19 Dec 2025
A bit of a wrap-up week before the holidays, the highlights were:
- Go no/go decision point for a housing management system
- Housing management system go live
- Conversation about potential application of AI in waste services
- Directorate and Senior Leadership Team meetings (x3)
- Workshopping a cyber resilience exercise
- Xmas meal with my Sutton directorate leadership team
- Catch up with Lambeth colleagues
- Briefing with my Kingston portfolio holder
- Workshop on debt prevention and debt recovery
- Digital and Tech portfolio board
- Chat about digital transformation in parking
We’ll have a bigger team than normal working over the holiday period. Two things responsible for this - going live with a new housing management system and moving 1500ish users to a new virtual desktop solution.
A huge milestone was passed on Monday, with a new housing management system going live. When you start a new role your handover will usually include the careful passing of a hand grenade… this was mine. Replacing a system like this is ‘open heart surgery while running a marathon’. It’s a spicy mix of regulated services, messy legacy data and heritage software. The housing, finance and digital teams have put in a huge effort to get this over the line. The risk of waiting until the New Year was greater than launching now, so we’ll be running hypercare support for the next few weeks.
The Cloud and Platform team are getting stuck into the challenge of providing Microsoft Office applications in a Google and AWS organisation. They’ll be working over the next few weeks to launch on January 1st, not something we were expecting but they’re getting stuck into the challenge - I will stick my head into a few meetings to offer moral support!
We’ve had some thoughtful questions come in from colleagues following the Sutton staff conference. My talk was mostly about service design and boring technology - but a couple of mentions of AI led to questions about trust, safety and environmental impact. It’s wonderful to know that colleagues are thinking hard about these things.
Reading
Empire of AI by Karen Hao. She’s a brilliant writer, so this is hard to put down. It’s a little more corporate intrigue (YC, OpenAI, MSFT, Tesla, Google etc..) than I was expecting, but a good reminder to keep asking ‘in who’s interest is a potential AGI being developed’.
Following a thread from Karen Hao’s book a briefing on the importance of data sovereignty and why the risk of data colonialism is increasing, with specific reference to the Māori in New Zealand.
Dennis Vergne on the history of relational public services, via a post from Simon Parker on why he’ll be spending more time thinking about this next year
Watching
5 years late… caught up on Season 4 of Hip Hop Evolution on Netflix. Wonderful 4 season documentary on all things hip hop in the USA.
Again, late to the party. Des on Netflix with David Tennant as Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilsen.
Grayson Fletcher’s Helion part, watching with my 9 year old on repeat
Listening
Revisionist History with Chino Moreno followed by everything the Deftones ever recorded.
12 Dec 2025
Last week
I missed last week, because I was in the pub on Friday 5th and then the weekend happened.
The highlight of the week was the Sutton Staff Conference, which happened three times because it’s not possible to get everyone in the same room at the same time. The Chief Exec was kind enough to let me speak for 15mins at each one - so a great opportunity to tell stories about our residents raised expectations for digital services and how we might meet them.
I also spoke at Tech UK’s end of year event and shared an optimistic prediction that we’ll start to see more radical service design in local government. The prevailing ‘new public management’ approach to change has run out of road, we can’t efficiency our way out of it this time round.
Briefings with Councillors about an AWS Procurement, planning a business continuity exercise, informal chats about a social care digital platforms change role and the usual weekly management committments filled the gaps.
This week
Less of a singular focus this week, but a stand out highlight with my team’s end of year get together. A few folks put a lot of effort into a very slick presentation of the impact the team have had and planned an excellent (and competitive) quiz.
Kingston’s information security governance board met and the AWS Procurement got through the final committee approval. Lots of great questions from members, who were engaged in both the technical and contractual details.
Joined a recruitment panel for a vacant director role and have closed out the week reviewing audit actions and checking in with the team ahead of a big system go live next week.
Christmas bonus project
As a Google organisation, we still have to consume a number of microsoft services. 11 years after Mike Bracken’s Blog about adopting open standards for document formats in government, we still have line of business systems that cannot function without Microsoft Word and Excel. There are a number of suppliers for whom the request to integrate with Google Workspace or Libre Office has proven an insurmountable challenge. Making things open makes thing better.
The net result of this is the Cloud and Platform team will be working hard over the Christmas period to land some new solutions.
Things I have emailed myself
Just the one this week. Jukesie’s spotify-like round up of his year’s most popular non-job newsletter links
21 Nov 2025
Remembering Casserole
I was reminded of a FutureGov project from 15ish years ago called Casserole. Yesterday I took the opportunity to tell a bit of the story to a group of senior managers, to try and set some context for digital transformation.
Casserole was a local volunteer scheme, supported by a social web platform. It helped people share extra portions of home-cooked food with others in their area who might not be able to cook for themselves. It was collaboratively developed by FutureGov and a few councils around the UK.
The online social network was supported by a matchmaking team and local organisations like care homes, lunch clubs and voluntary organisations. Safeguarding and food hygiene were managed through DBS checks and online food safety quizzes. Social technology was being used to build neighbourhood connections and reduce the demand on traditional meals on wheels services.
At its peak people were sharing 1000’s of meals in the UK and Australia, but it never quite found a sustainable financial model. Smartphones were not quite as ubiquitous, pilot funding didn’t quite run long enough and austerity was really starting to bite - so radical delivery models looked like very risky options.
