Kenny Loggins Dave Briggs recently wrote this excellent article asking should you develop a single customer account . What he’s actually asking following on from an article written by Carrie Bishop is should you develop a single customer facing website, portal, app, or whatever term you want to use to describe it, and as he says, the answer is no. Should you develop a single customer account though? The answer to that in my view is, yes. Different departments particularly in larger councils can work as independent business units, resulting in a requirement to create a multitude of logins for different services online. This could result in the need to create separate logins to council tax, planning, library, social care, education, and other services, and in areas where there are two tiers of council this is even more likely. It's an information superhighway to a danger zone of many logins. I hardly ever use council services as a citizen perhaps I might hear you say, how would a si
I love using analogies and similes to explain concepts and ideas, so when someone described a council changing direction as being similar to a train changing tracks this week it bought a smile to my face. I was reminded of Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet which uses a method of transport to describe changing organisational culture, and also perhaps slightly unfair comparisons with turning round an oil tanker others have made in the past. This got me thinking, what's the best analogy for change in local government? Anyone who's worked in the sector will probably recognise that a council isn't a single vehicle, it's more akin to fleet of ships all sailing in formation. When you think about it like that it's easier to understand that the challenge to deliver change in local government isn't altering the course of a single vessel, we know from the response to Covid that individual parts of a council can change direction very quickly, it's to alter the