27 November 2018
While everyone else was watching that other committee today, I was giving evidence to a less glamorous but equally important committee about digital government alongside Tom Loosemore. The hour long question and answer session covered a wide range of topics from the aspirations behind setting up the Government Digital Service (GDS), to the challenges government […]
14 February 2018
In its early days, GDS published a set of design principles to guide the building of new digital services. These principles were a codified version of a set of practices that had developed during the building of Alphagov and the beta of GOV.UK. The 10th principle says: Make things open: it makes things better Teams […]
10 April 2017
Recently, the National Audit Office (NAO) released a report on the Digital Transformation of government. In it, they devote a section to the approach and results of the government’s control of technology spend. As always happens, the focus is on “savings”. After all, what’s the point of controlling spend if you don’t make savings? People […]
16 August 2015. 1 Comment
It’s been a fortnight of big announcements. Mike has announced he’s leaving. Leisa is going home. Tom, Ben & Russell have decided to move on. We’ve also said goodbye to some others – Andy, Lindsey, Sam and Mark. There’s been lots of noise about what this means for GDS, for ongoing digital transformation, for the […]
9 September 2014. 1 Comment
When you’re deep in the day to day detail of projects, it’s quite easy to lose sight of the big picture. If you’re making lots of small, incremental changes, you can quickly forget what things were like when you started. I’m currently taking a couple of weeks away from my DVLA projects, partly because it’s […]
7 April 2014
View driving record – lots of my focus over the past few weeks has been assisting this team to get to their public beta. It’s been a bit of a testing-fest with load, penetration and data quality testing going on. As the data from the driving records goes though a pretty complicated process to get […]
24 February 2014
Vehicle tax & SORN – the team spent last week tidying things up and running tests with DVLA staff. They then launched the public beta on Thursday last week. Early counts suggest that nearly 5,000 people have taxed/SORNd their cars over the first few days using the beta. The team are now looking at the […]
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 […]