PD Newsletter #90: Meet Emma, our new Managing Director

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

We’re delighted to announce Emma as our new Managing Director. Emma has been an instrumental part of our story, not least in founding this newsletter 90 editions ago! Huge thanks to our previous MD, Andrew, who, following the success of The Radical How, will be leading PD’s global thought leadership.

This week Mike joined the HMRC board as a non-executive director. Ben writes about how we work with governments.

We're hosting Data Bites! Read on for details of our first event on 6 November.

Rosemary and Emma

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👋 Hello from our new MD, Emma

I'm proud to be the new Managing Director at Public Digital. Our brilliant consulting team brings a wealth of deep expertise, experience, and passion for getting things right for our clients (and their users).

User-centred, digital practices and ways of working are at the centre of everything we do, and we consistently receive outstanding feedback from those we collaborate with. I couldn't be prouder to play my part though this next stage in our growth.

This week I'm really proud to see the go-live of the new Government of California webpage. It places accessibility, performance, and readability at the heart of its design, principles developed during our work with the team back in 2020. Congratulations to the CA.gov team!

🍪 Introducing Data Bites

We are thrilled to be hosting the hybrid event series Data Bites. These monthly events originated at the Institute for Government, and highlight the brilliant work done by government and public sector institutions in harnessing data for public good. We will be hosting the series with the fantastic Gavin Freeguard.

Register to attend our first session
When: Wednesday 6 November 18:00 - 19:30 GMT
Where: Online or in person at Broadway House, Westminster.
A recording of the session will be available on our website.

🚀A new UK government: 100 days in

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has convened an advisory panel of experts to help shape the government’s new ‘digital centre’.

➡️ Martha Lane Fox writes about her takeaways from the group’s first meeting, with a commitment to working in the open.
➡️ Panel member Jeni Tennison did a shout-out on Bluesky asking for pointers on a digital centre. She has attracted thoughts from some distinguished voices, helpfully summarised here by Tim Paul.
➡️ Gavin Freeguard proposed a thinktank for digital and data in government.
➡️ In Jeni’s own first reflections on the panel, she praises DSIT for “taking maximising engagement seriously”. While it’s a significant challenge, “this moment is an opportunity to take a breath, reorient, and shape the future.”

Elsewhere:

Ways of working

🔄 This piece on bridging the strategy execution gap mirrors many of the arguments in the Radical How. Organisations often fail to execute because “creating a strategy early on when they know the least results in false assumptions”, and forces leaders to press on with a failing plan. Instead, organisations must adopt “iterative, continuous cycles that rapidly alternate between planning and doing.” Our colleague Lara neatly articulates some of those ways of working in the form of patterns and anti-patterns.

🍩 Our former clients at Sport England write about the dangers of a team donut. Despite working to the model of Emily Webber’s team onion, the success of service delivery projects can be threatened by the emergence of a donut: Too many people involved at a collaborative level (i.e. the donut ring), without enough people in the core delivery team.

😞 Design thinking as a service is having a midlife crisis, according to Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, who laments the lack of pathways for the next generation of designers and the trend of commissioners wanting design to happen ‘over there’. Among her many astute arguments is a call for systems of institutional memory: “Maybe a diary of decisions, reflections, lessons learnt could lead to better commissioning next time.”

🗣️ Some great tips in product manager Dmitry Vorontsov’s lessons from conducting customer interviews. He flags the value of taking a test-and-learn approach to user research: “when analysing your interviews, don’t just summarise the answers—go back to your interview guide and see if it worked the way you intended.”

☠️ Interesting reading on the perils of mis-managerialism, and why organisations focused on adding value do better than the ones focused purely on profit. It’s a take which echoes our colleague Katherine’s post on why business goals must come from user needs, rather than general aspirations of growth.

💵 Lou Downe tells us how to make the business case for service design.

State of technology

⚠️ Extreme weather in the US is acquiring new political dimensions as Musk’s Starlink enables hurricane victims to regain connectivity, ostensibly (but not actually) for free, while Trump takes the credit. Meanwhile Starlink, which controls two thirds of all active satellites, has been sanctioned in Nigeria for hiking up its subscription prices without approval from the country’s regulators. On the subject of Starlink’s figurehead, a day in Elon Musk’s mind makes for some chilling reading.

👁️ Few of us thought Meta’s new Ray Ban smart glasses would change the world. But two Harvard students have shown their alarming potential for misuse by staging a demo in which the glasses were used in conjunction with AI and facial recognition to ‘dox’ people’s identities and details. The implications are dystopian, and bring new meaning to the findings of Careful Industries’ latest report on ‘AI in the street’. Notably: “AI amplifies existing infrastructure and reinforces existing power relations”.

🤨 In more AI news, OpenAI claims the latest ChatGPT o1 can ‘reason’ through ‘Chain of Thought’. Simon Willison gives a technical breakdown of what that means. But asking ChatGPT itself about Chain of Thought appears, suspiciously, to be a violation of its terms of use. So much for working in the open…

🌍 These stories spotlight the dangers of market concentration in technology, and specifically AI. Our partners, the Digital Public Goods Alliance, provide recommendations to the G20 on how AI can be democratised as Digital Public Goods to address those dangers and reap AI’s benefits for the global majority. Likewise, a new report by the UN’s AI advisory body offers a framework for AI governance, but are frameworks enough to tackle the problem?

Digital government

🌟 The UN’s 2024 e-government survey highlights Asia as the fastest growing space in digital government. The top spots are filled by the usual suspects: Denmark, Estonia and Singapore.

🛡️ A new 18F guide to de-risking government technology projects has been published by GSA. This update on the 2020 version offers helpful guidance on how to reduce the risk of project failure at any stage, from budgeting to post award.

🇺🇸 Some fab insights from the first year of FileYourStateTaxes, Code for America’s new tool designed to improve the state taxpayer experience. It's an interesting case study in designing for a service that often prompts stress and confusion in users. Top tips: Use plain language, clarify terms, and provide review opportunities as well as human support.

❓ Should government websites look and feel the same? Matt Lane at Wellington City Council looks at why uniformity in design is hard, and the risks that come with believing it equates to sharing a template. In his words: “I can imagine a world of uniformly-designed bad digital experiences”.

👏 Finally, brilliant work from the UK’s Parliamentary Digital Service on sustaining digital and data transformation in Parliament. Recognising transformation as “something that isn’t ever finished”, the team write about their new mission to make best use of digital, data and information.

Something fun

🎩 The patents applications of 2023 spotlight some very weird UK inventions. Readers suffering from back pain might want to invest in a “Lying Down Desk”.