17 October 2013. 1 Comment
A year ago today two of the government’s biggest websites, Directgov and Business Link, were switched off and GOV.UK became the official site for information and services. The last 12 months have flown by. It’s interesting to see how much the site has changed over the year as it continues to develop. It’s now the […]
13 October 2013
The last couple of weeks have been dominated by one topic – infrastructure. As mentioned in my previous week notes, we’ve been designing and building out the production infrastructure for the View Driving Record service at DVLA. Lots of effort has gone into talking to suppliers, designing what we need and spinning it all up. […]
23 September 2013. 4 Comments
I’ve neglected my week notes for a little while so here is a condensed update covering week 16 to 21. Part of the reason for the lack of notes is that I took a couple of weeks off towards the end of August. I tried to avoid using my computer during these weeks and completely […]
12 August 2013
It’s been another busy few weeks. Our big focus over these few weeks has been making sure absolutely everything we have to do before our public beta is included in our backlog. We’ve spent quite a bit of time with the dev team and lots of people at DVLA teasing out missing stories, converting ‘documents’ […]
22 July 2013
Some belated notes from last week. The week started off with a very quiet few days in Swansea. Lots of people were away for various reasons so, for me, it was pretty unproductive. I did however get to spend some more time with the contract team and see the latest show & tell from the […]
14 July 2013
At the beginning of the week I took part in a workshop to look at abolishing the Counterpart Driving Licence (the piece of paper that comes with the plastic card). The counterpart contains additional information such as what you can drive (entitlements) and penalty points / disqualifications (endorsements). It’s seen to be a fairly important […]
6 July 2013
After a couple of very busy weeks things are starting to calm down and return to normal. I spent more time on Monday with some of the team working on the DVLA IT transformation. We’re looking at ways to strangle down the complex legacy IT estate to make it simpler to maintain and to make […]
4 July 2013. 1 Comment
Yesterday (3rd July 2013) I have a talk about Digital by Default at Civil Service Live (an annual conference for civil servants) in Bristol. There was quite a bit of interest in the talk (the venue we had was packed), so I thought it would be useful if I replicated the talk online and provide […]
30 June 2013
After the last few manic weeks, this week was a chance to slow down a bit and take stock of everything that has been going on. On Monday I and a bunch of technical colleagues met with the DVLA team leading on their ICT contract let (a piece of work to split up their existing […]
24 June 2013
A little late this week. On Monday I got to spend a day visiting the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA) in Bristol. Amongst other things, VOSA look after the MOT service. They’ve got a small internal development team and some SMEs working on various internal tools and an alpha of a potential future MOT […]