I’ve been reflecting on how the GDS local government sprint goals that Theo Blackwell is leading on and after a conversation with the team there I said I would suggest some practical prototyping which could help right now as we wrestle with Devo / LGR / Planning reform and of course the money…. I’ve just …
This is a quick ‘hot take’ as the kids say about the launch of the new digital centre for government yesterday. There were only a few local government people there so I thought it would be helpful to share. In parallel the state of digital government was published (spoiler alert: turns out the state is …
In my other start of the year post I talked about some of my democratic and design dreams for the year – in this one I want to share my digital dreams. Stepping back from devolution question and into the reorganisation one, the opportunity for modernisation which comes with the creation dozens of new organisations …
Last week we stopped the implementation of a major upgrade of a piece of legacy software as it really didn’t meet the hype it was sold with and clearly wasn’t going to support our modernisation work. Stopping something like this is hard in any circumstances and stopping a project with sunk costs – emotional and …
Having said goodbye to social media (sort of) and having largely bypassed the data hype cycle as being a technocratic rather than social one (with a large exception for a fascination with the quantified self and big data meets IOT which I might come back to) I am fully on the bus for exploring AI …
I’ve been thinking about governance a lot recently – how and where we make decisions – and specifically how we make them robust and trusted how we make them fast enough to get stuff done rather than admiring problems How we manage the tension between these two things How you build in accountability with the …
I’ve written about what we are doing on strategy / not strategy and I’ve come to write more about it again a few times but backed away as it didn’t feel ready, but we are moving into a new phase of the work now and making it more open internally and I feel a bit …
If design is the bringing together of form and function, then design principles are the organising statements that help us to navigate the myriad decisions that we are faced as we create anything, be it a product, a building or in our case an organisation. Design principles can also help us work through how we …
There is always more work – the challenge is really in how you decide what not to do. This is particularly true in local government where we can’t chose not to serve a particular group or delivery a particular service – we are here for everyone. We are doing work on planning and prioritisation at …
This is a bit of a sidebar from the strategy / not strategy post here but is also part of a longer contemplation around participation, organisations and democracy – with a bit of digital stuff as well. I’ve always believed that there is real power in aligning digital/design, participation and democracy practices. Each are fundamentally …