case my advisory services might be just the thing they are looking for.

Hire me!

The truth of the matter is that a good team can achieve great things with poor technology - however, it doesn’t mean they should have to. Continuing to ignore issues in the technology space - failing to keep up with upgrades, allowing infrastructure to rot, sticking with outmoded applications - makes your chances of success significantly lower.

So what to do about it? I think we just need to be careful when talking to decision makers about this stuff. ‘Digital’ is all about new ways of working, new roles and skills, different emphasis on whose needs are most important. But we must make the case at the same time that it’s also about using internet-age technology, which needs to be modern, secure, and flexible.

This issue’s links

This Friday, Nick and I will be opening the doors to our ‘innovation igloo’ and you are cordially invited. No, I have no idea either.

I’ve loved supporting Tass Smith as she blogs her work in the digital and technology space at Warwick District Council. Her recent posts on launching a community of practice, and on her noise reduction service design work are fantastic example of the kind of things individuals can do to make a real impact within their organisations. Be more like Tass, if you can.

A lovely example of open product strategy from the GOV.UK Pay team.

The Mysterious Power of the Platform, the Internet’s Building Block - “If everything is a platform—sites for networking, ride-sharing, dog-walking—does that mean nothing is a platform?”

Love the way Coté records his conference talk practice runs for our edutainment. Open working FTW! This one is full of wisdom:

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

No newsletters last week as I took a week off working. Very nice it was too! Stayed home but went out on various trips, including Tattershall Farm Park, where we met this guy:

Commenting on James Herbert’s sensible post about approaching AI in local government, I came up with 5 statements of the bleedin’ obvious that all senior people ought to have in their minds whenever technology is being discussed.

• If something sounds like a silver bullet, it probably isn’t one (and please don’t try to turn it into one either!*)

• You can’t build new things on shaky, or non-existent, foundations

• There are no short cuts through taking the time to properly learn, understand and plan

• There’s no such thing as a free lunch – investment is always necessary at some point and it’s always best to spend sooner, thoughtfully, rather than later, in a panic

• Don’t go big early in terms of your expectations: start small, learn what works and scale up from that

Increasingly, I tend to speak about digital being different from previous approaches to technology because it includes a healthy dose of cynicism about the ability of technology to improve anything, ever. Perhaps these points reflect that!

* this rather excellent addition thanks to Sarah Peña.

This issue’s links

WordPress for Enterprise looks a very useful guide. Strange it’s a PDF though and not also available as web pages (although as Steph mentioned to me, PDFs are very ‘enterprise’).

What is inclusive design and why is it important? “‘Inclusive design’ and ‘accessibility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are different things.”

“Microsolidarity is a community-building practice” - this is extremely useful - thanks to Lloyd Davis for writing about it.

Setting the ambition for Future Councils – been looking forward to seeing some outcomes from this work. Will write up my thoughts once I have had a proper mull.

Text of Bill Thompson’s recent ‘state of the net’ style talk – “The network and its many applications have had a massive impact on our lives, but the tools they gave us were unable to resist the incursions of predatory capitalism or hold back the worst excesses of human toxicity and hatred.”

Fab work by Tewkesbury Council, going live with their new – WordPress powered – website (I ❤️ WordPress).

“Catching up on the weird world of LLMs“. Great resource from Simon Willison.

Alan Wright’s blog is chock full of brilliantly useful articles, like this one on splitting product teams. Go read them all!

Not a ‘digital’ thing, but I have been very much enjoying the ‘These Times’ podcast, from UnHerd. It’s really good!

Watch this and be as confused as I was:

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

It’s been a busy week this one, with 2 whole days spent out of the house, on site with clients. I won’t lie - I am exhausted by this and so haven’t the energy to write anything too interesting here. Sorry.

No photo of Merlin the dog this time, but you do get to see another member of the family, Dexter. He went missing earlier in the week, resulting in much panic, worry and frantic activity: flyers through neighbours’ doors, posters on lamposts, desperate messages on social media.

He eventually sauntered in at 4am on Tuesday morning, looking bedraggled, filthy and utterly unrepentant.

I prefer dogs.

I spent some time with a council who are just starting out on a new plan to modernise their digital and technology approach this week. Particularly in smaller organisations, where things have been the same way for a long time, it’s really helpful to keep everyone as aware as possible of the purpose of the change, and articulate as clearly as possible where things need to get to, and why.

