PROFILE
large relational databases with data analysis
tools layered on top; now the MoJ has data
scientists who are R developers and experts
in AWS.
Frequent challenges
My biggest challenge is prioritisation
and more specifically, how we balance
investment in digital-driven business
transformation against getting the basics
right. We suffered a major IT outage in
January this year and this has sharpened
our focus on ensuring our basic systems
and services are resilient and recoverable.
Like many organisations, we have built up a
tremendous amount of technical debt in our
legacy systems and we need to start paying
this down.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Attracting and retaining talent is another
major challenge as we can’t always pay top
market rates in government. We make up
for this by making sure that we offer flexible
working for our people and foster a positive
and inclusive environment. Through this, we
are finding that people will miss out on a
small salary uplift as their quality of life is so
much better. It also means we are attracting a
much more diverse workforce which is making
the services we build much more effective.
The biggest IT achievements for the
organisation over the past year
In the last 12 months we have transferred
38,000 staff onto modern Windows 10 and
O365. This is huge progress not only because
it’s faster and simpler to use, but because
people are now able to work more flexibly
in terms of location. That is so important for
people’s work-life balance and allows staff
with families to balance pressures. We have
also made good progress in our mission to
move all of our systems to the public cloud.
We have now moved many services to AWS
and Azure, which saves money from the
public purse, as well as massively improving
deployment times for our developers.
On the software development side, we
have been adopting the ‘strangler pattern’
to replace some of our biggest monolithic
applications. Instead of trying to replace them
in one go, we are building small microservices
connected via APIs and delivering value to the
users iteratively. This approach is working well
as it demonstrates progress to the business
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