I spoke to Egle about GOV.UK Notify and the potential for using the service for Housing Associations (It’s currently only available to Government, Local Government and the NHS). At the moment we have a mixture of different notification platforms that are mostly determined by the supplier of each system and whatever integration they want to include. That means managing multiple pots of SMS credits and having limited control over the content and frequency of messaging. Massively thankful to Egle for running me through Notify. Armed with this information, I now need to see what the appetite is for doing the work of integrating Verify into our systems.
Ben Unsworth was kind enough to walk me through the ‘Ways Into Work’ service he’s been working on with Hackney Council. Two really interesting points in particular. 1 — the initial assumption was that they needed a job matching type service, but they quickly realised they’d never compete with the likes of Monster, Indeed, Reed etc. so they doubled down on digitally enabling the advisor staff (which is what the people who use the service really value) to make them even more effective. That’s pretty interesting since the usual perception of ‘digitally enabling’ something often infers removing people from the process. 2 — The advisors for the service were included in designing the product. Because of this, they felt they had ownership over it and even started using the early beta versions of it in their day to day job because it made their lives so much easier and their team happier. Compare that to your average IT system deployment!
I wrote a thing about whether Housing Association’s can refer to tenants as customers, mostly as a way to order my own thoughts on the subject and how I think it influences the design of services. As a side bonus it generated some good constructive debate on Twitter too which really help inform my own views (…and hopefully it was useful to others too).
Last weekend I went to NHS Hackday 19 in Cardiff. I’ve never been to a Hackday before.. and I quickly discovered I knew next to nothing about the inner workings of the NHS, so it was a good opportunity to rapidly learn a lot! Unfortunately I couldn’t commit as much time as I would’ve liked as several competing priorities converged on the same day, so ended up dipping in and out on Saturday. But it did give me the opportunity to wander around and generally have a nose at what people were up to. I’d encourage you to watch the video of the presentations to see the result of people’s hacks. Hugely impressive what can be accomplished in a day and a bit.
