Category: Blog Archive

Digital transformation is a phrase that gets thrown about a lot in government circles at the moment.

It means different things to different people. This makes it impossible for people to really understand what you mean when you say it.

I’m not the first to write something about this. Simon recently wrote about how the phrase is misused. Matt has also written good things.

A few weeks ago was my fifth anniversary at the Government Digital Service.

I’ve had the opportunity to work on a huge number of important projects in various roles including software developer, technical lead, product owner, delivery manager, troubleshooter and technical architect.

From building GOV.UK to travelling to DVLA in Swansea every week creating new digital services. From rebuilding a service that takes billions of pounds in payments in just a few weeks to bringing IT back in house after 30 years of outsourcing. From sitting on the technology spend control board to hiring hundreds of skilled people into government.

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 future of IT in government.

If I said this hasn’t all been unnerving and concerning, I’d be lying. I’ve spent a lot of time this week wondering what this means for me. Is it time for me to move on – do something new?

Last week I spent a day in Manchester with my team’s user researcher. She’s visiting people all over the country to help us better understand how people interact with government services.

Taking part in research like this gives you a great opportunity to meet people outside of your normal circle. As a civil servant, I spend most of my time with people who have an interest in and understanding of how government works. As a developer, I spend most of my time with people who are confident using technology. Many of my friends have scientific, engineering or legal backgrounds. All of these give unrealistic expectations of how people cope with the real world situations we inflict upon them.

January is usually a fairly quiet month. It normally takes people a while to get back into things following the Christmas break.

This year however, everything seemed to have hit the ground running. Lots of projects have moved forward quickly and it looks like the first half of this year is going to be rather productive.

This month the first phase of DVLA’s Vehicle Management service has moved to a public beta. Motor dealers can now notify DVLA that they’ve bought a vehicle online without having to return the paper V5C document. This will automatically update DVLA’s records, refund any vehicle tax due to the original keeper and cancel a vehicle tax direct debit if it’s set up.

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 long overdue, but partly because I’ve done just that.

I’ve been feeling pretty demotivated and frustrated at the lack of progress in some parts. But, of course, none of that’s really true. There’s been plenty of progress, I’ve just lost sight of it.

This afternoon, one of the projects I’ve been working on in Swansea launched into public beta.

For the past 3 months, I’ve been working with a small team at the DVLA to look at how we can make the process of buying tax for your car online simpler.

Taxing a car online isn’t exactly new – the existing service launched in 2006 and 54% of cars are already taxed this way.

What we’ve done is take the existing service and look at where we can make the process simpler. We’ve removed steps that were no longer necessary, stripped back the screens to make it clear and made look more like GOV.UK.

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 home to 75 government departments and agencies who are publishing announcements, policies, publications, consultations, statistics and blogs on over 45 different topics. It’s publishing information and statistics on government transactions including how many people are applying for a Lasting Power of Attorney each week, the things that stop people applying for car tax online, and the digital take up of the replacing your driving licence transaction.

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 a bit of commentary.

Hello

I’m Dafydd Vaughan.

At some point in the last few weeks a lot of the things I worked on back in Consumer Focus disappeared from the internet. The sites were turned off and the URLs redirected to the organisation homepage.

There is no explanation or notice explaining why you end up on that homepage and you would be forgiven for thinking that the sites and tools never existed. Every link ever made to any of those things are now broken.

As many of my friends and colleagues will confirm, I spent a large portion of the last 18 months commuting to work. Initially from Cardiff to London, then from Abergavenny to London. Both journeys over 2 hours in each direction.

It wasn’t really practical to do this on a daily basis, either from a time or cost perspective (4+ hours a day travelling in addition to a normal working day and a monthly season ticket of than £1000). So I travelled down on a Monday morning, stayed in a hotel* (and a friend’s sofa) during the week then travelled back on a Friday evening.

Back in February I wrote about how GOV.UK helps people get from a central government website to services provided in their local area. For each of these services, from paying council tax to reporting a dangerous building, we try and direct the user to the most useful place on their local council website.

Last week we finally launched GOV.UK.

On Tuesday afternoon I got to issue the pull request to remove all the beta messages from the site, then a team worked through the early hours of Wednesday morning to redirect as many Directgov and Business Link URLs to GOV.UK as possible¹.

On Wednesday, the site received over 1 million visits and regularly had over 10 thousand people using it at the same time. The teams at GDS monitored how the site was working, responded to feedback and made fixes where appropriate.

As the launch of GOV.UK draws nearer, it would be a mistake to assume that the beta is in it’s final state. The development and content teams are continuing to make tweaks and changes to the site based on feedback and testing. This will continue both up to and after it becomes the official site for government services on 17 October.

This past week, we’ve released (and written about) the new homepage design, updated browse categories and the removal of the search ‘auto suggest‘ feature. In addition, we’ve also made a few other, smaller & slightly less noticeable, changes to the site.

