Daveslist Volume 3 Issue 23
Which bits of a digital service are best suited to sharing? A method for building capacity and capability into the local government system.
Whassup!
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
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 ❤️