Can you be outcome focussed when examining an emergent space?

This was a point that was raised yesterday at Open Data Camp. There’s a good outline of the disagreement in this blog: https://www.odcamp.uk/open-data-strategy-campfire/.

In essence, for me this comes back to what I mentioned yesterday – that whatever the “X” is in your “X Strategy” is the product you’re delivering. But, further, if the space you’re exploring is emergent – is in the Genesis space on a map – then it’s almost impossible to say what would be built on top of it. The point I made was that going to the Moon got us a load of extra cool stuff (like Velcro, although I’m not actually sure that’s true) but the US didn’t set up NASA in order to get Velcro.

Equally, setting up GDS has consequently produced the Digital Marketplace, but if you started with the desired outcome of “Save money on government procurement” then I don’t think you’d have got to “Create a new business unit in the Cabinet Office dedicated to digital delivery” as a solution.

The emergent space is, for me, a space where you need a fairly strong-willed leader who’s just going to say “Do this thing, because I am the boss and I would like it done”. This is a very good attitude to have in an emergent space, where it’s mostly gut instinct and lots of bets will lose. Having a strong conviction that X is the right thing to do because of personal belief or political convictions or whatever is helpful in making things happen.

It’s also the worst possible attitude to take in a well-understood space where we have data and vast stores of experience to draw on, because that’s when a more considered approach is absolutely vital. Mavericks are not needed when the product or service moves into the ‘Product/Rental’ space (although of course if there’s not someone in your organisation who’s scanning the horizon and trying out emergent stuff there’s a real danger of stagnation).

If you’re building a product, I think it’s easy to identify the datasets you wish were open. You can map those and then apply tactics to try to open them up:

• You can second a member of staff to the relevant organisation and task them with internal advocacy
• You can advocate from outside, leveraging the learnings of organisations like the Open Data Institute
• You can advocate to the top and ask them to apply downward pressure
• If the data is available but not open – for example trapped in PDFs – you can build it yourself (whether you open it up or keep it for yourself at that point is a business decision)

However, if we’re looking more broadly at a strategy to make more data open, particularly government data, then it kind of depends where you are as to what levers you can pull. I’d maintain that in some spaces opening data is in a Genesis space because it’s so novel. In those spaces stories are not enough, and it may be valuable to have tools available that reduce the barriers to people getting it done.

In the end though I still believe that where Open Data is in Genesis the best thing to do is to try to influence the most senior people and encourage them to demand it. Or, alternatively, become the most senior people for a couple of years.

Be the change you want to see.

November is National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo. I’ll be endeavouring to write one blog post per day in the month of November 2019 – some short and sweet, others long and boring.

I’m at Open Data Camp, and as is my tradition I talked about Wardley Maps. Presented here is a approximation of what I talked about and what we covered.

Last year, when I talked about, there was a lot of discussion around what each category meant in terms of data. This year, I did an incredibly rapid run through of maps and moved quicker to the focus of the session, which was data: how to map it, and how to interpret it.

In general I assume that an “X Strategy” is a strategy about a product or service called X. If X is “Data”, then I expect the point of your strategy to be your data products. And it should probably include all the people and technology and other stuff that ends with the pointy bit of your strategy. If your X is “Improve adult literacy” then data should be in the strategy, but shouldn’t be the point.

Wardley mapping requires you to write down your whole value chain, to the limit of its usefulness. This is subjective, which is good, because only you know your product or service.

Mapping the value chain onto our x-axis of evolution allows us to spot the places where our data is being built ourselves and where we’re consuming it from another team. Where we’re building it ourselves, we should ask whether we need to or if we can get it from somewhere else. If we need to, then it’s an essential part of our business and we should do our absolute best to move that data product to the ‘product’ space, probably even the ‘utility’ space.

With this in mind we talked about a service I was pitched during a recent exercise – a service that users could access that told them whether their local authority recycled the thing they were holding in their hand at that moment. The team had identified two datasets that they’d need.

In the session today, I put both of them squarely in the ‘Genesis’ space. My belief is very firmly that building a service on the basis of data you don’t have yet is…foolish, like planning your family on the basis of a partner you’ve never met and a home that’s not yet been built.

This was a small example, but it spoke to the importance of including data – and how evolved it is – in your product strategy. If it’s not there, it’s worth looking at the levers you’ve got to move the product rightwards. Internal investment and automation are both approaches you can take; opening the data and hoping someone makes it available is another.

We concluded with the reflection that mapping informs strategy, so the more diverse the group of mappers the more effective the strategy will be.

The notes from the session are online: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JcVhQAZFRnFqnyNIHa7zS42bSRZ0gtxZlhw0Kig1a2I/edit?usp=sharing and there’s already a blog: https://www.odcamp.uk/wardley-maps-and-open-data-a-discussion/

I am always nervous when I do these. Not being I’ve got a fear of public speaking, but because the environment is heavily biased towards discussion and I’m basically doing a lecture. I tried to cut back on the lecture this time, but I don’t know if I should stick to my guns a bit more and accept that when exploring things that I know about and the audience doesn’t there’s going to be an element of talk-at rather than talk-with.

I am very grateful as ever to the collection of people who come along and asked bold questions and told me afterwards that they liked it/didn’t understand it.

November is National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo. I’ll be endeavouring to write one blog post per day in the month of November 2019 – some short and sweet, others long and boring.

I saw a musical last night. It’s the first musical I’ve seen in ages, and it was – it was different. It was good, really good, but I was distracted by the way it was different to the last musical I saw. You can’t help but compare these things, I think, because that’s the only frame of reference you’ve got – unless you see musicals every weekend.

I wonder whether comparing things like this is a recipe for upset; for feeling like perhaps there’s always something better or pining for something that you’ve idealised. We don’t really want to re-watch the first musical we ever saw, I think – I think we want to be the person we were when we saw it. There’s no going back, though. There’s no going home.

And there is a certain joy in being able to watch a musical with all the experience you’ve gained since your first. For example – you can see Sweeney Todd and hear the repeated themes of Dies Irae and wind up your friends by pointing out the people who are going to die, because Dies Irae is a musical metaphor for Death. And that’s a cool, albeit completely useless, superpower to have.

And I think it also gives you a bit more – distance, maybe? You can identify styles you like and don’t like; be more thoughtful; pick things you’ve not seen and put less pressure on yourself to enjoy it.

Anyway. Six: The Musical is playing at the Arts Theatre in Leicester Square. The theatre’s tiny and the characters are enormous, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s pure joy inserted directly into your eyes and ears. Go see it.

November is National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo. I’ll be endeavouring to write one blog post per day in the month of November 2019 – some short and sweet, others long and boring.