PD Newsletter #25: What Hertz the most

Welcome to the Public Digital newsletter. Our big news this week: we have 11 new affiliates, expanding our network around the world. Meet Annette, Heidi, Matt, Paula, Pascale, Andrew, Arthi, Catherine, Dave, Kalbir & Lawrence.

👋Before we get onto internet era ways of working, hello and welcome to everyone who joined us via Tom’s guest edit of Exponential View.

Emma
@egawen

🚀 Forwarded this email? Sign-up.

State of technology

💥🚗
Compare and contrast: Domino's is a company that understands that it's not just in the pizza business, it's in the pizza delivery business. That means it has to be great at shipping online products and services, and it has to keep up with not just what consumers eat, but how they buy. And with the best practices of modern, technology enabled logistics. Of the 800 people that work at Domino's HQ, half work in software and analytics. This didn't happen by accident.

Meanwhile, Hertz is still in the business of car hire. In early 2016, they set out on a project to redevelop Hertz.com and a suite of mobile applications, handing over all the work to out an outsourced provider, Accenture. $32 million spent, 3 years of work, nothing launched, one lawsuit.

It is worth your time to read the whole 16 page lawsuit. If not, Dave Guarino has an excellent break down of some of the things that may have gone wrong.
Accenture has clearly not covered themselves in glory, but Hertz outsourced it's team, tried to outsource all it's risk, and lost. As Jeremy Bowers put it: "You can hire and build a hell of a tech team with $32 million."
🎵
Rapid adoption of smart speakers is opening up new markets and product possibilities for using voice technology. Here's a guide on what some (mostly US) companies are doing with voice technology.

For an alternative view, I enjoyed this A16Z podcast on how education start-ups in China are using voice and machine learning through mobile apps to offer education in languages and music in a completely different way: starting from mobile first.

🚪
It would be remiss not to mention Huawei, since the topic of plans to allow Huawei to help build the UK's 5G network is the cause of the the latest Ministerial sacking in the UK.

There's a useful podcast primer on Huawei in Public Digital #22, including an explanation on why it's not so easy as switching to another supplier. With points for headline puns, Michael Brunton-Spall talks more on the complexities of the situation and some of the real risks in how we use cloud (in his excellent cyber focused newsletter).

Ways of working

👣
A guide from McKinsey on how companies can help midlevel managers navigate agile transformations. Identifies a very real problem, but gets a bit soggy in its solutions. Sometimes, sadly, some midlevel managers just have to leave.

🎓
Abhi Nemani is publishing a series of lecture slides from his Civic Technology Course at the University of Chicago (10 so far, with 10 more to come). Includes lots of examples of interesting civic tech services, and a good reading list.

💰
Some practical tips from Anna Shipman, Tech Director of the Financial Times, about making the most out of meeting vendors. Hertz could have done with a bit of this, rather than an "impressive, one-day presentation."

🖥
A guide to building a list of your services. This is useful step for any organisation that doesn't have a clear hold on the answer, and this is helpful on how to decide what to include. A minor quibble: I'd like to see advice about gathering quantitative data on there too, particularly costs and volumes.

Governments doing good things

👏 The Argentinian government have won a 2019 Webby Award for Chat Crecer, a virtual assistant for pregnancy and early childhood. Worth a look for anyone developing or interested in development of digital services around life events.

18F celebrates 5 years 🎉. this thoughtful post celebrates their successes and describes how their approach has evolved from early blazing a trail through delivery, to helping partners uncover teams, skills and processes.

While on the subject on 18F Founders, in Ontario the government has published a new digital plan as part of the 2019 Budget, that includes the Simpler, Faster, Better Services Act. It's a clear signal of how seriously the government is taking digital, from the top. Congrats Hillary Hartley and team 🙌.

If you're interested in the state of digital in Australia, look no further than this report by the Australian Digital Council, which looks at data and digital government initiatives across Australia. Comprehensive and current, one to read at your leisure as it's a 74 page PDF.

PD affiliate Heidi Uchiyama (left) working with users in Peru. Photo taken by Luis Miguel Hadzich.

News from Public Digital

Emily and Ben will be at the Transform Africa Summit is in Kigali, Rwanda from 14-17 May.

We'll also be at the Open Government Partnership Summit in Ottawa, Canada from 29-31 May.

and finally, welcome again to our 11 new affiliates: read Ali's post about them.