LG/WWW

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 ...

Even before LocalGov Digital was launched in 2012 I exchanged ideas and best practice with people across public sector organisations other than my own. In the following years I was part of the many that delivered things like the LocalGov Digital Content Standard , the  Local Digital Declaration , the Service Standard , and more. During the height of COVID discussion between councils didn't stop and the LocalGov Digital Slack was busier than ever, but for my team and I during that time understandably our focus was largely about delivering responses to the pandemic locally, as quickly as possible. Fast-forward to 2023 I was really pleased when DLUHC approved our application to the Planning Software Improvement Fund , and this week I attended the welcome event hosted by them with people from 18 other councils. In my post about LocalGovCamp last year I mentioned an emerging model for collaboration and delivery, and DLUHC's Planning Software Improvement Fund seems to follow that...

Tired of spending months writing a strategy or paying thousands for someone else to? Can ChatGPT do it for free? ChatGPT is, on the face of it, a website which you can ask questions that will provide answers in real time. That’s hardly revolutionary, but behind it is a natural language processing (NLP) machine learning model that's been designed to understand your questions and provide detailed responses to them. Again this isn't entirly new, in fact its current NLP is known as GPT-3 which means that there were two versions that came before. It is considered by some to be the most advanced NLP yet though, so much so that Microsoft will incorporate it into some versions of Teams soon . The people behind ChatGPT ( Open AI ) freely admit it will sometimes provide incorrect answers , and I found this chart produced by HFSResearch really useful in explaining its limitations. What this tells me is that we shouldn’t be relying on ChatGPT to provide exact answers, however it is usefu...

Change is inevitable. That's an obvious statement, but it's not until you start to think about the changes in the past ten years do you get an idea of the scale faced by local government. Austerity, wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine, Grenfell, the cost of living crisis, and of course COVID, are just a few things that local government has had to react, adapt and respond to, and we mustn’t forget the ongoing climate emergency which will be with us for many years yet. Most organisations will have, or have had some sort of transformation programme in place. I led a digital transformation programme which started in 2016 which found efficiencies and created better services across a range of functions meaning people can now report, as well as book and pay for things online, where before they couldn't. Transformation implies change from one state to another though, from a caterpillar to a butterfly for example, but we know from my examples above that change is constan...