Something’s got to give. I’m either going to give this blog up for lost, change it’s focus or pick it up with renewed energy.

I have yet to decide.

In the meantime, I’ve been at it elsewhere. Mainly on the GDS blog, where I’ve posted about:

• the way government has been publishing news and the way it might be done on GOV.UK, called Have I got government news for you?
• the types of people who will make use of corporate information on GOV.UK, called What we know about the users of Inside Government
• analytics for the Inside Government section of GOV.UK since its launch, called Inside Government – traffic, demand and engagement numbers so far

It’s a honour to post there, among some seriously smart and creative people. It’s one of my favourite blogs to read.

I’ve also been posting alongside Neil Williams on Inside Inside Government, which we use to explain new features and ideas for Inside Government. It’s been particularly enjoyable writing for that, I think we’ve got a good style going there and the feedback has been great.

Actually I’ve been a bit lax there too recently. But not to worry, I’m brewing up a couple of tasty announcements.

What an honour it is to have been called up to the small band of product managers at the Government Digital Service.

Wanting to do the absolute best job I can, I jumped at the chance to tag along to Mind the Product 2012, where product managers from around Europe met up to learn how some of the best in the world go about their business.

Of the many pearls of wisdom shared, here is what stuck with me since…

Where a product manager sits
First up was Martin Eriksson who, as one of the organisers, welcomed us and then pulled up a slide to explain where product management sits in an organisation…

So there you have it, product management is the intersection between business, technology and user experience.

And with that wrapped up, it was time to go home.

Not really… throughout the rest of the day we would hear how behind that handy, simple diagram is a complex, tough and hugely rewarding discipline.

A heightened sense of purpose
The opening speaker was one Marty Cagan, a man well-placed to explain what’s involved in industry-defining products having seen a few in his 30 years at the likes of HP, Netscape and ebay.

What stood out most in Marty’s talk was his strongly held view that good product managers need to have a heightened sense of purpose. And that purpose is to create products that people love to use.

Again, it seems very simple but in the rest of his talk, while trying to reassure us that we were capable, Marty was also open about the sheer hard graft, sharp thinking and courageous risk-taking that would be required if we were to achieve this purpose.

So how is it done? How does this product management thing play out day-to-day?

Materials that move at the speed of thought
Tom Chi is a maker clearly at the top of his product management game. Most recently he’s been leading a Google X team to bring augmented reality glasses to market as part of Project Glass.

He wowed us with swashbuckling tales of rapid prototyping Google X style, starting by asking everyone to guess how long it took to produce the first working version of Project Glass. 4 to 5 years? 4 months? 5 days? Try 45 minutes!

How did they do it? By believing that they could, by thinking big but starting simply with minimum functions and raw components. And nothing can be simpler than coat hangers and modelling clay – yes, these were the ‘materials that move at the speed of thought’ Chi and his team employed to prove that the vision could be a product and to then move through the iterations that would eventually lead to a patented design and maybe one day soon a product on your face.

Tom Chi’s was my favourite talk at #mtpcon. It was quite simply exciting and fun and made product management feel full of potential.

I loved the way he talked about ‘constellating’ the results of iteration to ensure that you are truly discovering the best possible product. I also appreciated his dogma squashing skills when he had the whole audience applauding and nodding at his ‘don’t fail. learn.’ correction.

Oh, and he introduced us to the concept of π-shaped people.

Good turns
There were plenty of other good turns over the course of the conference from product managers who work with music, games and even the future.

Listening to them, I came to realise that product management wasn’t just applicable to websites and software; the discipline’s focus on users, return on investment and innovation made it highly relevant to a range of sectors.

Product management of critical national infrastructure
I’ll give the last word to Tom Loosemore, one of my bosses at the Government Digital Service. Tom’s words at the lectern have had an effect on me more than once over the years but his Mind the Product talk was especially galvanising coming as it did just a few weeks before our big launch of GOV.UK.

He explained how applying the methods of product management was one of the major step-changes being made to digital  in government. He spoke of how product management, like the use of open source, is vital to the delivery of a new shared web platform for all of government and a radically improved user experience to boot within an ambitiously tight timeline and an incredibly small budget. Ambitious but entirely probable because of the methods we were using and because of the people GDS had hired, people with attitude, the right attitude. No pressure then.

As Tom spoke, I could see my peers logging into the beta, I watched them nod approvingly as they engaged with the site and with what Tom was saying. As I sat there at the back listening to Tom talk about the importance of product management to the programme we are involved in, I started not to feel the pressure but the belief that I could deliver as part of a team of product managers who are working with a breathtakingly, refreshingly talented team of designers and developers united by a desire to deliver a piece of critical national infrastructure that citizens don’t just use but that they appreciate.

