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?
The last few weeks have involved lots of spinning plates.
Two weeks ago GOV.UK reached one year old. We celebrated in the traditional way with blogs, cake and beer.
Building out the new DVLA cloud infrastructure is ongoing. The View driving record team has started and completed the first stories focussed on Identity Assurance. There has also been conversations about network connectivity and the wider DVLA technical transformation plan.
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.
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 cut myself off from anything work related. This inevitably led to an insane amount of work prior to my time off and a crazy period of catching up upon my reassimilation.
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 IT contract management team and see the latest show & tell from the view my driving record team.
Wednesday was the biggest feature of the week with our Sprint Alpha event. It was a chance to show off everything that GDS has been doing with transactions across government. Filled with a mixture of civil servants, press, permanent secretaries and ministers we had a chance to update everyone on what we’ve been up to and what comes next. We’re working on 25 services across government, including 3 (view driving record, vehicle management and personalised registrations) at DVLA.
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 piece of paper. If you drive a van for work, you can use it to prove to your employer that you can drive that type of vehicle. Similarly, if you hire a car you can use it to prove to the rental company that you can drive. There are lots of reasons why someone might need to see it. Unfortunately, lots of people misplace the counterpart or throw it away not realising they might need it and then have to get a replacement.
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.
I’m Dafydd Vaughan.
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 procurement (a piece of work to split up their existing IT estate). We took at look at the work their team is doing and made some suggestions on how to proceed.
This has been a week filled with workshops.
On Monday I spent the day at the Richard Ley Development Centre (RLDC) in Swansea. The RLDC is the DVLA’s conference and training centre. It’s perfect for workshops and planning sessions – there is lots of space, lots of whiteboards and Wifi!
As part of the driving licence project I’ve been working on, we’ve been building a bunch of services to handle lots of queries against the DVLA’s driver databases. We spent Monday looking at the systems that currently (and might in the future) make queries for this data. The aim was to identify which services might be next to transfer over to the new platform.
The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. There’s been lots going on and I’ve been travelling to and from Swansea quite a bit. There’s also been a bank holiday, and a couple of days off.
Work on the driving licence service has continued. We finished sprint 8 and started sprint 9. The end of sprint show and tell was really well attended by staff from across the organisation. We’ve been concentrating on the public facing elements of the service recently so we could start user testing. We’ve now started spending more time on the backend services including the internal APIs, data services and auditing.
A number of people are starting to put together week notes about what they have been up to over the past 5 days of work. I want to give this a go too, partly so I can look back in a few months time and remind myself what has been achieved.
I probably won’t get round to writing these every week, but hopefully often enough that it makes sense.
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.
2019 update:
LocalDirectgov and the underlying datasets have now been replaced. This means the tool was getting out of date and inaccurate, so I’ve switched it off.
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 over a year ago, I blogged that I was taking a break from CF Labs and joining a project to create a new website for government.
Since then lots of things have happened, and many things have changed. Here is a quick summary:
Over the last year, this blog has been very much unloved and has gathered an unhealthy layer of dust. It’s not for want of trying – there are several half finished posts that I just haven’t gotten around to finishing. I’m hoping I can resurrect some of these, but I suspect many are now too out of date.
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.