Fast forward to 2025 and I can use my phone to get any number of foods delivered to my door via Uber Eats and Deliveroo, but we’re still not fully applying everything the technology offers to really challenge our existing operating models. That was my pitch anyway, supported by a healthy dose of nostalgia for a wonderful project that I remain convinced should exist today.
Double the governance, double the fun
A unique feature of a shared service role is navigating large decisions through two organisations. My team has done an excellent job of managing the procurement process for our cloud services infrastructure - the last piece of the puzzle is getting approval at the relevant committees for both councils.
Reading / listening
A few long drives to and from the office this week, so i’ve mostly been listening to Apple in China, The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. A really enjoyable story that has the history of Apple, deep nerdery on industrial and product design, stories of impossible manufacturing challenges and the main narrative of how China’s long term strategic planning used Apple to completely transform its economy.
Things I emailed myself
Katherine Wastell with some hard earned lessons on transformation
Polly Mackenzie on change and bureaucracy really resonated. The link to the three horizons model and how we need to create ‘iconoplastic’ organisations is something a lot of digital teams will recognise - particularly the need to see where rules need to be rewritten and to really hear the defenders of the status quo.
07 Nov 2025
Jevons’ Paradox and Baumol’s Costs Disease
It’s an unusual week when two things I studied in A-Level economics are spotted in the wild. Even more unusual is when they have relevance to the things we’re trying to do in local government digital.
Jevons’ paradox is from The Coal Question published in 1866. Jevons set out a theory that as something gets more efficient, you lower the cost and open up more potential use cases. This drives up demand that exceeds the gains in efficiency.
The tech sector is using this thinking to model future AI revenues - that more efficient models will increase overall demand and generate the revenue to pay for all this capital investment. At a much simpler level, I’ve seen this play out in digital teams. As we introduce reusable platforms, the business case for some of our smaller services becomes easier to make which drives up overall demand. Every time I think our increased efficiency will buy us some breathing room, I am reminded of Jevons book about coal.
The core idea in Baumol’s cost disease is that wages across the economy will rise together and the public and private sector are competing for the same people. In very people driven services (a lot of where the public sector spends its money) you hit some hard limits in the unit cost vs. output equation. A care worker, with all the AI tools in the world, can still only care for so many people in a day.
This is all a very long way of me saying we have to look beyond just cost reduction and efficiency, we need to use design and digital to fundamentally change the whole system. We shouldn’t try to do this alone, structural problems require structural solutions.
What I’ve been doing
We have some procurement decisions working their way through the process. Being a shared service means double governance and double briefings, but it’s a pretty well oiled machine with colleagues doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
Resilience has been a theme of the week. Not personal resilience, but the emergency planning kind of resilience. A half day training session with fellow directors for Sutton Council’s Silver command rota (the folks who will lead the tactical planning and coordination in an emergency), followed by a refresher course ahead of my week on call for Kingston’s Gold command rota (the strategic leadership).
A few boards for things like capital investment, corporate performance management, transformation and risk management. Some quality time with the team too, collaborating with our transformation friends.
The end of a week brought a bit of a challenging issue, but by the time I was back off the school run all that was needed from me was to review some comms explaining to affected users what happened and how it was going to be very quickly sorted out.
Managed to squeeze in a bit of time catching up with some trusted folks in my network too.
Reading
A very rare re-read. But knowing next week I am on call, I went back to the wisdom in Lucy Easthope’s book on emergency planning and recovery - When the Dust Settles
Listening
Three trips from Buckinghamshire to the offices in London this week meant nearly 15 hours in the car, so ploughing my way through 1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, on Audible
Things I’ve emailed myself
Essex County Council’s design and patterns library update on creating usable forms
Dafydd Singleton’s post on user needs for data standards
Phil Rumen’s post on sourcing the stack for local government technolgy (also linked above)
Sean Goedecke’s post on seeing like a software company
The City of Seattle’s AI plan and Policy
31 Oct 2025
It has been almost three months since my last weeknote. Habits are hard to form and easy to break.
I won’t attempt a full recap of the first couple of months in the new role at Kingston and Sutton councils. I’m having a wonderful time, the people are great and the work is incredibly challenging.
Things I have emailed myself
Hannah White and David Eaves paper on GOV.UK Notify is a great case study on doing digital transformation at scale, in bureaucracies, with complex financing and staying user focussed throughout. As a local gov user of Notify in a few organisations, it’s fun to see how the benefit of essentially free SMS services was a key part of their adoption strategy.
A blogpost from back in June by Beth Simone Noveck that I like becuse it’s helpful to read analysis of a thing by people who are smarter than you. Beth’s take on The Agentic State whitepaper is helpful. I am wrestling with questions about how much getting your data perfect matters today, if the promise of agentic AI that can interpret unstructured documents and make light work of messy data, is true.
Model Context Protocol staying on the agentic AI theme, MCP is the open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. It remains a challenge to get access to an API from some of our ‘heritage’ technology providers, how might the local gov supplier ecosystem respond here?
Ayesha Moarif on making product work in public services popped into my feed at a helpful time. Me and the team are spending lots of time with our transformation colleagues, looking at how we focus together on the things that matter most. The public sector is built for programme delivery, which values predictability and managing commitments upwards. We know more adaptive evidence-based work, often from small and long lived teams, can help manage complexity and uncertainty. How do we build this capacity in very stretched organisations having to face off against increasing demand?