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PD Newsletter #16: Teams, technology, and empty chairs

Welcome to the 16th edition of the Public Digital newsletter. This week we're celebrating, as Ben has been named by the RSA as the first Royal Designer for Industry for Service Design. Congratulations Ben!

Drop me a note anytime with feedback or ideas.

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Ways of working


🙌
We know that Internet-era ways of working are a big part of digital delivery. Tom Loosemore and Dafydd Vaughan brought that to life this week. They had a candid (Tom's words) conversation with a UK parliamentary committee.

Here are a couple of clips I thought you might like:You can also check out Dafydd's write up of the themes covered, Diginomica, or ComputerWeekly.

☕️ Or, make a cuppa and watch the whole thing.


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There's no IT department at Starling Bank; it was 'born agile'. Megan Caywood and Martin Dow presented at AWS: reInvent about how Starling built a bank from scratch, starting with multi-disciplinary teams.

The first 13mins (of 54) give a good insight into how an Internet native company can work. Stay longer for more technical depth. Slides.

State of technology


Benedict Evans published his annual State of Tech presentation. Hopefully you've already seen it, through his excellent newsletter.

Why Doctors hate their computers: Some very human stories about how complex, static and big IT systems can have a critical impact on your staff.

Facebook continue to come under scrutiny over their handling of personal data. This week a UK committee assembled international parliamentarians to empty chair Zuckerberg and question his representative, Richard Allen.

New Zealand have banned Huawei from supplying hardware for their 5G network, following a similar move by Australia. Interesting read, which also sets out the influence of China's Belt and Road Initiative in developing countries.

Government news


🦘 The Australian government published a new Digital Transformation Strategy. The consensus is that the direction is positive; however, the similarity to pronouncements in 2013 highlights the impact of the tumult and leadership revolving doors of the last few years.

🇩🇪 This is not a nerd project: In Germany, Angela Merkel set out her ambition for government services to be developed in a user-centred, incremental way. Transcript (translated) | Video (In German)

💰 Here's why policy work must hand in hand with delivery: also in Australia, a policy to block welfare participants buying restricted products on a cashless welfare card has proved difficult to implement.
🎥 What is a platform? In this video, Till Wirth from the UK's Government Digital Service sums it up in 38 seconds.

Till is the Senior Product Manager for GOV.UK Pay. To date, 51 services use GOV.UK Pay, and it has taken 2.14m payments. (See the performance platform for the latest).

Notes from AWS: reInvent 2018


James sets out his highlights (so far) from AWS: reInvent 2018.

Pitch for the future. Amazon unveiled tools for robotics and satellites.

Optimising infrastructure. They continue to optimise for large volumes of data, more devices, and services which work for global organisations that work across regions. Like the other big cloud vendors, they are bringing developer productivity options to machine learning and connected devices.

Fix the basics. The backbone to their announcements are tools which help customers fix the basics: from simplifying networks, getting insight from logs and managing software licenses, to opening up cloud services using some older protocols so it’s easier to move to the cloud.

🚘 And of course, what’s not to love about an excuse to consider a toy autonomous car a business expense!

News from Public Digital


Another jam-packed few weeks at Public Digital. Some highlights:

This week, Ben has been named by the RSA as the first Royal Designer for Industry for Service Design. He set out his thoughts on the PD blog on service design as an industry and a profession.

Mike has been in South America, first in Panama for Red GEALC with Emily and Angie, and then in Brazil.

Angie Kenny, who's been working with us as an advisor over the last few months, has written about the Panama trip with PD and her reflections on Latin America's current situation in digital government. (In Spanish and English, with bonus pictures).
Angie is on brand at Red GEALC.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery is available to buy in print and on Kindle, direct from the publisher, from Amazon, or Book Depository.