LG/WWW

Organising a sustainable peer group This week LocalGov Digital launched a  peer group for the South West of England . Added to the newly created group for the South of England and established groups for London and the Midlands this now makes four. The groups are primarily there to help regions establish how to work to the Local Government Digital Service Standard  (LGDSS), but can cover whatever the regional leads feel would best meet the needs of the group. This is great news for digital practitioners interested in thinking, doing and sharing to create better public services. What if you're thinking "where's the group for my region?" though, if that's the case then why not start a group yourself. LocalGov Digital can definitely offer you: Publicity through the LocalGov Digital newsletter ,  Twtter account ,  website  and Eventbrite page . Workshop plans and agendas from other peer groups Advice from other regional peer group leads via a dedicate...

Yesterday I was at the Midlands Peer Group , set up to support councils in the region use the Local Government Digital Service Standard. The event was expertly facilitated by Julia McGinley and Kurtis Johnson , and built on the success of  the London Peer Group  and  the Summit at City Hall the week before. I don't work in the Midlands, but there isn't a group for the South (yet) and we're starting to use the Standard at my place, so I wanted to hear from, and talk to other councils who are in the same situation. It's exciting to see councils start to use the Standard, and I've been amazed by the speed of progress. This time last year ago it didn't exist and has come so far already in a short space of time, thanks in part to support from people in organisations like the Government Digital Service . If you work for a council, you can sign your local authority up to the Standard here . For me the main question now is, how we can enable the creation of mo...

The LocalGov Digital Service Standard Summit happened on Monday 19 September and you can see the agenda here . Here's some things I learnt from it: There's a growing number of people working in central government, who want to help improve local service delivery and are willing to lend some of their professional time and skills. There's a growing number of people who work in local government who have an interest in doing digital well. Some IT suppliers are seen as an obstacle to delivering better, cheaper public services. City Hall, London is a great venue, and there's some great people who work there. It's entirely possible and relatively easy to put together a panel of excellent speakers on digital, the majority of who happen to be women. If you're going to an event on digital that features mostly men, ask the organiser why that is. If you're paying to attend an event, someone's probably making money out of you. That's not necessarily a ...

Sometimes you have to push back. It won't make you popular, but when business requirements and user needs clash you have to stand up for the user. Let me give you two examples of this. A service delivery team wanted a new digital service so that users could register for a permit. Most of the proposed questions were simple and straightforward, but two weren't. They were: Upload a copy of a recent utility bill  Upload a copy of your vehicle's V5 certificate Asking these questions assumes that the user has access to the technology to scan or take a picture of the documents required, and also the skills required to use the technology. We asked the team to research their service users' skills and their access to technology. At present the service is being created without these two questions. The second example is where a new law and statutory requirement meant the creation of a new digital service. The service delivery team wanted the digital service to ask arou...

Why aren't the private sector lobbying for the public sector to use open standards? Why would they do that you might ask? Well let me propose why they should be, and what's in it for them. Take how the private sector sell to councils for example, whether you're buying a product, SaaS or using a paid for service another way, this is generally how it works Yes, I know that the API might be a database connection and there's lots other ways to integrate a service with a website or app, but let's look at this model for now. So the maximum number of clients the supplier can ever reach directly is 433 because that's the number of Tier 1 and 2 councils in the UK. So lets make one change that enables another. Now the API is using open standards. This in turn opens up a new market, as now suppliers can sell direct to the service user, because they can build in the knowledge that the API won't change. So now they've expanded their market from...

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...