Just under two and a half years ago I joined CF Labs – a new team based within Consumer Focus with a remit to build useful online tools and make data more useful and accessible.

Over that time, we’ve worked to make product recall information more useful and helped to make it easier to reduce cold calls and junk mail. I’ve been able to work with Consumer Focus’ energy team to publish complaints data on energy suppliers, the Wales team to publish performance data for the Royal Mail, and Passenger Focus to help open up rail performance information.

Back in May I wrote about the new EU law on cookies that came into effect this year and will be enforced from May 2012.

I admit it; I’m a bit of a train buff. I don’t stand around at the end of platforms recording the numbers of trains, but I do like to know what is going on and how everything works.

I’ve been a regular user of trains for nearly 10 years. When I was in college, I had to use the train to get to classes. Before I moved to Cardiff in December, I commuted to work by train every day. Now, I travel by train to meetings in London on a pretty regular basis. I like to think that I’m a bit of an expert at train travel.

Later this week a new law comes into effect – the Privacy & Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011. This law requires all website operators in the EU to gain consent from visitors before storing or retrieving information from a visitors computer.

Essentially, this law blocks the use of cookies until a user has been asked for (and has given) informed consent. Francis Davey, the fantastic tech legal expert has written an in-depth blog about the changes.

I’m disappointed. Over the past few months a concerted media campaign against public sector workers has been building. We are continually portrayed as being lazy and overpaid, not only by the ‘old’ media (by which I mean the traditional print media in general) but also by MPs and our ‘bosses’ in Government. An image has been created of thousands of staff sat around twiddling their thumbs while earning footballer-style fat salaries, not to mention huge benefits, fabulous working conditions and cushy pensions to boot – all at the taxpayer’s expense.

On Friday, the Government announced that it is intending to close up to 75% of the 820 public sector websites it has identified. The announcement coincided with a report from the Central Office of Information (COI) outlining statistics for central government websites. These figures show that 47 websites have cost taxpayers over £127 million in the last financial year.

If you dig a little deeper into the figures you can see that central government has spent £14m on Strategy & Planning, £15.8m on Design & Build, £23.8m on Hosting & Infrastructure and £9.7m on Testing (these are categories that COI requires under their TG128 standard). Despite their efforts (gathering this kind of data is by no means easy) I have concerns about the quality. For example:

On Thursday, CF Labs launched their latest project – Stay Private – into public beta. This site is designed to make it easier to sign up for the various marketing opt-out services that exist in the UK.

There are lots of different opt-out services that exist, all of which have separate sign-up forms and require you to fill out the same details (such as name, address, email address), over and over again. We felt there was a better solution, and so we built a site that combines the forms into one and does the hard work of submissions for you. The initial version of StayPrivate.org incorporates the Telephone, Mail & Baby Mail Preference service offered by the Direct Marketing Association.

We are nearly two weeks into the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat and there seems to be a lot of work going on behind the scenes to prepare for the start of the new legislative programme tomorrow (Tuesday).

Of course, with a new government brings a new direction. Steph Gray, a former civil servant working in the technology arena has written a fantastic overview of what might happen to public sector IT over the next parliament. While these potential plans seem to focus on large scale IT projects, we’ve already started to see the effects of the new government as it has attempted to make its mark.

Just over a year ago I joined CF Labs as one of the developers working on innovation and making data publicly available. When I started, Consumer Focus was a pretty new organisation still getting to grips with its role and getting everything into place so it could undertake its duties properly. In the middle of all of this fun, the three man CF Labs team was put together to experiment with a new way of doing things.

As some of you may remember, a few months ago I waded in on the MP expenses controversy with a crowd-sourcing website for putting together a list of what they all claimed.

The Guardian (and others) produced their own websites that did a similar job and generally worked better. Since then, there have been further developments including the Legg report and further detail released (twice).

This means that the data added to WhatTheyClaimed.com has become out of date and incomplete. This presents a problem as it may confuse and mislead visitors to the site.

Most people will be aware of the concept of a hack day – a number of designers and/or developers getting together for a day to build “cool stuff”. These sorts of days happen on a regular basis and quite a few interesting projects have come out of them.

On Friday, Charlie and I attended a hack day with a difference. The ScraperWiki Hack and Hackers Hack Day was designed to bring designers, developers (hackers) and journalists (hacks) together to see what they could do. While other hack days may have involved journalists in a media capacity, this event involved journalists from the beginning.

The past 36 hours haven’t been the best for those travelling with Eurostar. Five trains were stranded for hours in the Channel Tunnel without power, light, food, drink, heating or information. A further train became stuck near Ebbsfleet yesterday evening.

The focus today is on the cause of the incident and the safety procedures. However the issue that concerns me is how public service companies like Eurostar handle communication in such emergencies. Poor communication can lead to frustration, anger and even panic. I’ve experienced this in much less drastic circumstances when commuting to and from Cardiff by train.

