In 2011, I presented a digital strategy to a board of directors in government for the first time. A few years previously, the board had decided to ditch printing things physically and put everything online for download instead. As a result, they expected all following conversations about publishing to be an all or nothing approach. Talking about publishing on social platforms like Facebook, or making …
This is the second in a series of three posts on hype circles around tech innovations. In 2010, if I wanted to commiserate with a public sector colleague about something that had gone wrong, I had a quick riposte. “Cheer up”, I’d say, “it could be worse. Your Director could have got an iPhone for Christmas.” Anyone fighting in the same web (we hadn’t yet …
This is the first of a series of three posts on hype circles around tech innovations. In the early noughties the web was a sterile, text-based world where a custom link style constituted pushing the envelope. Anything beyond this was exotic, desirable and more than a bit profitable. When a former piece of drawing tablet software called Flash stepped up to the plate and looked …
When I was working in the GDS transformation team, one of the questions I got asked often was “why should we spend money and time on user research?”. This case study is the answer I usually gave. I still talk about it today, despite the fact that it dates back to 2014. [With the agreement of all involved, I used the screenshots and details in this …
Of the assessment panel roles, the role of lead assessor for a government service standard assessment is both the most daunting (any difficult questions, everyone looks straight at you) and the least obvious (to be the design assessor, it helps to be a designer; to be a lead assessor, it helps to, um, know a lot about government services). Somewhere back in the mists of …
[Scene: An angry civil servant from a government department confronts me, a civil servant working for GDS.] “It’s ridiculous. The service standard is just an excuse for external organisations to make money out of government. You [pointing at me] should be ashamed of this.” “What’s the problem?” “This is the problem. Every team has to have all of these people in it [brandishes print-out]. You …
We sometimes talk about “bad smells” from digital teams: indications that not all is well. This is a list of the ten most pungent odours I’ve encountered. I wrote this because I hoped that it might help people identify issues and improve things. Please feel free to take this and iterate it; I’d love to know how you used it and improved it. 1. Do …
In my series on Service Design and Language, I’ve tried to offer a few practical suggestions for how we might improve the delivery of services in the languages of Welsh and English. Some of these suggestions are, of course, easier than others. A rough summary would look a bit like this: Stuff that will cost a reasonable but not ridiculous amount of money Where the …
In this series of posts, I’ve tried to outline some of the ways that I think we could improve the provision of public sector digital services in the languages of Welsh and English in Wales. I’m hesitant to go any further than I have done in these posts and aspire to write guidance for a few reasons. The first reason is that good guidance, like …
I’ve always said that if you want to understand priorities about digital in the public sector, it’s simple: follow the money. Where there are many claims and plans and conferences and blog posts and strategies and good things said, the measure of commitment is money. Follow this through, and how you purchase – or procure – digital work shapes how that digital work is delivered. …
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