So we spent a fair bit of time looking at things like visions, and principles. No doubt some people are rolling their eyes at this, and in some circumstances, such things aren’t helpful. It’s a bit like the whole ‘do you need a digital strategy’ question. It really does depend! Very mature organisations probably can weave ‘digital’ through their other strategies, so it doesn’t sit apart. But, seriously, how many organisations are really that mature?

If change is necessary, it must be explained to people clearly, particularly when they are used to things being usual. That means taking the time to work on some of this high level thinking. It just increases everyone’s confidence - your team will be more likely to think you know what you’re talking about; your peers will see you as being credible, with a sensible story to tell; and perhaps more importantly, you will feel more confident in yourself, with hopefully at least one or two fewer doubts in your mind that you are doing the right thing.

I’m always delighted if the things I write about are of use to people. Sometimes folk need a bit more help - in which case my advisory services might be just the thing they are looking for.

Hire me!

This issue’s links

The Wildlife Trust - which I can’t help but feel would be a great place to work - have a job going as a Data Analyst. If that’s your bag, you should apply.

“Digital proof: where one service ends, another begins” is a really interesting piece from Harry Scott-Trimble, outlining a means for data to be more easily shared between services.

Consider this your regular reminder that wholly outsourcing your technology function is destructive and I can’t believe it is still happening.

I've long been looking for a decent Evernote replacement. Keep It looks like a potential winner. Mac only, sorry.

I heartily approve of this message - keep it in your pocket for any AI / machine learning suggestions from helpful colleagues.

"Why I no longer believe in Content Design" by Nicole Alexandra Michaelis.

I wrote a quick and snarky post about Cipfa's recent report about blockchain. Given the difficulties council’s have with implementing traditional financial management systems, encouraging them onto the blockchain sounds like utter madness to me.

"Why does PDF content persist when it sucks so much, and how can you get rid of it?" by Lauren Pope.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

I do think that there is currently a yawning vacuum in the strategic advice space around technology and digital in local government.

Where exactly do councils go to find good practice, models to follow, and stories they can learn from?

There are plenty of websites that are happy to regurgitate press releases masquerading as case studies from vendors, generally pushing the message that deals have been signed rather than outcomes achieved. These ‘stories’ are never followed up to see if the promised savings or service improvements ever materialised - nobody is really incentivised to do so.

There are fantastic networks out there - LocalGovDigital, OneTeamLocalGov, and others - where practitioners can get together, ask questions, get support, feel heard. But these voluntary endeavours cannot fill the gaps that require dedicated, professional approaches. We also have the great work done by those teams in councils taking the time to blog about their work. More of this can only help the situation, but again, it’s not the same as professionally curated good practice, scaled to work for different contexts.

The LocalDigital team in DLUHC does a grand job of talking about the various funded projects, highlighting good things happening in different councils. But there is little practical follow up, in terms of how other councils, particularly those with very limited capacity and capability in this space, can replicate them. And of course, central government finds it politically very difficult to tell councils what to do about things like digital and technology.

Then there are the membership organisations, whose very existence ought to be dedicated to supporting local government to make things better.

The silence is deafening.

I’ve a bit of a theory, percolating away in the back of my mind, that the emergence of the Government Digital Service 13 years ago led to the people who were supposed to be supporting local government to stop thinking.

Those people who ought to be advising, supporting, nurturing and coaching local government technologists just seemed to stop. Go read the service manual! Hire agile product teams! Fix the plumbing! Yeah, OK - but how? Cue tumbleweed.

That this took place during the decade in which local government has been starved of funding, and when innovative advice about how to do more with less through digital and technology was needed more than ever, is I think nothing short of a disgrace. Who was arguing for the protection of digital and technology budgets, strongly enough so that the salami slicing of teams didn’t happen? Who was advising councils on where to invest cash while they still had it, to set themselves up for leaner times ahead?

Since I have returned to writing about this stuff on a more regular basis, the response has been overwhelming. That is equally gratifying and infuriating.

Fundamentally, this is too important to be left to being the hobby of some bloke in Spalding. Something needs to be done to fill this void.

I’m always delighted if the things I write about are of use to people. Sometimes folk need a bit more help - in which case my advisory services might be just the thing they are looking for.

