Is it weird for a Council's in-house development team to publicly blog about the things it does? They're only serving internal customers, so what relevance does it have to anyone outside those walls? Isn't it just a waste of time and public resources?
I'm glad you asked those questions... ok, I asked them, but you were thinking them.. weren't you!? So, why bother with any of this? Lets get onto that...
Who are the customers?
Our main customers are the service areas within The Council. Services like Social Care & Health, Planning, Pest Control. They're the ones who tell us what they need to improve the service they deliver to the public.
But wait, where does the money come from which pays our wages, so that we may deliver these wonderful goodies to a service area? The public. So actually our customer, even though we're an internal team, is the public.
However, our customers aren't just the public and our service areas. The information about how we're spending the public's money isn't just useful to them. It's useful to other Councils too!
Blogging is a great platform for sharing ideas, projects and approaches. We're all doing the same thing, so sharing what we're doing can only help improve the quality of service we deliver.
Why are we doing this?
What we're trying to do is expose the brilliant work that these development teams do, previously shrouded in mystery like some military Black Ops team.
We want this to be a two way street. This isn't just about us telling you what's going on... with us. It's about us opening up this doorway and removing the corporate walls, to allow people who wouldn't normaly interact with a Council the opportunity to express their opinions a little less formally, and a lot more technically. We want you to tell us what you think of the things we're doing, right or wrong. We want you to help us shape how services are delivered.
Expect a lot from us over the coming months. We're going to show you what we've been working on, and how it benefits everyone. We'll be going into detail about what we are doing to help improve services delivered, and how we are actively reducing costs.
I hope everyone learns as much from this blog, as we do ourselves.