EUROPE at DVLA go down then about 4,000 people stop work , so availability is huge , resilience is massive . Supporting that is very important . The challenge we ’ ve got is the age of our IT systems , they are dated legacy systems . We ’ re six months into a transformation programme to move away from these legacy systems , and to totally re-engineer and re-architect our IT . Supporting that is a massive priority for our IT commercial team .” As the largest category within the commercial directorate , around 25 employees are entirely dedicated to IT . The DVLA has moved away from big IT contracts . It has some enterprise agreements with companies like IBM and Oracle , but the vast majority of its IT contracts now are two years in length , which is following GDS ( Government Digital Service ) guidelines . “ We ’ re moving , as much as we can , into open source to get away from being locked into

long-term supply contracts with IT suppliers . We ’ ve also got a very big cloud transformation programme going on as well ,” explains Falvey .

MAJOR MILESTONES The move away from big IT contracts has been a major change for the DVLA in recent years . “ One of the major milestones for DVLA has been insourcing our IT function , which was back in 2015 . We insourced over 300 people , which followed the end of a long-standing IT contract . That created a great deal of work for the commercial team , in terms of novating and insourcing all the contracts that were part of the outsourced contract ,” Falvey advises .

“ We ran a commercial project for 18 months to do that , and successfully managed to insource or novate around 180 contracts . I think the perception was that when we insourced we ’ d have fewer IT contracts , but of course when you insource you ’ re

www . gigabitmagazine . com 97