Legacy Technology

Why some DVLA digital services don't work at night

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.

2024 year note

2024 has been a bit of a roller coaster. Work has been ridiculously busy and we started the first phase of renovating the house.

External Article

Public Digital Newsletter: CrowdStrike special

Following the CrowdStrike incident a few days earlier, I guest edited a special edition of the Public Digital Newsletter to bring together articles and views that explained what happened, how it might have been avoided and what might happen next.

External Article

Public Digital: CrowdStrike - a global wake-up call

I’ve published a post on the Public Digital blog with immediate reflections on the CrowdStrike outage which impacted millions of computers around the world.

External Article

DigitalBC: Legacy modernisation - The Why

I’ve recently been interviewed by Jillian Carruthers, Executive Director of the Environment Sustainability Division in the British Columbia Public Service for their #DigitalBC series of videos.

In this video, I talk in detail about how government approaches legacy modernisation projects.

A version of this interview was also published as a podcast.

External Article

O'Reilly: Solving problems with principles

James Stewart and I recently gave a talk at Velocity Conference in Berlin about how to use design principles to solve problems in technology projects

External Article

Public Digital: Building new services around older IT

Working with technology, it’s rare that you get to build something totally new without having to think about systems or services that already exist.

Talking to Parliament about digital government

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

Archived Post

Week notes #10

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 it easier build new services. Given how complex and tightly coupled the existing systems are, this isn’t going to be a simple process.