GovTech Summit 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 …

AI, the journey, and the destination: 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 …

Sustainable pace as a design constraint: 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 …

Hot Take: The Deepseek model is having a little hype curve all its own. : 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 …

The State of Digital Government Review: It's the right ideas, again (and again): 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 …

A short GenAI summary of the State of Digital Government Review, 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 …

Oh, ChatGPT. Babe. Seriously, we need to talk.

AI is useful, but not yet as useful as people think, and it's hard: 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 …

Giving this a go. It seems like a useful thing!