LG/WWW

I thought I'd write a quick summary of the main things I did this week. Yes, in many respects this is a narcissistic mixture of self promotion and self congratulation, however I'm doing it for two reasons which I'll explain later. So here we go: With a couple of my team, spoke to our Civil Contingencies Team about creating a new digital service to record information about emergency shelters. Attended our Capital Group to ask for a new fund to be created. Attended a meeting of our Education Service's Senior Management Team. Attended a Digital Transformation Project Group meeting. Spoke with our Consultation Team about forthcoming user needs research. With our Planning Policy Team, launched our Register Your Self-Build digital service. Attended a meeting with the company doing the Libraries Needs Assessment for our authority Attended my team meeting. Amended the code for our search engine. With one of my team, met with Human Resources about offering a better

There's an ongoing debate on the LocalGov Digital Slack Team about the merits of a low code approach to building digital services. A low code platform is one that enables you to quickly create and deploy digital services usually by dragging and dropping a selection of predefined plug and play elements. These could be anything from a text input box, to a database or API call, to a bit of logic based on answers to previous questions. Where I work we've been using a low code platform for 3-4 years and some of the stuff you can see being used in our dashboard was built without writing a line of code. There are great benefits to having this approach available to you. Just one example of this is we're currently user testing an end-to-end register for the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Regulations  which we built in a couple of weeks. We'll make this available for anyone using the same platform as us, for free. Because we're starting to use the Local Governm

It seems like we're at a pivotal period for the future direction of our country. Not for a long time have many things been so uncertain, but this means it's an opportunity for change, so now seems a good time to suggest four ideas for the future. Local service providers can't continue to go it alone any more We know that digital offers new ways of delivering services locally and individual organisations don't have to procure products from individual suppliers any more. You might look to  SaaS  a way forward, but for me shifting from products to services doesn't really solve the problem that hundreds councils and other local service providers are individually buying the same thing over and over again. This is a huge waste of taxpayers money and should be addressed because the financial situation for councils isn't going to get any easier in the short or medium term. It really needs disruption and re-design, not just within each organisation but across the