Weeknotes — 2019 11 22

Week 9 — OurWeek!

You will be pleased to know that I am not even going to mention trains this week… Really I’m not… Nothing…

#OurDay — Tuesday

For those that are not aware OurDay is run by the LGA as a 24 hour social media marathon aimed to give those who work in Public Sector an opportunity to showcase what we do. I was really impressed with the Hounslow response to this. I don’t think there was an area of the Council that didn’t take part!! It also really shows that there is so much to Local Government and what we do.

I was really pleased to see Digital and IT being such an integral part of the twitter feed on Tuesday. It is always too easy to ‘forget’ about back office functions but we really are essential for the running of the Council as was noted on Tuesday.

I even had to get in on the work as well.. With a tweet of Andy and I having a catch up call via Skype — probably one of the strangest selfies i have ever taken… and then having had my 1–2–1 with Clive… I still have the ambition to get #GetCliveOnTwitter trending. At least I have my targets for next year sorted.

Wednesday

We met with procurement to go through the list of current projects, there are a fair few! A mix of infrastructure and business as usual projects as well as wider Council wide projects and we have taken the opportunity to review whether we still want to go ahead with a number of these.

I then met our Amazon account manager. This was really useful as I haven’t worked with AWS before so was good to get an understanding of what we do with them but also I think there could be lots of things that we get involved with over the next year or so across Hounslow.

The afternoon was a IMF Board — which i was very excited to go to but was not as exciting as i thought it was going to be. Apparently nothing to do with the Council’s role in Mission Impossible…All very disappointing…

IMF is actually the Information Management Forum in Hounslow with the aim of ensuring that the Council understand and carries out it’s responsibilities with Information Governance and Management. It had representatives from across the Council and the Data Protection Officer and covered a wide range of topics. Once I got over my initial disappointment it was actually a really good meeting as it is a topic that I am really interested in. A number of things emerging from the meeting that we can improve on things so was a good meeting!

Thursday

I attended a session with Gartner, which was really interesting and was good to get some time out to think about the future and what others industries and sectors are doing.

The afternoon on Thursday was a meeting of the London CIO Council so my peers across London, the main theme of discussion was sharing data with the NHS. There is a One London project with a focus on service users wanting to use data and information better and more joined up across London. There were some great examples from some of the early work of the project. Including the example of a task that used to take 6 weeks to get info — took a couple of hours — freeing up time to spend more with patients.

Tune of the Week: Had to be… Mission Impossible Theme Tune… (remix of course)… Mission: Impossible — Theme (Tiësto Remix)