5.9 — weeknotes — end of financial year — knowledge with purpose — cyber in action!!
Fortnight notes this week. Just didn’t have the headspace to do last week. But has been a really good, challenging, hectic but rewarding couple of weeks.
End of financial year for local government always creates a flurry of activity to ensure that everything is in order. We have been forecasting an over spend for a while but the team have been bringing that down over the past couple of months.
Had the London and Southeast region Socitm meeting on Thursday at the Microsoft building in Paddington. Was really good to hear from colleagues around the region on some of the work that they have been doing on all things Digital. The buildings themselves gave me some ideas for our remodelling of Hounslow House as we we are looking at what space we need for the future. So I am not sure the reason or need for a drum kit on a staff floor but one to consider certainly.
Colleagues over the past couple of weeks have been having demonstrations for our tech enabling project, part of the transforming community experience program of work. This is a really critical piece of technology that we need in our ecosystem for us to deliver the transformation.
Friday we had our Hounslow Leadership Group meeting going through the delivery plan and the service planning approach for the next 18 months. For me I think we are in a good place with this as we have been thinking about our own delivery plans for the last few weeks but the critical piece for me is linking up across the organization to understand what other services are planning to enable Digital to be able to plan appropriately.
Into this week… Things are clearly getting back to normal as took a train into London this Tuesday and Wednesday and had to stand both days. Not had to do that for an age. Didn’t like it!
Tuesday was a session with Socitm, LGA and PETRAS at UCL, on cyber security and net zero. Was a great discussion bringing together some great people across the space to help with some of the future work in this area. Petras is a research organisation that has been doing a load of work in the Internet of Things and ethics / cyber space. I’ve been doing a fair bit of work with them recently.
A range of topics discussed and lots of work already taken place in this area. Main things from me was to make it as real as possible and we need to bring some of this alive. Especially as over the past few weeks we have seen a number of cyber events across the sector!
I attended the AWS accelerator impact day on Wednesday with Kings College London. What an amazing day. It was part of their computer science 4 year course and the idea was to give a real life project at the end of that. To say that I was blown away is an understatement. We sponsored one of the groups but I really had t been involved at all so I had no idea what to expect. There were 8 groups who each had a problem to solve using tech. Really was knowledge with a purpose. Great session and already looking forward to being part of next years!
Also makes me reflect that when we talk about social value this is what we really mean.
How is it Easter next week?
Tune of the week: Mimi Webb — Red Flags (Official Music Video)