Time will tell whether we are successful. But what I learned at Mind the Product – from all the fantastic insights and examples that have delivered on their promise – is that by adopting product management we are doing something right and proper. It’s something I strongly believe in and that I am proud to be a part of.

It’s an overdue refresh. I actually transferred to the Cabinet Office and the Government Digital Service in December 2011, but I saw out the remainder of my two-year secondment to FCO which. But now I am full time at GDS and loving it.

There’s a proper, serious start-up culture here; it’s an atmosphere I’ve been craving to work in. Everyday feels like a mission to shake things up and everyone is pulling in the same direction with the aim of radically and rapidly changing the way Her Majesty’s Government thinks and does digital. 

I’ve blogged here previously about the work I’m involved in at GDS. You can also read a recent post I published on the GDS blog about the evaluation of the Inside government beta. It’s part of a triptych that starts with Neil Williams on why we did it http://goo.gl/UF4Eb, followed by Peter Herlihy on how we did it http://goo.gl/KyX48 and ends with me on what the results were http://t.co/yCeX1Vev.

I’m specialising on monitoring and evaluation for the product development team, which is something that I’ve always enjoyed wherever I can but I’m now getting to focus on it in the midst of some serious design and development talent. Everyday I’m amazed by the people around me and I’m already feeling the benefit of being driven on by my colleagues to work ‘simpler, clearer and faster’ (which has been the mission statement for Gov.uk).

This is easily the most innovative, technical and principled environment I’ve worked in. It’s the most trusting, respectful and demanding team I’ve ever worked in. So, so far so good.

And the ‘big move back’ bit? Well, almost ten years ago I moved down to London to start a job based on Kingsway and now installed in GDS’ Aviation House HQ, I find myself back where it all began.

I’ve been working on Whitehall for the last two years, which was very cool. But in a weird way, being right at the heart of government made me feel totally out of it. Whereas back here, at the intersection of the West and East ends of London, under the Plane trees, next to Covent Garden and up the road from the LSE and Somerset House, it feels like I’m bang in the thick of the world and discovering London again.

‘Golden hours’ by Saddo

‘The Golden Hours’ is a show about two different visions on time, memories and death by artists Aitch and Saddo.

This is a piece (or a group of pieces) from that show. I love the mish-mash mythological styles, especially the colouring, in Saddo’s work.

Check out the rest of the pieces from the show on Saddo’s Flickr page. And here’s a write up.

Foreign Secretary William Hague answering questions on the situation in Libya and also on the Arab Spring on 9 June 2011 via Twitter

We’re not short of social media strategies in the government, neither are we short of social media guidelines for staff. But we are short of ICT access and on more than one occasion these social media projects have hit this same frustrating [fire]wall.

Organisations restrict access to social media for a number of reasons. The most common are concerns about creating security vulnerabilities, incurring spiralling technology costs, opening up reputational risks, losing sensitive data and suffering dips in staff performance (as they log on to watch the latest hilarious random video lulz).

It’s obvious that governments are particularly sensitive to these concerns and that this has caused them to be slower than other organisations to take advantage of social media. These days this lethargy is a problem for more than just digital teams; increasingly its policy and service delivery teams that are feeling frustrated by the blocks on their access.

Currently it is more common for access to be restricted than open. But there are a number of ways that the innovative people of the Civil Service have found ways to get the access they need -  be they in media, marketing, research, policy making, consultation, engagement, service delivery or even ministerial roles. These workarounds include:

• Allowing staff to use their own devices – they would have it on them anyway but it does mean that they have to pay for it out their own pocket
• Whitelisting domains – sometimes it is the stripped back mobile versions rather than the ‘full fat’ versions that get the OK
• Permitting access through gateways, portals or virtualisation – it’s overcomplicating but it’s something
• Monitoring and throttling usage – to encourage respectful use and keep costs down but breeds resentment
• Requiring a business case – perhaps a bit over the top just to get real time information
• Providing standalone machines – not terribly green or cost effective
• Installing secondary browsers – to enable use of social web channels that couldn’t be accessed on the old browsers used as standard in depts

Providing IT access is a balancing act that the UK government is looking to address decisively and consistently across its departments by implementing action 19 in the Government ICT strategy. And soon the Home Office and GDS will issuing instruction and advice to departments on how they can overcome the infrastructure challenges and provide greater  to the open web, if if not the total free access which has to be the ultimate aspiration based on presumed competence and trust.

