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Hello Mike. How are you doing? Hi there. Not too bad, thank you.
What have we been up to at GDS this week? Some interesting stuff going on in the world
of Transformation. Home Office have a great Visit Visa alpha which they did earlier this
year, which really does something that we've not seen before, which enables the user experience
to be built dynamically, based on the type of visa someone's applying for. We've been
very happy with the alpha, and the beta build of that starts this week, so that's exciting.
As a side, we've actually taken that product and made a generic version of it for use by
all the departments, so that's a really good example of reuse of some of the things we're
developing with departments. That's probably our most exciting one.
Also, we've got a couple of discoveries coming to a conclusion, one of which is the waste
carriers permits, which doesn't sound that exciting, but gives you the licence to do
everything from clearing rubble from a building site to disposing of nuclear waste, so quite
important; the other one is personal independence payments, which is the replacement for disability
living allowance. Other Transformation news also: HMRC (HM Revenue
and Customs) wrote a digital strategy last year. We've been doing exemplar projects with
them for some nine months, now, so we're having a review and a reset of that in conjunction
with GDS. That relaunched today, and that work will be happening up until about the
end of October. Then in other news, we've been doing some
interesting work with BIS (Department for Business, Innovation & Skills) around the
business usage of the GOV.UK site. We're looking at some of the products on there, like the
finance support finder, browse, content and employing people and setting up a new business,
so a whole load of user-focused research on that.
Several members of the team are out this week giving talks.
Yes we are; we're out there spreading the love. Firstly, Sarah (Richards), Lisa (Reichelt)
and Janet (Hughes) are out talking around the whole world of user research, and then
James Stewart is at Cloud Conference, talking about the Digital by Default standard on Thursday.
In turn, we've got a couple of visitors to GDS.
Yes, we have. A really interesting one; there's a chap called Richard Perez, who's representing
Cape Town. For those of you who don't know, Cape Town will be the World Design Capital
for 2014. So, similar to other great cultural and sporting events, there's one for design
and Richard is the director of that event, so he's visiting Ben Terrett and his team
to look at what we do here. Finally as ever, some new starters this week.
Yes, this week we have Khadeja (Al Harbi), who's joining the Digital Inclusion team,
which is growing nicely as that work spins up into life.
Terrific. Until next time. Thank you very much.