LG/WWW

Despite discussions of more devolution you may see in the media, slowly but surely local government services are being centralised.  In this piece I'll highlight a few examples, and suggest what this might mean for councils. The first high profile service to be centralised under the GOV.UK banner was Register to Vote , or more accurately as it says underneath its page title, apply to register to vote. Whilst the creation of this service was good start, it doesn't meet the new Service Standard in that it fails point number eight which is " Iterate and improve frequently ", and it arguably doesn't meet a few others too. Because of this it's never really achieved it's full potential, and not only does it not meet a basic user need of telling people they don't need to register to vote, it creates additional unnecessary work for electoral registration teams in councils because you can register to vote as many times as you like, even if you're alread...

I'm putting together the outline of a new digital strategy for my organisation. I have a good idea of what should be included, but to help me to refine this and to fill the gaps, I've been reading the following to inform my thinking: My organisation's Council Strategy https://info.westberks.gov.uk/strategyandperformance The most important of the lot. What the administration and leaders of my organisation want everyone to deliver, and what every strategy underneath it should be informed by. The Local Digital Declaration https://localdigital.gov.uk/declaration/ My organisation signed up to the commitments in the Declaration, this strategy will help us deliver them. The Technology Code of Practice: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/technology-code-of-practice/technology-code-of-practice One of the commitments of the Local Digital Declaration is (where appropriate) every new IT solution procured must operate according to the Code. The Government Serv...

I've been thinking about, doing, and sharing collaboration in the public sector for around fifteen years. One thing I've learnt in this time is that things go in cycles, and different people will try and solve the same problem, the same way, over and over again. This week the Local Government Association (LGA) launched its Transformation and Innovation Exchange and FutureGov launched a library of Service Patterns for Local Government ; a couple of weeks ago Nesta announced it was starting its Upstream Collaborative. The Transformation and Information Exchange now sits alongside the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government's  (MHCLG) database of Local Digital Projects , LocalGov Digital's Pipeline , revitalised by Hackney and now supported by the London Office of Technology and Innovation , MHCLG, Hackney and others, the LGA's own  Shared Services Map , and many others. Service Patterns for Local Government in some part replicates the Governm...

Shortly after the 2019 local government elections in England, Dan Slee posed a question in his excellent article,  why is it so hard to find out election results . I'd been meaning to write something about why the speed of data reporting (how quickly and frequently data gets updated and published) varies. and in doing this I can also try to answer Dan's question too. In almost all cases the speed of data reporting operates at the need of the business, not the end user. Sometimes these are the same, in the case of local government elections they're not. That's why it's so hard to find out election results until days after an election. On the night the best place to find results was a news organisation's website, radio or TV channel, for example Sky News . Why? Because their business model is built around getting you the facts as quickly and as accurately as possible, and in the case of a commercial news organisation having a reputation for doing this well...

Work on standards and interoperability in social care to enable better sharing of data across the public sector has been ongoing for years. What that means in real terms is being able to provide better, cheaper services by stopping duplication and securely sharing information in and across public sector organisations such as councils and the NHS. What's important to remember is that IT systems and data are there to support a service, and if services are different, then the schema for data and the IT systems which support the service will be different. Even when there’s specific legislation such as GDPR, local interpretation can be different, and where there isn’t legislation service delivery can vary even more. So the challenge is really how do we influence the interpretation of legislation where it exists and the overall delivery of services, because only then will we really start to solve this problem. Whilst this is often posed as a digital or IT problem, it’s a human is...

As statements go, "technology is easy, culture is hard" is neither original nor totally accurate. It was however the catalyst for the first Digital by Design Day, held yesterday at my place. Technology isn't easy, but it's getting easier. Creating a new digital service is a bit like baking a cake. In the well stocked cupboards below I need ingredients from three shelves and a couple of things from outside, in the fridge. It's not as easy as throwing things together in a bowl and hoping for the best, there's some knowledge and skill involved, but following the right recipe, and with the right ingredients success can be achieved. Building a digital service is similar. Start with the right ingredients, or technical capabilities (some are shown below) and the right recipe, and with knowledge and hard work you can create a great service. For example using forms, integration, email, BPN and our line of business waste system we've automated over 7...

LocalGov Digital is the association for professionals working in and around local government digital, of which I'm currently Chair. We're the voice of local government digital practitioners and offer a range of services to our members for free, to aid collaboration between councils to help deliver better, cheaper services. One such service is Pipeline . Back in 2013 I wrote about a Kickstarter for Local Government . The idea was to kick start collaboration between councils by creating a platform on which could councils could publish details of the projects they were working on, and update people as they progressed. Its aim was to stop duplication; doing the same thing separately in hundreds of councils across the country, and therefore reduce waste and cost across the sector. In 2014 I created the first iteration of Pipeline built in C# on an open source wiki, and quickly roped in Ben Cheetham to help develop it with me. The initial response was great, with over 50 co...