S2, E12 (Week 05, TSLT blog 07)

[We must be due a prize for keeping this up for 7 weeks?!]

Sorry that this is a later post than usual — a reflection of how busy and back-to-back our diaries can be. It’s important that we make the best use of our time something that Ed has been talking about. We need to get better at the balance between ‘being in the conversation’ and not suffering from meeting overload. It is hard.

Highlights and reflections on the week just gone, key decisions we’ve taken:

• This week has been really busy, receiving and preparing supplier laptops for the forthcoming EUD Pilot. We’ll be working with the pilot users in the coming days — thanks to everyone involved for the continued efforts in driving this project forward!
• Cameron Bye presented details of a security incident to TSLT following an attack on a local government organisation we work with. There was no data breach, and the incident was well managed by the SOC. Please speak with Cameron if you’d like more information, including some of the learning points we’ve captured.
• Recruitment We are pleased to update that we have a new interim Solutions Architect joining us, we will share more details about the successful candidate very soon. Interviews will continue as we have a further opportunity to support with the Future Highways Programme.
• Diversity and inclusion The Solutions Architect advert attracted over 50 applications! Despite our efforts to ensure there was no gender bias in our advert we didn’t have a single female applicant. We need to work much harder at reaching more diverse talent and creating inclusive teams.
• We have said a fond farewell to Ashley Stock this month who has retired from ECC after an impressive 30+ years of service. Many of you will have known Ashley and may have worked with him during his years working in Technology Services but his impressive career also included roles across the organisation including Corporate Finance, Social Care and Education. Farewell Ashley and enjoy your very much deserved retirement!
• We had a discussion with key stakeholders about the benefit of Platforms for Data being sponsored by a business lead within the data profession, rather than TS. Sponsorship will sit with the Policy Director who has responsibility for the data profession and practise within ECC. TS will continue to fully engaged in driving forward this critical programme of work.
• We’ve been preparing for a jeans and jumpers day with our Cabinet and CLT. The session will focus on AI and we’ve lined up some excellent external speakers from Faculty AI, Gartner, the London Office of Technology Innovation, Microsoft, and the University of Essex. It’s looking like it will be a great conversation and there’s already a huge amount of interest. The challenge on this one is going to be avoiding trying to cover all of AI in one half day!

Priorities and focus for the week coming:

• Next week we will be working with our network service procurement consultants 4C on key stakeholder engagement workstreams to cement service / user requirements and our vision for a future network service.
• TSLT have some time with the Technology Programme Leads to discuss progress on our Technology Roadmap.
• The End User Device pilot deployment starts on 5 February. BG01 is being used as a collection point for colleagues on the pilot.
• We believe we have confirmation of rooms for our co-design sessions — just doing a final check and hoping to confirm the co-design date on Monday.
• Ed will be meeting with fellow presenters to the Vine HR managers conference (colleagues from across Essex).

At TSLT this morning we talked about our weekly blog (this weeknote). Please keep giving us feedback — we really value knowing whether it’s worthwhile (or not!) and want to make sure that it’s of use to you. We also agreed that we’d try to include what we’re reading and what we’re watching… when we remember. (We co-edit the note in Word online as you may have worked out from the style changes!) Here are Ed’s reads and watches:

• We’ve loved watching Hijack at ‘casa Garcez’ on Apple TV — Idris Elba is a hero in our house and that alone is reason to watch it.
• In between times I’ve been reading 1984 — it’s an oldie but goodie. I’ve not read it for at least 30 years and am really enjoying reading it again.

Hope you all have a great weekend (and that it stays ☀️)