Weeknote 12th December

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