2024 Weeknote 16

April 15-21

This is my ongoing attempt at producing “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. You can subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

It was a weird week.

I came in from a couple days off for seeing the eclipse, then being away for a conference in DC. Then BAM! I was in 2 days of leadership meetings that culminated in axes being thrown around. Then back to “work” after that.

Leadership meetings

Monday (4/15) was an all-day session to talk about work in progress, work expected to be done through the rest of 2024, and work expected in 2025+ from across the entire leadership team. Well, except me. My list was too long for us to fit in, so we’re discussing it in the coming week.

The general idea is we need to map out work vs. resources and prep for 2025 budgeting (starting now — ugh), which includes asking for headcount where needed.

Budget: woe

Budgeting is made very difficult in our county because customers (agencies) create their budgets in parallel to ours, and we don’t know what technology requests are in their budgets until ours is pretty much done. Adding to that is the complication of elected officials who decide what they want to do long after budgets are set. We’ve had multi-million dollar tech efforts hit us without warning well outside annual budget cycles. It naturally catches us flat-footed. But if you ask for resources in anticipation of a potential workload, you get denied (which isn’t crazy—you don’t want to staff up for work that never materializes).

After 5 years of this, I’m pretty sanguine about it. Truth is, it’s not realistic for just about any organization today to plan their spending 18+ months ahead, except for routine maintenance expenses. We’re all making decisions rapidly based on the latest input or strategic shifts or elections or regulatory changes, and so on. When people say the world moves faster today, it’s not just an idle observation.

Further, I don’t think the agencies and elected officials are wrong to behave in the way they do—making last-minute decisions. I believe the budgeting process itself is out of step with real-world business processes. The right thing to do would be to develop a multi-layered budgeting process with different time horizons for different expense types. You might plan maintenance costs up to 24 months out. But project expenses should probably on time horizons of just 6-9 months. And everyone needs to maintain a healthy “rainy day” fund. Because it rains a lot and our forecasting is not great.

But that’s just my $0.02. I know there are other opinions out there.

Team-building + leadership dev

The second day of all-day meetings (4/16) was half leadership development, half team-building. We used axes for the team building, and shockingly, no blood was spilled! It was actually my first time with the axe-throwing fad that’s been going around the last decade. Not bad.

As for leadership development, I don’t have a lot to share here, as much of that is fairly confidential. Suffice it to say it’s gonna be an interesting few months, seeing how this plays out.

Site re-launch: franklincountyohio.gov

Once back in the office, attention turned to launching our first citizen-centric / services-focused website using the Granicus OpenCities hosted platform.

We announced it on LinkedIn, and I’ll share more notes about it over on the GX Foundry site. But my short hot takes are:

Congratulations to Sarah Gray and Caitlyn Coughlin on a job well-done! Sarah, in particular, has been the fearless leader we needed, with an eye for CX and a public servant’s heart.
The site is really just a sort of “index” or a links collection right now, replacing the prior site at the same address that served the same function, so this really is just Step 1 in a long series of actions that will totally transform the county’s online presence.
The real work wasn’t getting the site launched. It was…
- doing the emotional labor of pulling together the 15 starter agencies in a supportive, but directed way
- collaborating with the vendor
- deciding how to organize the county services represented
Now that we’re launched, we can probably speed up later phases of work, based on what we’ve learned. (But we’re not sure our vendor will be able to keep up.)

Headed to Code for America Summit for the first time, and taking a team

Speaking of digital government services… I and three of our team will be attending the Code for America Summit for the very first time at the end of May. We even registered and booked travel this week. A full four of us flying from Columbus to San Francisco (Oakland), staying in the same hotel, attending the same conference, and flying back—that’s also a first. It should be a great experience, based on the newly-released session details.

One session of note talks about what New York City has been doing with their web presence:

The current NYC.gov experience was built 10 years ago and is modeled around the structure of government rather than residents’ needs. The NYC Digital Service team has been redesigning NYC.gov to move from an agency-first platform to one that serves New Yorkers first.

Uh… that’s what we’re doing! The site launch noted above is in that same vein.

This made me realize our work in the GX Foundry is on point. We’re not leading the industry by any means — we are fast followers. But we’re not as far behind as I felt like we were a couple years back. Government teams at all levels are at different places in their journey. We’re not the first, but we’re also not the last. That’s why we share what we’re learning along the way (and learn from others!).

Hot takes on AI

Overall, I think the generative AI stuff that’s been coming out over the past 18 months has been very interesting. But I don’t see world-changing technology on par with the Internet. So far the tech appears to be autocorrect that’s been handed some syntax processing info, a huge collection of source material (a lot of it illegally), and then set loose when following “prompts” (commands) from users. Interesting, evolutionary, but not world-changing. Yet.

So I am enjoying the increasing number of hot takes on AI that are taking it down a peg or two. The backlash is a trend now — part of the standard Gartner hype cycle, really. Here are just some of my recent faves…