Goodbye Consultancy, Hello Civil Service

I joined PwC Consulting on 24th October 1999 after finishing a Masters degree at University. In 2002, PwC span off its consulting arm to separate it from the audit side of the business. A new company called ‘Monday’ was created, business cards printed and pencils sharpened. In the end, only days after this rebranding, ‘Monday’ was bought for $3.5 billion by IBM. As a result, on 1st October 2002, I became an IBM employee in the Global Business Services division.

Now, almost 16 years since I first started work, I’m about to wave goodbye to the consultancy lifestyle and become a civil servant at the DVLA. On the face of it, that may seem like a crazy decision. I was doing well for myself at IBM. I’d received the highest grade given to only a small percentage of people in 3 of the last 4 years. I’d been elected to the Technical Consultancy Group (TCG), the top cross-brand technical community in IBM UK and Ireland, and I was part of the Public Sector CTO team.

The perception of the civil service is one of faceless individuals in suits and bowler hats. Worse still, for someone like myself with a huge interest in technology, public sector is associated with big old archaic computer systems. The truth though, is that the times are changing.

DVLA are on the cusp of a major transformation. Government is still faced with a large deficit meaning departments need to find ways to save money. It’s well known that legacy technology is costly and inflexible, with vast sums of money spent just to stand still. As a result, there is a fantastic opportunity to completely re-engineer the existing outdated processes whilst focusing on user need. The exemplars delivered at DVLA, for all their shortcomings, demonstrated that the agency were capable of delivering new capabilities in the cloud, built on open standards and open source, embracing DevOps, utilising multi-suppliers and delivered using an agile methodology. I firmly believe this is the approach all industries will adopt.

At the same time, DVLA are actively involved in building a local digital community through their partnership with TechHub, and are forging closer alliances with universities. More importantly, it allows me to get more hands-on with technology.

Personally, I am exciting about the next couple of years. It’s up to me to make the most of it, and that’s something I intend to do.