Weeknote 19th December
19 Dec 2025A 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.