🍂 In true autumnal mode now in NZ both looking back at what was a relatively good summer weather wise, and planning ahead both in a professional and personal context; exciting times ahead!

The work

🔨 I start and end the month on interview panels for a variety of roles including Senior BAs and an Agile Coach, and we continued our recuitment mahi through the month as I’ve decided to go out for a Technical Product Owner. This role will help shape services, tidying some of our neglected backlogues, and also help us plan effectively, influencing our other business units. I’m really keen to get someone good soon to start that important work.

Accessibility matters

The wider team have been connecting with our Department of Internal Affairs counterparts in preparation for some accessibility reviews across our services. We feel a lot of our services will not tally well, though I’m hoping to use any data out of this exercise to build better cases for funding to address now and into the future.

We do have gaps as an organisation in general UX capabilities, and this is part of that problem.

A technology strategy amidst ‘BAU’

I’ve finished our technology services strategy piece (I will post on that soon separately), and quite happy with it, i think it has come together really well. We are modernising our statistics and data platforms and production and there are opportunities to improve how we collaborate as an organisation, in building solutions that are interoperable, more efficient to scale, and run in the long term.

Through all this, there have been incidents and accidents aplenty this month, pulling us back down to earth! As always, we learn from these things and move forward with that knowledge.

🧱 Lastly, I was involved with an incident response simulation which certainly stimulated a lot of thought, actions in terms of what we need to do in the event of a denial of service, or ransom type attack. It reminds us us of how important our work is in ensuring the data (taonga) we work with is kept secure, safe.

The rest

Interweb interest this month includes:

• 💻 Been reading about the fiasco at Birmingham Council - speaks to issues around closed culture, lack of change awareness, management and planning
• 🎯 Interesting post from Jennifer Pahlka on how Opposite is not a winning strategy; example of duplication in a public service highlighting the need to address inefficiency head on; otherwise we lose money, we lose engagement, and we lose relevance at our peril.
• 🙆‍♂️ Good post on how AI is transforming programming outlining the value and potential of chat base programming as supplementary to skills profiles we need now and into the future. This should be the dominant perception, and not the anxiety of AI ‘taking jobs’ which I still find I’m explaining a lot. Good consideration as we plan our future service line.
• Speaking of AI, my forrays into AI technologies continue. I truly went nerd on it this month, cracking open the terminal on my Macbook Pro for the first time in an ion, running some python against..fantasy football API data saving me a lot of time in analysis.
• I’ll wait and see how things play out - have had experience of AI analysis sometimes getting pretty simple data relationships wrong and undermining the whole exercise.
• Finally, I got a lovely box of tea from one of the team returning from trip back to Sri Lanka.

The play

Ive been watching old westerns at the weekend, sometimes with the kids in tow, including ‘Way Out West’ and ‘The Big Country’; not sure where the nostalgia is coming from tbh but part of our Sunday routine now!

A bit more life in my audio adventures this months including:

• The new Pulp single; something that is both a throwback and incredibly refreshingly new too - brill stuff.

• The latest Bon Iver album - not sure when this came out and it got lost in the mix with me (im horribly out of touch with pop culture these days) - but more a veer back to the early material.

• The new Manic Street Preachers album has some interesting material, notably Nicky Wire on vocal for a couple points to band comfortable in their skin; ‘People Ruin Paintings’ is one of their best.

• Just for fun - a friend put an old ‘band photo’ into an AI angine to produce this five second clip (of course not our music!); it is impressive how it puts this together with so many wonderful (and weird) use cases I’m sure.

Sin e an scéal (that’s the story)😀.

Laters.