[belZaah]

Former CTO of a country here. Anything GDS did filled me with deep envy: it was beautiful and made so much sense and I had none of it at my disposal. Then Brexit. I was there in GDS offices a few weeks after the vote and the organization was being dismantled under my very eyes. See, the trick with such endeavors is not what you can drive centrally, it’s what you can make others implement. Reporting to the Man is a good way of creating pressure, but as the current examples in both UK and US show, you can’t sustain that pressure for, say 30 years. Also, centralization neither scales very well nor is democratic as it centralizes control and removes responsibility from the service owners. So how do you have something placed fairly low in the government working horizontally effect meaningful change in other organizations? Have tried it in a few countries, have a few answers and many questions, AMA.

[bythreads]

I've done the same for a multinational with 1000 franchises-like subcompanies - trying to get them to conform to horizontal guidance. It is an impossible task, noone takes it that serious and are focused on imminent kpi and okr's.

My only success has been internal reviews of wcag compliance and the threat of fines if found lacking.

But for non digital design its embarrassingly hard