I’m not sure I can stretch myself to writing something every week, so I’m setting myself a slightly less onerous goal of a note every month instead. So - January 2024: work, health, things I’ve read and things I’m thinking about
External Article
O'Reilly: Solving problems with principles
James Stewart and I recently gave a talk at Velocity Conference in Berlin about how to use design principles to solve problems in technology projects
The state of blogging in digital government
Publishing blog posts about the work you’re doing is a great way of making things open. In the early days, GDS was great at this. Working out loud and talking openly about even small changes was normal practice. It was just a thing that happened. Fast forward to 2018 and things are different. Blogs that were once active, now lie dormant – untouched for months.
Archived Post
What I mean when I say "digital transformation"
Changing the relationship between the citizen and the state. Digital transformation is a phrase that gets thrown about a lot in government circles at the moment.
It means different things to different people. This makes it impossible for people to really understand what you mean when you say it.
I’m not the first to write something about this. Simon recently wrote about how the phrase is misused. Matt has also written good things.
Archived Post
Week notes #22-24
The last couple of weeks have been dominated by one topic – infrastructure. As mentioned in my previous week notes, we’ve been designing and building out the production infrastructure for the View Driving Record service at DVLA. Lots of effort has gone into talking to suppliers, designing what we need and spinning it all up.
We’ve been working closely with colleagues from GDS and HMRC who have used similar patterns and who are also in the process of spinning up their infrastructure services.