Personal Note: My first blog post for 6 months, due to a number of different factors and events which have made me not feel like it. Time will tell if this marks the return of my blogging habit or is just a flash in the pan. Either way, that’s ok.
There’s a trend this year following a suggestion by Dan Slee for attendees to this year’s UK GovCamp to try and capture 20 insights they gained during the unconference. I was one of those attendees so here is my stab at it. I can’t do 20 but maybe will update the post later to reflect new stuff I remember.
- The Government Digital Service used to be “us”. Now it’s “them”. This is as negative as I can be about it as otherwise they do great stuff.
- Some of the attendees are world-class drinkers. No names, no pack drill, but they know who they are.
- At current growth rates representatives from my particular organisation will constitute the entire attendance of UKGC18. Be very afraid. On the other hand I was really pleased with the reaction of my new colleagues as they threw themselves into contributing, networking and generally having fun.
- We all have a default way of engaging in conversations, which can – if desired – be deliberately subverted, with sometimes profound results. I hope to blog some more about this but suffice to say that I am grateful to Lloyd Davis for showing me the route to that insight.
- After going to this event for 3 years I now have “proper” friends there. This pleases me enormously as I make acquaintances easily but not friends.
- Councils don’t need CRM systems. We only have them because the rest of our systems aren’t properly functional.
- Data Quality is the new rock ‘n’ roll. It’s the foundation on which we will build our future organisations. But currently hardly anyone does it.
- Whenever we dismantle a hierarchy there is an opportunity for a community to take power. We should do this deliberately if possible.
- Communities have business models (in the Business Model Canvas sense) just as a “standard” business function does. Whoever models it first gets the chance to shape its development.
- Customer Development is the primary activity of a community, specifically the testing of a hypothesis. If the hypothesis is shown to be disappointing, the community might fade away unless new hypotheses can be found. Again, more on this and #9 soon.
- You can deploy an IT infrastructure from “box” diagram to functioning cloud implementation in under 15 minutes. But we already knew that.
- There’s a guy who carries a dragon around. This is either a sign of a relatively harmless mental health issue or a very clever exercise in personal branding. If in doubt, suspect the latter.
- I really don’t blog enough. This is my first entry for over 6 months 😦
- I am quite an effective useful idiot for testing the usability of software because I have basic skills in most things, neither clueless or brilliant. Hire me while I’m still in the sweet spot 🙂
- In the 3 years I’ve going I’ve seen it become more diverse. This can only be a good thing. We had a councillor and a social work practitioner this time and both had good input to give.
- I’m conflicted about the 1st day happening on a Friday. The Saturday crowd is, in theory, far more committed and self-selecting but we got a really good buzz off the Friday so maybe I worry needlessly.
That’s it so far. I want to develop some of these things a bit more but not sure if I’ll get the space or time to do it. We’ll see.
Martin Howitt's blog 
On this basis, more blogging soon please!
Your point 6 was right on the money.
I’m interested in #6. I missed that conversation at #ukgc12. Could you expand on that one?
Hi Ben,
this was in Dan Slee’s “Big Ideas” session.
I think that a CRM *system* (as opposed to the discipline or practice of managing customer relationships) as a holding area for customer queries is an example of waste. Cases come in but are only dealt with once they hit the line of business back end system (highways, social care, benefits etc). What we should ideally have (and I accept it is some way off) is for the cases to go straight into those systems.
Joining up our thinking around individual customers, in this model, is a matter for business intelligence/analytics, master data management and messaging rather than for a standalone CRM system.
I hope that makes some kind of sense 🙂
This is very true but I feel we still need a CRM “system”. I believe what is often done wrong is that it is seen as holding master data. The CRM should be a thin layer which orchestrates a particular context (the case) and links to other systems. It’s should be a kind of Meta data layer. I did a blog posting related to this a while back though my thinking has changed a little since then.
Hi Stian
thanks for the comment. I think I agree with you: but are there any actual CRM systems on the market that do that or are we really talking about something else?
I haven’t come across any CRMs that implement this relatively new concept so far. Though Liferay as an example of a social portal comes very close. Its model achieves the ideal that you described: All entities are life cycle managed by their respective line of business backend systems. The portal simply provides a social API that is easily integrated with each one, enabling linking between entities and digests of life cycle activities. What portals don’t have is implementation of concepts such as “case” and “enquiry” typically found in CRMs. But these can easily be added as plug-ins. Also, if the line of business backend systems fully manage the entities relevant to themselves, then this will result in duplication of entity definitions. This pretty much always happens anyway, no matter what approach is taken! So it would be sensible to define an overarching logical data model that can be used to aggregate over the duplicates to facilitate a single view for users.
Expanding on my blog post about personal data stores – in the case of Liferay, a lower level and more generic protocol is supported: OAuth 2.0. This enables the portal to gain access to external (to the portal) resources owned by an individual once the individual has provided consent. The consent can span an arbitrary amount of time and be withdrawn at any time. Facebook and Google implement this protocol and shortly Twitter will too https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/397
Sorry, I didn’t really want to spam your blog post with technical mumble jumble!
What Tom said. More, please. Good sensible voices like yours with things to say should ne cherished. Have you come across #weeklyblogclub on Twitter? You’d love it : )
Ditto point 6!
Vendor did a great sales job though.
Martin, I have to reluctantly agree with you on point 1. There were tons on GDS employees on Friday but no sessions on GDS or directly about the work they’re doing. And they are doing some great stuff but, you know, how about talking to us?
Please elaborate on #11.
There was a demo using MS Azure where someone created a short script to implement a 3-tier web infrastructure. Obviously these are virtual machines and so if you know what you are doing and work from saved templates it can be done relatively quickly.