Home on Dafydd Vaughan

By breaking the DVLA’s massive, 20-million-transaction paper logbook system into small slices - starting with commercial motor traders - we bypassed the paralysis of multi-year planning.

The recent mockery of First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth exposes a persistent, casual disrespect toward Welsh language and culture within the English-speaking world.

By replacing a failing legacy system with a working car tax service in just ten weeks, we proved that momentum and iterative delivery manage risk far more effectively than months of traditional planning.

2025 has been a difficult year.

Stop funding fictional target architecture blueprints and start funding empowered, long-lived teams.

Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night.

2024 has been a bit of a roller coaster.

Short(ish) month notes for August.

I think I’ve started every set of months notes saying I’ve been busy.

Things got busy, and I predictably stopped writing.

Following the CrowdStrike incident a few days earlier, I guest edited a special edition of the Public Digital Newsletter to bring together articles and views that explained what happened, how it might have been avoided and what might happen next.

I’ve published a post on the Public Digital blog with immediate reflections on the CrowdStrike outage which impacted millions of computers around the world.

I started writing this last week, and then got completely sidetracked.

I’m sure I only wrote one of these a few days ago - but apparently we’re almost in April.

Another month gone.

I’m not sure I can stretch myself to writing something every week, so I’m setting myself a slightly less onerous goal of a note every month instead.

There is so much that has been written and said about the Horizon scandal over the past 10 years, that it’s hard to pick out what actually happened, and how it got so bad.

It’s half way through January, so I’m a little late with my 2023 wrap up.

This site uses cookies.

I have an old blog that I no longer update.

I’m a digital technology specialist with extensive experience in transforming complex legacy IT, coaching technology teams as they build new digital services and coaching executives on setting the conditions for success.

We can’t display this page Go back to the homepage and try again.

The page you requested was not found.

You are not allowed to access that page Go back to the homepage and try again.

I’ve recently been interviewed by Jillian Carruthers, Executive Director of the Environment Sustainability Division in the British Columbia Public Service for their #DigitalBC series of videos.

2020 is almost over.

James Stewart and I recently gave a talk at Velocity Conference in Berlin about how to use design principles to solve problems in technology projects

Working with technology, it’s rare that you get to build something totally new without having to think about systems or services that already exist.

This week I gave evidence to the Parliament Science and Technology Committee about digital government and the challenges ahead to continue delivering good services to users

Publishing blog posts about the work you’re doing is a great way of making things open.

This year has been a bit of a mixed bag, with many ups and downs: Leaving GDS; setting up my own business; getting married; visiting new places; exploring London.

Spend controls often focus on immediate savings, but there are many other benefits of introducing controls on technology spending which often get ignored

When building and running services it’s important get into the habit of releasing updates to users on a regular basis.

Organisations that create an environment and culture that supports delivery will find they build better services and have more productive teams.

Progress and impact of the work we’re doing to improve the security of government digital services

An incident report about several issues that took government services offline

Changing the relationship between the citizen and the state.

A few weeks ago was my fifth anniversary at the Government Digital Service.

Work we’re doing to improve the security of government digital services

It’s been a fortnight of big announcements.

Last week I spent a day in Manchester with my team’s user researcher.

January is usually a fairly quiet month.

When you’re deep in the day to day detail of projects, it’s quite easy to lose sight of the big picture.

Some of the recent tweaks we’ve made to the DVLA vehicle tax and SORN services

How DVLA is making vehicle information easier to understand for users

How DVLA/GDS are using A/B testing to push more people towards the beta vehicle tax service

View driving record – lots of my focus over the past few weeks has been assisting this team to get to their public beta.

I started off the fortnight with 4 days in sunny Newcastle doing interviews for HMRC’s new digital centre.

Vehicle tax & SORN – the team spent last week tidying things up and running tests with DVLA staff.