Halloweeknote

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?