20 Feb 2026
This week felt like a compressed version of my first six months. Equal parts trying to deal with unpredictable things and making space for shaping the work that needs to happen. Highlights this week were:
- connecting with a previous colleague who’s leading work to change our social care case management system to meet the demands of client-level data reporting and the families first reforms
- checking in with the team who are replatforming Sutton’s website to LocalGov Drupal
- in person morning with my Sutton peers to talk about budgets and transformation
- a couple of impromptu chats about intranets and why they’re so often failing to meet user or organisational needs
That AI article from last week
Matt Shumer wrote an article that got a pretty significant cut-through. The internet did its thing and divided opinions into:
- An unreliable narrator has created a masterpiece of hype
- The singularity is here, we’re all about to be unemployed
As a professional fence sitter, I fluctuate wildly in opinion as I experiment and think about the implications. The recent advances are impressive, claude cowork feels like magic and the emerging practices for orchestration of multiple agents look like where the future’s headed.
Quickly and cheaply building an application has rarely been the answer to the hard questions in local government. But a direction of travel that sees a commoditisation of agentic tools, that’s interesting and a little bit unnerving.
Tom Loosemore has written a post on the end of friction as a policy lever that gets into the issues we’ve been talking about in the team. Our canary in the coal mine is FOI submissions. We have a small team of diligent and highly skilled people who triage, read and respond to requests. They’ve always been stretched, but have managed a fairly predictable pattern and shape of work. Generative AI is changing this - we’re seeing an increase in volume and complexity. What were previously short and precise requests are now quasi-legal dissertations. It’s not hard to imagine the agentic version of this, where a personal agent chases, escalates, challenges and complains.
We’ve seen versions of this before, with FixMyStreet reducing the friction to report public realm issues - which then bumped into the reality of legacy line of business tooling poorly equipped to handle concepts like status or progress. The platforms improved, integrations were built and feedback loops with residents created. The thing that’s different this time is that it could happen to all services, at the same time - including the less transactional and more complex services that are already experiencing high levels of demand.
If ever there was a time for militant optimism and a drive to rewire the state, it’s now.
Things I emailed myself
Andrew Greenway on cloaking radical change in reassuringly crusty clothes. A really enjoyable read, because you can taste the frustration. Makes a great case for radical organisational change and establishing a Royal Commission on the future of the Civil Service as the way to get there. I don’t think Local Government needs to wait, we’re smaller and could do this to ourselves. CW: Long.
New America with more on how AI can reduce friction and increase demand
Lizzie Hines on some work at the V&A to create an intranet that helps staff get things done.
Watching
The Winter Olympics. I can hear my snowboard calling me from the attic.
06 Feb 2026
Things I emailed myself
The launch of the AI Skills Hub caused a decent amount of snark on social media. I tend towards fairly mild takes online, conscious that there are people behind the work and often a context I am missing. I do think it’s fair to say that this isn’t digital government at its finest - from the use of an org.uk domain to the hostile user experience and accessibility issues. Others with an eye for detail have done more detailed post mortem.
A nice reminder of why, on the whole, the UK is pretty good at this digital government thing in a Tom Loosemore article for the Economics Observatory.
“LinkedIn takes the structure of sharing life updates—births, grief, joy, relationships — and hammers business acronyms straight through the middle of them” made me snort tea out of my nose. Chris Clarke, with the loveliest writing, makes a rallying cry for saying what you mean and refusing the dead language of corporate life.
Like the dead language of linkedin, there’s a particular shape and tone to that stuff that’s generated by LLM’s. Something called mode collapse reduces the diversity of output from LLM’s. A very helpful paper explains all of this and shows how to develop prompts that guide the model to pull from across the probability distribution of its training.
Watching
I binged STEAL on Amazon Prime over a couple of evenings. Really enjoyable and super performance from Sophie Turner as Zara.
Night Manager on iPlayer. All caught up on Season 2. As good as the first season and a lot sexier.
Fallout Season 2 on Prime. This is how you put a video game on TV. Ella Purnell is a wonderful actor. I am negotiating the return of my PS4 from my kids so I can replay Fallout.
Marc Simmons Quip of the Mark special on YouTube. Complete mastery of the one liner.
Reading
Got a copy of David Mitchell’s Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England’s Kings and Queens for my birthday. My internal voice is his voice when I read this, which is fun. Seeing King Cnut written down still makes me laugh.
Preordered Sharon O’Dea’s book Digital Communications at Work, you should too
16 Jan 2026
Bit late, but happy new year.
Enjoyed a couple of weeks off over the Christmas and New Year. First real block of time off since joining the shared service. I was more tired than I thought and my brain appreciated the reset.
My cloud and platform colleagues had to put in a Christmas shift, something I and the organisations we support hugely appreciated. A real testament to small empowered teams, they iterated through some gnarly technical and business solutions to deploy an AWS virtual app streaming service for our users.
My leadership team and I spent a fun day with colleagues from AWS, sharing our plans for the future and looking at how we support services to transform. Always rewarding to shut the laptop and look out beyond the next few weeks - need to keep space to do this more often.
Both councils are starting to form plans and teams for the next phase of transformation. Demand is up, available funding is down (as it has been for the last 15-20 years) so we in Digital and Technology need to be disciplined and align our focus to the things that matter most for the organisations we support.
The NEC housing management system has been in live service for a few weeks and is moving out of hyper care and into application support. Great to see the bold decision to go live rewarded with working software, but lots still to do. The teams are evaluating the next phases of feature development so we can continue to iterate and drive value from this investment.
Joined a show and tell for some great work on debt prevention and recovery. A sharp focus on problems to solve and where the team can see opportunities within individual services and across the organisation
The digital platform team has continued to release new services for reporting abandoned bikes, cancelling waste container orders and paying for citizenship certificates. Another small team working across the organisation releasing value pretty much every week.
Dropped into the data network, a group of about 40 folks who work with data in their roles across the council. Talked through the importance of data beyond analytics and performance reporting - like so many of these talks, it ended up mostly being about service design. Where we’re failing to meet people’s expectations for simple and responsive services, it’s so often because the data that powers the service is available how and when we need it.
One thing I emailed myself this week
Faculty AI caught my attention with an article on why AI hasn’t 100x product development yet follows Simon Wardley’s writing about coevolution of practice. As technology and context evolve, methods that once worked become less effective, and new practices emerge to fit the new reality. We saw this with cloud computing and the move from ITIL to DevOps, then with serverless to FinOps. Something to watch in the application of AI to any context - have you adapted the operating model to the new context that AI allows?
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