Thursday, March 20, 2025
Great day at the GovTech Summit yesterday! Started off the day with delightful impromptu coffee with Rachel Murphy, James Findlay, and Emilia Hogarth — wonderful to reconnect after so long. Something very lovely (and valuable) about just being in town and bumping into people.
Early talks focussed on themes that have been pretty consistent/familiar over the years - leadership, skills, performance management, funding models, process, etc - but a good bit of disagreement around the acceptance of failure: should ministers openly own up to honourable failures, or is that just politically naïve / therefore never gonna happen?
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Sunday, February 9, 2025
I’ve been using LinkedIn more recently. I’ve been avoiding the algorithms for a few years so it’s interesting to be consuming the output of one again. Some time away has made it much easier to resist the infinite scroll.
For all their disadvantages, the algorithms do sometimes surface interesting things you’d otherwise never see. One of those this week was a service that will automate the writing and publishing of a daily post on LinkedIn for you.
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Wednesday, February 5, 2025
I’ve always been a believer in maintaining a sustainable pace. Many organisations, especially in agency-land, fail to prioritise it, leading to unhappy teams, high staff turnover, and - most critically - missed opportunities to build the institutional knowledge and strong culture of delivery that high-performing teams rely on.
I’ve heard some take a mercenary view, arguing that the cost of burnout can be offset by a strong recruitment function. But I think that stinks.
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Saturday, February 1, 2025
I have a keeping-organised tool that summarises stuff from email, calendars etc to get my day started nicely.
I swapped out gpt-4o for deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-7b running locally and it was… pretty disappointing. I had visions of magically-vanishing OpenAI invoices but alas, I think it’s not to be. Its responses are less useful, much less aligned to the prompt (as in, there’s stuff it just ignores) and with many more hallucinations. Some quite funny, so that’s nice.
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Wednesday, January 29, 2025
I just read the State of Digital Government review published last week. If you’d rather not read the whole thing, here’s a quick GenAI summary.
It’s a good read. It says all the right things, and it’s clear, positive, and generally free of consultantese. It feels grounded in the right kind of culture and thinking.
That said, it’s also a bit frustrating, as the “right things” have been the same for many years.
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Wednesday, January 29, 2025
The “State of Digital Government Review,” published on January 21, 2025, provides a comprehensive assessment of the UK’s public sector digital landscape. Drawing insights from over 500 leaders across 120 public organizations, the review evaluates how effectively digital technology is utilized to deliver services to citizens, communities, and businesses.
Key Findings:
Digital Expenditure and Workforce: The UK public sector invests over £26 billion annually in digital technology and employs nearly 100,000 digital and data professionals.
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Tuesday, January 28, 2025 →
Oh, ChatGPT. Babe. Seriously, we need to talk.
Monday, January 27, 2025
We do need to use it, but the current widespread assumption in organisations that computers will always do what they are told when given a good set of instructions will no longer be true – and that requires a different way of thinking about the services we build.
But we are perhaps helped in this by the fact that the majority of users do not share that mistaken impression, finding that computers do the wrong thing, behave in unexpected ways and make unreasonably complicated demands all the time.
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Monday, January 27, 2025 →
Giving this a go. It seems like a useful thing!