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As an individual, I find that gov.uk is far more useful than any of the sites that preceded it - especially DirectGov. It's sad to hear that they haven't paid q

As an individual, I find that gov.uk is far more useful than any of the sites that preceded it - especially DirectGov. It's sad to hear that they haven't paid quite so much attention to corporate users of Government services. However, much of this article appears to be anecdotes of people in Government complaining after-the-fact. Why were they not involved during the transition, when they could best help with the process? I highly doubt the gov.uk team rewrote entire libraries full of quite technical information on their own - there was someone on the side of the departments who failed to do their job.

adwf 12y ago
I think you've hit the nail on the head there. A lot of GDS's mandate revolved around modern agile techniques and just doing it. This doesn't exactly mesh very well with traditional civil service slow bureaucracy. The civil service tend to like getting every bloody stakeholder involved and bury you in meetings upto your eyeballs. And then have meetings about the meetings. And meetings about meetings about the meetings... That's how we wasted £10bn on the NHS IT system with little to show for it.
- cssmoo 12y ago
  The NHS projects are a little more complicated than gov.uk front end implementation. Have you seen any of the care pathway workflows? We're talking 128 page documents integrating police, social services etc as well, just for a birth. They're also all or nothing and have reliability requirements. You can't just agile this stuff; it's space shuttle up front design from day one. One fuck up in one workflow instance and someone misses that imaging referral and then that person goes from stage 1 to metastatic cancer. How do you assign an appropriate cost vs risk trade off to that? That may make it too complicated to complete to be honest but where do you go from there? You shelve it with a shit ton of bad PR and pay up the people who told you it's not happening.
  - grey-area 12y ago
    In my opinion the only way they could have made it work was to start small and iterate. Start with a health record which was: NHS no, name, dob and make sure everyone is using it first, then start to build APIs which let people add data from the various services to that record and control access etc. You simply can't design a system from the top down to deal with something as complex and multi-disciplinary as a birth or a lifetime of health records, in fact no one system could probably cope with all those demands, even if it only catered to a few medical specialties - even just between GPs, Surgeons, Anaesthetists and Dentists there are huge gulfs in requirements, let alone bringing in other public services like the police. On top of that people are happy with existing systems and will resist change to some centralised system if you try a big bang approach. So I disagree that it is all or nothing, or even could feasibly be done as an all or nothing project.
  - LeonigMig 12y ago
    The space shuttle programme was basically a horrible disaster.
- celticninja 12y ago
  exactly, the gov.uk team could have involved every department, team and committe and shipped a late, bloated useless product. The issue for the govt.people is they assume it would have been better if they had been involved, but they would have looked at it from an insiders perspective and not from the customers point of view. the result would have been a site useable by people with good knowledge of their area of government (although useless to them as they dont need the info) and useless to the end user who actually needs to use the site.
learnstats2 12y ago
> As an individual, I find that gov.uk is far more useful than any of the sites that preceded it - especially DirectGov. I think I have to disagree. With DirectGov I didn't always find what I was looking for, but when I did find it, I trusted it. It was reliable. With gov.uk, even if I find the information, I don't trust it. For example: https://www.gov.uk/exchange-foreign-driving-licence/y/yes/car-or-motorcycle/european-union https://www.gov.uk/exchange-foreign-driving-licence/y/yes/ca... Only the form they propose says the cost is £50, not £43. Only the EU says that an EU license remains valid without exchange. So now where do I go?
- robin_reala 12y ago
  You click on the link at the bottom that says ‘Is there anything wrong with this page?’ and report it.
  - learnstats2 12y ago
    That's super-helpful, thanks. I used the link to report the incorrect fee when I first noticed it - over a month ago. Nothing has changed. It's still wrong.
- MistahKoala 12y ago
  I'm inclined to trust GOV.UK to have the most current information there, as DVLA reduced its costs a few months ago. My assumption is that DVLA hasn't updated its forms. That said, it's a source of confusion. Someone, somewhere, hasn't been proactive with that information which should have lead to GDS clarifying the ambiguous cost (assuming DVLA isn't going to get round to updating its forms in a reasonable period of time).
  - learnstats2 12y ago
    Genuine thanks for this, I still can't find this information anywhere but did get a £7 refund. So gov.uk is correct, but the canonical form it directs you to is wrong. And DVLA doesn't have a formal website for clarification, apart from this one.

