Weeknote first half of January
16 Jan 2026Bit 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?