Week 12: Weird relic from an earlier time
Lots goings on this week, both in micro with the work on my project and in macro with all the wider government stuff.
I’ve been continuing to work with others on understanding data flows and what individual fields mean and are used for.
Am also starting to realise just how much amazing work took place during the pandemic to spin up new services and platforms. Understandably some of this involved tactical solutions, and the job now is to try and unpick the weird relics and re-align on longer-term models.
Data export interfaces
One design job this week was to sketch up a range of possible interfaces to let organisations extract data from the service. This could easily get complicated with lots of options and filters, so the aim is to find the right level of simplicity which could meet the immediate need and be deliverable technically.
It’s not ideal to be enabling flows involving downloading and uploading CSV files, and longer term I’d hope we can meet the reporting and analysis needs in other ways. Tactical solutions.
New energy
The change in government has given an intangible feeling of new energy to the sector.
I watched an internal live broadcast of an intro from the new ministerial team. Big crowd.
Both the Health Secretary and Prime Minister have mentioned openness in their speeches, which is great.
An independent investigation into the NHS has been launched.
Research
I volunteered to observe and take notes in another team’s research session, which was exploring experiences and attitudes of vaccinations in pregnancy.
Always good to get in my recommended dose of research!
Links
A ton of links to share this week:
- Not bad for week one from Public Digital
- Public sector design — time for a reset from Richard Pope
- I’m looking for a man in AI, trust fund, 6 foot, blue eyes from Rachel Coldicutt – a report on Tony Blair’s AI speech
- Who’s responsible for our accountability problem? from Tim Harford
Looking forward to the Euro final. Come on England!