adwf 12y ago

I think you've hit the nail on the head there. A lot of GDS's mandate revolved around modern agile techniques and just doing it. This doesn't exactly mesh very well with traditional civil service slow bureaucracy. The civil service tend to like getting every bloody stakeholder involved and bury you in meetings upto your eyeballs. And then have meetings about the meetings. And meetings about meetings about the meetings... That's how we wasted £10bn on the NHS IT system with little to show for it.

cssmoo 12y ago
The NHS projects are a little more complicated than gov.uk front end implementation. Have you seen any of the care pathway workflows? We're talking 128 page documents integrating police, social services etc as well, just for a birth. They're also all or nothing and have reliability requirements. You can't just agile this stuff; it's space shuttle up front design from day one. One fuck up in one workflow instance and someone misses that imaging referral and then that person goes from stage 1 to metastatic cancer. How do you assign an appropriate cost vs risk trade off to that? That may make it too complicated to complete to be honest but where do you go from there? You shelve it with a shit ton of bad PR and pay up the people who told you it's not happening.
- grey-area 12y ago
  In my opinion the only way they could have made it work was to start small and iterate. Start with a health record which was: NHS no, name, dob and make sure everyone is using it first, then start to build APIs which let people add data from the various services to that record and control access etc. You simply can't design a system from the top down to deal with something as complex and multi-disciplinary as a birth or a lifetime of health records, in fact no one system could probably cope with all those demands, even if it only catered to a few medical specialties - even just between GPs, Surgeons, Anaesthetists and Dentists there are huge gulfs in requirements, let alone bringing in other public services like the police. On top of that people are happy with existing systems and will resist change to some centralised system if you try a big bang approach. So I disagree that it is all or nothing, or even could feasibly be done as an all or nothing project.
- LeonigMig 12y ago
  The space shuttle programme was basically a horrible disaster.
celticninja 12y ago
exactly, the gov.uk team could have involved every department, team and committe and shipped a late, bloated useless product. The issue for the govt.people is they assume it would have been better if they had been involved, but they would have looked at it from an insiders perspective and not from the customers point of view. the result would have been a site useable by people with good knowledge of their area of government (although useless to them as they dont need the info) and useless to the end user who actually needs to use the site.

learnstats2 12y ago

> As an individual, I find that gov.uk is far more useful than any of the sites that preceded it - especially DirectGov. I think I have to disagree. With DirectGov I didn't always find what I was looking for, but when I did find it, I trusted it. It was reliable. With gov.uk, even if I find the information, I don't trust it. For example: https://www.gov.uk/exchange-foreign-driving-licence/y/yes/car-or-motorcycle/european-union https://www.gov.uk/exchange-foreign-driving-licence/y/yes/ca... Only the form they propose says the cost is £50, not £43. Only the EU says that an EU license remains valid without exchange. So now where do I go?

robin_reala 12y ago
You click on the link at the bottom that says ‘Is there anything wrong with this page?’ and report it.
- learnstats2 12y ago
  That's super-helpful, thanks. I used the link to report the incorrect fee when I first noticed it - over a month ago. Nothing has changed. It's still wrong.
MistahKoala 12y ago
I'm inclined to trust GOV.UK to have the most current information there, as DVLA reduced its costs a few months ago. My assumption is that DVLA hasn't updated its forms. That said, it's a source of confusion. Someone, somewhere, hasn't been proactive with that information which should have lead to GDS clarifying the ambiguous cost (assuming DVLA isn't going to get round to updating its forms in a reasonable period of time).
- learnstats2 12y ago
  Genuine thanks for this, I still can't find this information anywhere but did get a £7 refund. So gov.uk is correct, but the canonical form it directs you to is wrong. And DVLA doesn't have a formal website for clarification, apart from this one.