Providing all government bodies take this seriously – and who would want to be left behind – this could be one of the most significant developments in government’s use of digital.

GOV.UK 100 days signed sign by @psd

On February 28th the hangar door of Aviation House opened and gov.UK/government took it’s maiden flight. It might not be up there with what happened at Kitty Hawk in 1903, but this will go down as a decisive event in the way government publishes and engages – digitally or otherwise.

Inside government is the second part of the GovUK beta to go live and although in the history books it will all rightly be discussed as one and same, for me at this stage in the development /government is the most radical and exciting part.

Your best guide to the project and the site is Neil Williams, the gov.uk/government product manager. But before I lose you to him, you might spare me just a couple of minutes to share an unofficial insider’s view (someone who has worked with, for and now in digital teams in the government; a hard-boiled sceptic, now convinced through first-hand experience of the gov.UK project)

So here are five reasons why I think the release of the Inside government beta is a watershed moment:

1. A site without precedent
The first  bit of Gov.uk to be released [on February 29th] provides service information and transactions. It does it superbly well and in genuinely innovative ways but it is built on the foundations of on an existing product -  Directgov.

/government, on the other hand, has no precedent on the HMG digital estate. Or looking at it another way, /government has hundreds of competing precedents in the corporate websites of central departments and agencies. Bringing these long-standing domains together on one platform for the first time – even in this limited beta – is a minor miracle.

Martha Lane Fox and Francis Maude wanted a ‘revolution, not evolution‘, semantics perhaps but what they wanted to be able to do is point to an instant when everything changed and would never go back to the way it was (with the ultimate aim to make massive cost savings while delivering a vastly optimised user experience).

I think that with /government GDS has demonstrated what was previously thought impossible and delivered not just one but four revolutions (or evolutionary steps), which are…

2. In-house build
In recent memory, nothing this big and webby has been built in government offices by government employees. Government digital teams have rarely if ever comprised so many disciplines or been as technical or as creative (in the strictest professional senses) as that behind the /government beta.

We tried to staff the exercise with as many owned, borrowed our stolen civil servants as we could, only stepping out to the private sector with very specific, time-bound requirements. We did it. We managed a build to time, to budget and to expectation on largely our own steam. And we’ve been able to develop and keep the experience in the Civil Service network to be reused.

As I’ve said, we did bring in outside help, in the form of the brilliant Go Freerange (who were teachers as well as team members). But the production was delivered collaboratively rather than in the traditional approach of running a tender for an agency to ‘work in partnership’ with but then paying them to go away build something and come back with a finished product 3 months later that hopefully meets our expectations bang on but most likely falls short.

You’d have to ask them, but I think the supplier in this case enjoyed working alongside their client, they knew what they were being asked to deliver, took pride in that contribution, and then handed over knowing that the product would be nurtured and developed further by the client and other parties.

3. Additive manufacturing of a CMS
Everything GDS produces is driven by user need, framed by Agile principles and built using dynamic development methods. That in itself is not so terribly remarkable.

But developing  in this manner enabled us to produce publishing software based only on the minimum of what is commonly needed across all the participating departments. The result of this additive rather than reductive process was a customised, lean and very cheap ‘content management system’ that is easy to understand and add to.

Previously, for a site of this nature we would have licensed generic proprietary software and then tried to retrofit it to our purposes with the obvious inefficiencies.

4. Collaborative editorial processes
With Inside government departments are sharing the same corporate digital space and working from the same style guides and editorial model for the first time. For the first time they are being asked to think not just as discrete publishers but as a cooperative. They are forcing themselves to think about what they are uploading with the others in mind, they have to think about the relevance and associations with the others.

There has always been this thinking in principle but this project forces it as a practice. So rather than say the same thing six times, we might collaborate on it and say it once with six times the impact.

5. Testing and developing in public
In the past a site like this would be launched into the public domain as a ‘polished’ product with hype and plenty ta-daa. But Gov.uk/government is different; it has been launched in beta (sections of it are arguably even in alpha). This is not the product, it is the prototype and it is being opened up at this stage to get feedback, criticism and ideas about the proposition and the product from the very people we hope will come to be its regular user base.

So before we bring it in for review and a service on April 11th, have a look, a click around, a read and a think. The feedback routes are open and we are eagerly waiting to hear and discuss ideas, bugs, praise and complaints.

The five factors might be quite subtle but they are nonetheless substantial. When Inside government launches for real, it will have evolved beyond recognition but regardless of what it looks like, how it functions or what content it holds, the way in which government develops its digital products will never be the same again because of the influence of this beta.