Hire me!

This issue’s links

This is an extremely important thread for anyone wanting to understand the financial pressures felt across local government (and no, it's not related to solar farms...).

Am liking the topic of this upcoming event: “Living with Legacy”.

"How to play Mundane Superhero" - looks a fun way to kick off workshops etc.

"Council Spotlight: Stockport’s Family Context tool"

"Why Open Source Matters"

Lovely stuff from Simon at Adur & Worthing Councils: "5 Highlights from 5 Years of the Local Digital Declaration".

Another good thread, this time on how we should be thinking about stuff published in 'private' online work networks.

How did I not know about this? Emulated Macs going back to the original, all in the browser. Fairly pointless, but amazing.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️

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 one from Gavin Beckett giving a supplier's perspective.

Gavin's is extra interesting because he was in the room when the declaration was being planned and written - as was I, although my involvement was significantly less than his. Despite that, I wholeheartedly agreed with the text and the ambition it articulated.

I felt it was necessary to put into words for the sector what we meant when we talk about digital, and to find a way for senior people in councils to understand their responsibilities in moving their organisations forward on this agenda. It was important to point out what good looks like, and to acknowledge some of the really tricky problems that needed ironing out before real progress could be made. I feel the declaration did that, and still does.

So, how's it gone, really?

Loads of good stuff

Lots of projects have been funded. Discoveries have been completed, prototypes built. Perhaps most importantly, Councils have tried to collaborate to produced shared outcomes that many can benefit from.

We've got a really good content management system. It's technically excellent, takes just the right kind of open source approach, and has taken the time to think about governance and sustainability. That is not to be sniffed at, and is a major achievement.

A commercial supplier has productised (can't believe I just typed that as if it is an actual word) a product developed through one of the projects. I think this is ok - part of the ambition of the declaration was to disrupt the supplier market, and this is exactly an example of that.

The field worker mobile application developed in Birmingham is genuinely impressive and hopefully can be rolled out effectively in local councils.

There's still loads of work happening in the digital planning space, which I will have to admit having almost total ignorance of. It feels like it still could be a thing - but it has definitely not broken out in the same way that LocalGovDrupal has, I don't think.

All the other projects have also produced good outcomes: learning, research, developing capabilities, introducing new ways of working and culture to councils that otherwise might never have experienced it. That's good, worthwhile and not to be sniffed at.

But...

...let's have a quick look at the declaration, and what it says.

Can we really say that in more than a handful of councils "digital expertise is central to our decision-making"?

How many councils have "visible, accessible leaders throughout the organisation (publishing blogs, tweeting and actively participating in communities of practice), and support those who champion this Declaration to try new things and work in the open"?

How many local government digital services have been "informally tested by our peers against our national service standard where appropriate" in the last 5 years?

How many cases are there in which "[w]here appropriate, every new IT solution procured must operate according to the technology code of practice, putting us in control of our service data, using open standards where they exist and contributing to their creation where they don’t"?

That's just a handful of the commitments that hundreds of councils have made. I would argue that none could honestly say they could tick every one off - or even come close.

I think that is completely understandable, and to think that it could happen in 5 years is unreasonable. However, I also think that the almost complete lack of progress on most of the basics highlights a massive problem.

The problem

The issue is that the declaration is not wrong. The things it asks for are exactly the things that councils ought to be doing. But it's too ambitious. What it is asking for is probably too far along from where councils are at to enable them to even think about starting.

Why is that? The majority of local authorities are pretty small organisations, that in over a decade of austerity budgeting, have salami-sliced their way to making the figures balance in such a way that their digital and technology people are woefully understaffed, lack the capability and skills to do what needs to be done, and have allowed things to get into such a mess that it's as much as they can do to put the fires out. And we think these people can just start delivering user -centred, agile, digital products, just like that?

There are councils that have put off doing major infrastructure work because of cost and time, which has left them in positions where they can't upgrade a system because the server it runs on itself is in need of so many updates it'll cost an arm and a leg and take a year to sort out.

There are some councils websites (and no, I am not talking about parishes) out there that are an absolute travesty. I've no interest and naming and shaming, because people are doing their best in probably really difficult circumstances. But of course you're going to have a terrible website if you don't even have a single person whose job it is to make it good. And that's where a lot of councils are right now.

