Posts tagged "VOSA"

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.

The last couple of weeks have been dominated by one topic – infrastructure. As mentioned in my previous week notes, we’ve been designing and building out the production infrastructure for the View Driving Record service at DVLA. Lots of effort has gone into talking to suppliers, designing what we need and spinning it all up. We’ve been working closely with colleagues from GDS and HMRC who have used similar patterns and who are also in the process of spinning up their infrastructure services.

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.

A little late this week. On Monday I got to spend a day visiting the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA) in Bristol. Amongst other things, VOSA look after the MOT service. They’ve got a small internal development team and some SMEs working on various internal tools and an alpha of a potential future MOT service. It’s fantastic to see this sort of thing happening in departments that are getting very little support from GDS.