When a ye olde colleague emailed me with the strange question, ‘Are you dead?’ I replied, ’No, I’m a dad’.

He was asking because I hadn’t blogged since Pixie Lott was number one, and he was disappointed because he found my blog had been one good way to keep up on digital in government.

I told him that it was simply that I now had additional responsibilities at home in the form of a bouncing baby boy. And, when Ben was taking a break from bouncing to finally go to sleep, blogging was really quite far from my thoughts.

Still, if I was going to take his flattery I also had to take his point and get posting – check – even if I’m slightly cheating by riffing on what I emailed back to him in the form of four recommendations for blogs that cover central government’s use of digital.

I picked my recommendations based on the fact that I like reading them and they have posted regularly through the year offering genuinely unique insights. So well done them.

1. Stephen Hale / Health Conversations

First up, Stephen Hale, who goes about his business in an understated manner that belies his creativity and industry. A seasoned blogger from his days at the FCO, Stephen’s using blogging at the Department of Health to account for his work there turning around that department’s digital fortunes. But as well as blogging about matters close to home, he’s also using his experience and contacts to spotlight and comment on important developments across his profession.

2. GDS / Government Digital Service

If you only read one blog about HMG on the web it should be the ‘boss blog’ from the Government Digital Service. Corporate blogs from the HQ can sometimes ring hollow but not this one. It’s mainly down to the cast which includes Mike Bracken (Executive Director of Digital), James Stewart (Tech lead at GDS) and Neil Williams (who’s been quiet on his own blog to blog here). What a line up. This is where you have go for the inside line on what HMG is thinking and doing in the digital space across engagement, service delivery and the single government domain.

3. Simon Dickson / Puffbox

A man who knows his gov webbie stuff and isn’t backward in commenting on yours, Simon Dickson can divide opinion but is fairly consistent in his own. He’s considered in his views and often first to break a development, he keeps the debate chugging along like only a critical friend can. Don’t get him started on WordPress, though; he can’t stand it.

4. Stefan Czerniawski / Public Strategist

Pubstrat we call him because Czerniawski is a bit more difficult. Stefan is the Clydesdale of the blogging workhorses paraded here for you today. He does the heavy hauling; he’s got the patience and the nerve to tackle the detail of digital service delivery. His blogs help step you into debates that you might have otherwise feared to tread on, and suggests super sharp angles from which to consider them.

Of course, if blogs aren’t your thing then there’s always Twitter. Either way there’s no excuse for not knowing what’s going down on the hot desks of Whitehall.

'Untitled #20' by Filip Dujardin

This is my favourite from a series called ‘Fictions’ by digital artist, Filip Dujardin.

His architectural creations are from a parallel dystopia. Unemcumbered by the laws of architecture, he has constructed completely original building dimensions and layouts, which are nonetheless distrurbingly familiar.

You can tour the rest of ‘Fictions’ at www.filipdujardin.be.

'A day in the life' by Dan Hipp

As a hooj fan of Indiana Jones and illustration this cartoon just makes me smile and smile.

Dan Hipp is an amazing talent who mashes up zombies with TinTin and Star Wars through to Super Mario Bros. and back again. Love it!

I put in on a #FF0080 background to bring out the colours.

'On the platform, reading' by moriza

People still read, right?

‘The Measured Life’ by Emily Singer in Technology Review

Whether it is to get fitter, better or just to have a go at hacking the human condition, people are beginning to turn ’big data’ technologies on their sleep, diets and productivity. Athletes and sufferers of certain medical conditions have been at it for years, but evidently the ‘quantified self’ is going mainstream and it’s bound to be big business.

‘BBC World Service Language Websites: user experience and typography’ by Kutlu Canlioglu on BBC Internet Blog

The FCO publishes in 50+ languages on our platform and in 20+ languages on the social web. We know a thing or two about multi-lingual publishing. But there is still an awful lot we can learn from the way the BBC Worldservice approaches publishing its non-English websites. What I find impressive is the way the Worldservice provides custom editorial in so many languages yet maintains consistency in user journeys and page layouts. This blog post is about how they do it.

‘British Attitudes Towards the UK’s International Priorities’ by Robin Niblett for Chatham House and YouGov

This is the second survey of British attitudes towards the UK’s international priorities that Chatham House has developed with YouGov. The survey examined the attitudes of two groups – the first a representative sample of GB adults, and the second a group of ‘opinion-formers’. The differences between the two are fascinating but what is truly revealing are the discontinuities in the public’s thinking about foreign policy. The ultimate conclusion, for me, is that there is a lot of communication and engagement that needs to get a lot better.