Why have you got Word documents - WORD DOCUMENTS!!!! - on council websites for people to download, fill in, print, sign and post to you to get something done in 2023? Probably because someone, somewhere, thinks it's ok, and nobody has been able to convince them otherwise. Or maybe everyone knows it's a problem, but nobody gets round to fixing it because, you know. Reasons.

And we genuinely thought that all the councils signing up to the declaration might really be able to meet the technology code of practice? Come on!

What has the declaration ever done for us?

I think the declaration has a done a really useful job. It has proved a number of things:

• it is possible to make change happen in the sector, if the idea is good, you have agreement and alignment, and the people with the capability to drive it forward (Will Callaghan I am looking at you)

• there is an appetite among a lot of people across the sector that things need to be better, and they have the energy and motivation to work together to make it happen

• that a lot of councils have ambitions and desire to do good work in this space, and also that many do. But an awful lot of others aren't able to meet their own aspirations, and a bunch of others maybe don't care that much at all

• The most important learning? That this is really, really hard.

I don't think I can overstate the last point. I can totally understand why councils signed the local declaration in the hope of getting some funding money to help them out of some of the holes they found themselves in. I can totally understand why councils hoped that by piggy-backing onto some collaborative projects, they might have been able to get hold of a new bit of free tech that might make some part of their lives just a little bit easier, to take just one thing off that massive to-do list.

But if you're in a tiny organisation that delivers so many different services with a tiny team of technologists to keep all that stuff running, you're never ever going to have the breathing space to make the fundamental changes needed to be even competent in this space.

What, then?

We have an ambitious vision. We have proven that in the right circumstances, council collaboration can prove results.

We've also proven that many problems are just too intractable for this approach to fix them.

1. We need to build more capacity and capability in the sector, which might mean structural changes - councils need bigger digital and technology teams than they currently have. If they can't afford them, they need to design ways to share them. Shared services often suck so badly they are neither shared nor services - but this doesn't have to be the case. There must be a way of doing it that meets organisation and user needs. More on this in a future rant, but we cannot keep expecting councils to adopt all these new ways of doing things when they don't have the staff, the time, or the skills. It just isn't fair.

2. We need to work harder with people in leadership positions. Still far too many chief execs and directors think it's acceptable or even funny to not be competent with technology. If you're someone in one of those roles, and you've ever joked about it in front of your staff, book yourself on a course right now. If you pretend to understand it by learning a few stock phrases and when it is a good time to say them, find someone to talk to and ask questions. It's impossible to fix this stuff without understanding at the top.

3. We need to properly learn from those councils that do this stuff well. My current favourite is Tewkesbury - a tiny council of 225ish people who are doing great work. Is everything they do perfect? Absolutely not, but given their resources and capacity, there is a lot to learn from what they are doing. I am not sure we are currently telling these stories in a way that helps them to be replicated effectively.

4. As well as the ambitious declaration, we need some steps to get there. Can we break down those ambitions into 5 different levels, and describe how they differ? Can we get across that councils should be banned from talking about AI or automation when they still have Word forms on their websites? Can we say that having a website that doesn't meet basic accessibility requirement is simply unacceptable? Can we say that running Windows Server 2008 isn't a great idea, and that councils should find a way to fix it?

Yes, councils should be creating digital services that are user-centered and help people achieve their outcomes. Yes, we need agile product teams. Yes, we all can and should be doing a hell of a lot more with data. Yes, all our infrastructure should be up to date, patched and secure.

But pointing this stuff out is one thing, doing it is another - particularly when you have no time, no people and no money. Let's find creative ways to fix that, and that probably starts with getting some of the basics nailed.

I'm going for a lie down.

This issue’s links

I have a Bluesky invite code going spare, if anybody wants it.

Really excellent advice on 'shadow IT'. Give it to all your technology people: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/shadow-it

Does the browser need reimagining? These folk seem to think so - I don't like the insistence on opening an account before you can do anything else.

An extremely long tweet post on ‘X’ from someone who knows Twitter/X from the inside. It’s well worth a read - although I had to copy and paste it because reading something that long on Twitter/X just felt weird. Nonetheless, some fascinating insight in here, and some really good reflections.

In Our Time about Jupiter.

Some great, addictive little browser games.

That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️