It has been exactly nine months since I started my job at Consumer Focus Labs. In this time, we’ve published our Recalled Products website, some data on the Digital Switchover in Wales, been contributing to a blog following our attempts to get data out of Tesco and are producing our new StayPrivate website.

Sometimes I come away from the office and struggle to see what we have actually achieved. When you are stuck into day to day work, it is quite easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

When you move into a new area, how do you find out about the community you are going to be living in. How do you find out about the community groups, the local services, the bus times. Some of the more technology savvy amongst us might look towards the web in the hope that the information is available. Others might wander around and talk to neighbours, a few people just won’t care.

The Royal Mail is well known in the UK for being an outdated organisation that is struggling to modernise, is regularly hit by crippling strikes and always seems to be losing money (despite the fact they made a profit recently?!). However yesterday they took on a new tact: they appear to have decided to bring the rest of the UK down with them.

The issue surrounds a small piece of text – the Post Code. It sits at the bottom of every address (similar to the Zip code in the USA). It is the holy grail of data in the UK. It maps each place in the country to a physical location. The Royal Mail uses it to assist with routing mail from A to B, developers use it to verify addresses and locate other services nearby. Unfortunately, access to this database costs thousands (approximately £3800 per website per year).

Hello? Is that Birmingham City Council? This is 2001, we’d like our website back!

There has been a lot of talk on Twitter today about the launch of the new Birmingham City Council website. Without a doubt, Birmingham have successfully launched one of the most delayed and expensive websites of the last few years. After being delayed for 6 months (original launch date was expected to be March 2009), and going significantly over budget (costing a total of £2.8 million), you’d expect the site to be the best thing ever developed.

Last week, Neil Williams from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) published his draft Government Twitter Strategy. I think its about time someone sat down and produced a document like this. Some people have responded to the document negatively (as expected), some positively, and some have completely missed the point.

I wanted to spell out why I’m pleased Neil has written this document.

There is a lot of skepticism about new media in Government. Many people are scared about it – I partly believe this is because of the lack of control. With ‘old media’ people had a pretty good idea of what they were getting into. With ‘new media’, its well, new, big, scary and uncontrollable.

Yesterday, Richard Pope and I launched WhatTheyClaimed.com, a site aimed at digitising and collating all of the data from MPs expenses.

The website is based upon a system I built a few weeks ago to monitor our own expenses at Consumer Focus Labs . The site was designed to match the processes at Consumer Focus, but when Richard and I realised that MPs expenses were being published, we realised we could make use of the same codebase with a few minor changes. I need to note at this point that the website was a personal project and not supported by Consumer Focus.

I’ve been a part of the team at VSI for the best part of nine years, originally as a summer job, but more recently as a full time developer. During this time I’ve seen significant changes in the way the internet works, from new technologies and new standards in design, to new ways of communicating and ways of thinking.

The internet landscape is completely different now compared to when I first started out in the industry. For the first time, we are starting to see businesses and government use the internet in completely new and innovative ways. Groups are being set up to take the vast quantity of data available and turn it into something useful. From services such as FixMyStreet.com by MySociety to the more recent School Closures website from Directgov, the internet is starting a new phase of open development.

Earlier today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Dublin, Robin Christopherson from UK charity AbilityNet gave a talk on website accessibility. I’ve seen quite a few different talks and sessions on website accessibility and understand how important this topic is. This talk however really hit home – Robin is blind and gave the whole presentation & demonstration while using a screen reader.

I understand how screen readers work and have tried out some myself, but seeing someone use one in a real situation was really humbling. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it is to use a large part of the internet for someone who suffers from a disability that affects their ability to use a computer.

A quick update this week!

Last weekend I was pleased to launch CllrTweeps. The new site, inspired by TweetMinster, aims to list every local councillor in the UK who is on Twitter. After our first week online, we have already tracked down and verified the first 100 councillors using the service.

Unless you’ve been in a cave (or outside of the UK) for the last few days, you’ll know that we’ve been experiencing the fun of a ‘severe snow event’. The exact definition of a severe snow event remains unanswered, and I’ll leave the debate over whether what we’ve been experiencing is severe to another time. What is important, however, is that a large number of schools have been closed because of the snow. The BBC reported earlier that over 500 schools were closed today in Wales alone.

Recently, the UK Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Andy Burnham did an interview with The Telegraph. During the interview he confirmed that the government was looking into a cinema-style rating system for websites.

As a web developer, hosting provider and internet user, I do not understand how such a scheme would be possible. There are a number of issues that need to be considered before anything like this is implemented in this (or any other) country.

A few days ago I came across an article about the branding of the Dutch Government. It appears that they are fed up of having different brand for each of their 200(ish) departments and ministries. Instead, they are developing a single ‘Government’ brand that will be used for everything the government does, irrespective of the government.

This strikes me as a great idea – not only could it save money by just having one brand instead of 200, but it could help people recognise the work that government does.