Category: Thinking

Stop funding fictional target architecture blueprints and start funding empowered, long-lived teams. The traditional, rigid approach is too slow for the age of AI and will never solve your real-world legacy tech problems. It’s time to trade the fiction for empowered teams and clear principles.

Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite complicated.

There is so much that has been written and said about the Horizon scandal over the past 10 years, that it’s hard to pick out what actually happened, and how it got so bad.

When things go really badly wrong, there’s never just one cause. Many things have to have failed. In the case of Horizon, this list is huge: the tech, the supplier, the culture, the investigations, the lawyers, the system of private prosecutions, the management, the politicians, the governance and scrutiny, the recovery. There are things wrong at pretty much every level.

This week I gave evidence to the Parliament Science and Technology Committee about digital government and the challenges ahead to continue delivering good services to users

Publishing blog posts about the work you’re doing is a great way of making things open. In the early days, GDS was great at this. Working out loud and talking openly about even small changes was normal practice. It was just a thing that happened. Fast forward to 2018 and things are different. Blogs that were once active, now lie dormant – untouched for months.

Spend controls often focus on immediate savings, but there are many other benefits of introducing controls on technology spending which often get ignored

When building and running services it’s important get into the habit of releasing updates to users on a regular basis. Always be shipping.

Organisations that create an environment and culture that supports delivery will find they build better services and have more productive teams. Don’t slow down delivery.