6.27 — weeknotes — WLA — off for some sunshine…

Mark Lumley
3 min readOct 4, 2024

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As always another busy week. This will be the last one for a couple of weeks as am away getting some ‘winter’ sunshine… Normal service will be resumed from the LGA Conference at the end of October.

TCE Board on Monday, really busy board, loads to get through as there always is, updates on the resident experience programme and where we are on various elements of the work. One of the things we talked about was the communications around the programme and how we are going to bring it alive over the next few weeks and months both internally and externally. Such an important part of this.

I stayed overnight on Monday in the lovely Travelodge so the commute to work was great on Tuesday — not done that for a while. Went for a walk the night before with a colleague to get some steps in and managed to walk through the Borough to Twickenham — was great to see some bits of the Borough I hadn’t seen before and get some steps in. Yes there was a lemonade waiting for us at the end…

Had the monthly Director’s group on Tuesday morning which I volunteered to chair, as the usual chair was off — don’t tell her but I actually quite enjoyed it. Some really good conversations about a variety of things taking place across the Council and some things in the very early planning stages. Lots of focus on budgets at the moment!

Thursday morning I travelled to White City and chaired a West London Alliance (WLA) Digital Place group. We’ve spent a lot of time online talking about various things and I know the team has done a lot from a connectivity viewpoint but this was the first time we’d met face to face together. Was great to have everyone in the room and have some time to chat over a coffee.

Lots of good conversations and trying to get some very practical things moving forward not just in the IoT space but connectivity and some foundational elements as well. We had lunch at Imperial offices, where we are bringing Senior Colleagues from WLA Boroughs to at the end of the month, to hear about the work they are doing and align with some of the WLA work.

Then I had to dash back to Hounslow for the Digital Strategy Board. Again covered a range of things and not enough time as always. Some of the topics included looking at reviewing telephony across the council in terms of how we allocate mobile phones and telephone numbers to colleagues, trying to simplify and standardise!

Nice to get some feedback on the panel session we did at DigiGov last week (although I am sure they say that to everyone ;-) —

The panel received great post event feedback, with multiple respondents quoting it as a highlight of the sessions they attended.

Two days until some sunshine…

Tune of the week: Scouting For Girls — She’s So Lovely

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Mark Lumley
Mark Lumley

Written by Mark Lumley

Director of Digital & IT for the London Borough of Hounslow

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