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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.