• Social Media Question and Decision to Write Post: Every few months, someone asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off overnight. Instead of answering each time, the author decided to write this post to explain. It also serves as a case study on the complexity of making government services digitally native.
• A Bit of History: DVLA is about 60 years old and managed driving licences and vehicle records. For decades, it outsourced technology management to IBM and Fujitsu. In 2015, it brought it back in-house. In 2013, when the author started working with DVLA to deliver new digital services, almost all technology delivery was by IBM and Fujitsu. Many services were backed by an old IBM mainframe (Drivers-90) with code in COBOL and ADABAS database. In the early 2000s, there was an attempt to modernize using Java and WebLogic with Oracle Databases (New Systems Landscape), but it didn't finish, leaving a complex infrastructure with some services using new architecture and some using the mainframe. The code written by automated tools was overcomplicated and brittle, and the new batch jobs had assumptions that the underlying datasets wouldn't change during the overnight batch window.
• Delivering New Digital Vehicle Services: As part of the GDS exemplar programme in 2013, DVLA committed to delivering new digital services. Building a new front-end service was straightforward, but updating vehicle records was complex as it required integrating with legacy systems. The team faced a choice between redesigning and rebuilding the underlying infrastructure or accepting that the service couldn't operate overnight initially. The author pushed to deliver a service that could operate during the day and be turned off overnight to get value early. They built a new service with an API into the database and worked with IBM/Fujitsu to narrow the batch window.
• What Happened Next: After the first service was launched, a way to allow services to operate during the batch window was designed and prototyped. But DVLA decided not to implement it and focused on rebuilding the legacy infrastructure instead. In 2024, 10 years after the launch of the first service, the legacy infrastructure is still the reason why the services are offline overnight. Legacy tech is complicated and a big barrier to digital transformation.

The author also mentioned finding a brilliant team of Civil Servants who developed and owned essential tech services, which is a story for another post.