On ‘the single view of the customer’

“We need a single view of the customer!” Well, no you don’t, and you can’t have one anyway.

‘Single view of the customer’ is one of those easy to trot out phrases that sounds brilliantly simple and impossible to argue with when uttered with confidence. But just the slightest digging under the surface reveals a plethora of issues, whether technology, governance, ethics, data quality, affordability… the list goes on.

If anyone offers to sell you a single view of the customer for anything less than many millions of pounds, and needing at least 5 years to get working, then they are fibbing.

Instead, try bringing together the data you need about a certain type of customer, for a particular use case. All the debtors, for example. Then see if you or your software can spot trends or commonalities in that. You don’t need ALL the customer data to be able to make a difference, and trying to do so will slow you down so much that you’ll end up making no impact at all.

Another little LinkedIn post / rant, which I am saving for posterity here.

📅 Daily Note: July 11, 2025

Digital and mission-driven government: digital, burdens and networks – Richard Pope’s first essay of three looking at how his Platformland thinking “can provide a unifying role in the successful delivery of the government’s missions”.

In the digital age the answer is more subtle: using technology and digital-age design to systematically eliminate ‘administrative burdens’, one by one.

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How is it that I keep seeing these posts where people have made all these cool things with image generation AI, and I only ever get absolutely terrible results?!

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Is it worth bothering with LinkedIn articles any more? Seems easier and more engaging to just whack even longer form content into posts, as long as it fits into the character limit (3,000 or 500 words or so).

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James Plunkett: How to save bureaucracy from itself

I’m struck by how common it is these days to hear people working in government say some version of ‘bureaucracy is broken’, ranging from senior civil servants to political appointees.

These are thoughtful people, so their point isn’t that everything in government is broken. They’re just saying that the problem runs deep — that it’s not enough to try harder, or to run things better, because at least part of the problem relates to the logic by which bureaucracy functions.

If that’s right, what do we do about it? A principle I find helpful is the idea from systems theory that when a system fails we need to work at the level of the problem.

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Tom Loosemore: behind the scenes of the Universal Credit Reset – really interesting podcast episode.

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Content Restrictor WordPress plugin

For a project, I needed a way to easily restrict access to content on a WordPress website on a per user basis.

There’s loads of existing plugins that over complicate this significantly, so I thought I would test Gemini‘s capability at writing WordPress code.

The result is Content Restrictor – and it works very nicely for my needs:

  • Pages and posts have a check box – should this be restricted or not?
  • Each user page now has a section with a list of all the restricted pages, and if checked, that user can view the content, else they get a message
  • The message can be customised in the settings
  • There’s also a short code to display all the restricted pages that the current user has access to
  • Admins accounts bypass the restrictions entirely

If it works for you tool, feel free to grab it from GitHub!

📄 Balancing ambition and caution in LGR

Chatting with Clare this morning about all things digital and local government reorganisation, I came to the conclusion that it really is all a balancing act. The risks of things going wrong are huge, and the importance of being ‘safe and legal’ is vital… but at the same time this is a generational opportunity for positive change and genuine transformation that must not be wasted.

So I think the answer for leaders going into this is: be ambitious, but be aware of the minefield you are working in. Be realistic about what can be achieved in what timescale, but absolutely make sure that at the right points in your roadmap (which ought to span a decade, if we are being honest) radical reform is on the agenda.

A couple of ideas on what that looks like. One of those inflection points is right at the beginning, when the business case is being put together and the design of the new organisation is being thought about. This is a moment for radicalism, for the new council to be infused with digital-age principles: responsive, user-centred, flexible, a positive actor within a wider system, preventative, relational, etc.

Do not, whatever you do, factor in any short term savings around digital and IT – it ain’t happening.

But when planning for day 1, I’d be cautious. Get everyone on the same Microsoft tenancy so you can at least all talk to each other. Having a single finance system will make managing budgets a hell of a lot easier. Make sure the basics of security are in the right place. A single website front end would be nice. I think that’s enough to be getting on with. Extend all the contracts that all the original councils had with existing suppliers – they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Beyond day 1, we can start being radical again. Set out a realistic roadmap for the next 5 years or so, identifying the major service areas for redesign. This cannot, must not, just involve aggregating everyone onto a single system, but is the opportunity for ground up, blank sheet of paper style transformation, with the right technology a key part of making it happen. Don’t take on too much – even with a big team, these could take multiple years to complete.

From that point, iteratively keep circling around, don’t take on too much, manage expectations that real transformation is hard work, takes time, but is worth it. Each service area will be reached, at the right point in time, and until then, services must do the best they can with what they have – it’s worked oki-ish for the last 20 years, it can keep going another 5. Best not to rush, take the time and do it properly.

As I said at the beginning, keep in mind: we have to be ambitious, but those landmines are everywhere. Think about where you are treading, don’t be hasty. This is an amazing opportunity, so let’s not cock it up.

This was originally posted on LinkedIn, saved here for posterity.

📅 Daily Note: June 5, 2025

Really helpful stuff from Jason Kitcat at the Department for Business and Trade on matrix working.

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My general take these days is that the local gov software market isn’t necessarily broken – it’s probably doing what it is supposed to do, i.e. behaving like a market. The issues are symptoms of wider problems, largely lack of capability and capacity on the buy side.

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Ben Unsworth points out that I haven’t installed the free and open source Caffeine on my Mac. How foolish of me.

Have rectified that and will amend the post at some point to include it.

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Ben Holliday on ‘networked responsibility’:

Digital transformation has to be a people movement. And it has to be ‘of the internet’ in the way that it’s networked, open, and has the potential to self-sustain how ideas and solutions work in joined-up ways across systems and layers of government – networked responsibility is the role we all have as individual leaders in making this happen.

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