Technology

How we reduced errors on GOV.UK

All websites run into errors. We've reduced our errors by over 90% and changed our culture around errors so they are identified, owned and resolved quickly.

Updated: Mon Jun 28 2021

International Women in Engineering Day 2021

Today is International Women in Engineering Day. It's a day where we celebrate the amazing work of women within the engineering sector. According to the Engineering UK 2018 report, only 12% of all engineers in the UK are women. We ...

Updated: Tue Jun 22 2021

Meeting policy intent and user needs at the same time

In this post, aimed at product managers, Isabelle Andrews explains how her team adapted impact mapping to help align user and business needs. This technique kept them focused on what matters most.

Updated: Thu Jun 17 2021

Update on the engineering and manufacturing route review

I'm delighted to be able to provide an update on how we are moving forward with our engineering and manufacturing route review. 58 occupational standards, which set out the key knowledge, skills and behaviours employers expect to be covered by ...

Updated: Fri Jun 11 2021

The Institute talks...about green apprenticeships

You can subscribe to The Institute talks podcast on Amazon Music, Apple podcast, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. You can read transcripts for this podcast episode on Podbean. In this episode of The Institute talks, we talk about green apprenticeships. We are joined ...

Updated: Fri Jun 04 2021

Introducing a Head of Digital role to DfE

The last year has showed us that we need to change how we lead digital in our organisation. We've rearranged what we do into 5 areas of work and we've created a new role - Head of Digital. James Reeve explains more in this post.

Updated: Fri May 28 2021

Engineer your career at the Home Office

The Home Office is recruiting significant numbers of software engineers. Check out Civil Service Jobs to find out more or register for our live recruitment question and answer event on 12 May where you can meet our engineering team and learn more about the recruitment process.

Updated: Tue May 18 2021

Podcast: the first in our 'Think digital, act human' series

Emma Stace - chief digital and technology officer - gives her personal view on mental health during covid, and the conversations she's had about race in the past year. She also explains what service ownership and user-centred deign lab are and how these ways of working make such a difference.

Updated: Tue May 18 2021

DfE's digital and technology strategy

Chief digital and technology officer, Emma Stace, sets out our digital and technology ambitions and priorities - being responsive to learners' needs, running the business, reducing burdens and always raising standards.

Updated: Wed May 12 2021

Help us make government more sustainable

We're currently working to add a new point on sustainability to the Technology Code of Practice. We're adopting a user-led and iterative approach to policy to ensure the new point is as useful and effective as possible.

Updated: Wed May 12 2021

Sowing seeds for a bright future

This past year has been incredibly challenging for all of us. As we emerge from our third lockdown and reflect on how life has changed, I am so proud of all that has been achieved across the agriculture, environmental and ...

Updated: Thu Apr 29 2021

How we fixed a strange 'week year' bug

When a pull request failed because of an incorrect creation date, the GOV.UK Pay team investigated the cause. Here's how they found and fixed the bug.

Updated: Wed Mar 24 2021

The Cyber Support team's technical remediation and support activities

During the cyber security discovery last year, we identified five areas of opportunity for MHCLG to support councils in improving their cyber health. One of these areas was technical remediation: providing support to councils identified through the survey on mitigating ...

Updated: Thu Mar 18 2021

Wheel of Misfortune: Incident rehearsal for GOV.UK PaaS

Rehearsing for incidents with replica environments to perform hands on investigations takes a lot of setting up. The GOV.UK Platform as a Service team wanted to see if they could get a lot of the value with a reduced amount of setup time and cost.

Updated: Thu Mar 04 2021

Kicking off the Cyber Health Framework Alpha phase

In June 2020 the Local Digital Cyber team completed a discovery into cyber security at local authorities. We found that: There are many cyber standards, but no clear baseline. An effective cyber baseline must encompass culture, leadership and 'cyber first' ...

Updated: Tue Mar 02 2021

Creating a more flexible funding model for the Local Digital Fund

Since 2018, the Local Digital Collaboration Unit (LDCU) has funded 35 projects through multiple phases of work and across five rounds of funding - including our relatively recent C-19 Challenge. Through the Local Digital Fund, we've given out nearly £5 ...

Updated: Wed Feb 17 2021