The Size (reposted from faststream.hmg.gov.uk)
Before I joined Poke, I spent a couple of years in the UK Civil Service as one of the first few people to join via the Technology in Business Fast Stream, launched a few years ago to plug the (then widening) digital skills gap in Government. When I was asked by the Cabinet Office to write about some of my experiences last year, I put together the post below, which was published last May.
While I enjoyed the time I spent in Whitehall, and feel like we made a lot of progress in the short time I was at HMRC, there were a few of us who felt constrained by the technological limitations that come from working in the Public Sector (my main bugbear being having to use IE6…), and who have taken since swapped Whitehall for Tech City Silicon Roundabout.
The Fast Stream team have recently removed all posts by those of us who have recently moved on - they’ve made some positive first steps onto Facebook, but still don’t quite get the idea of blogging…
I’ve therefore reposted the article below (and added back in the links), which hopefully will be of use to those out there who are looking to apply to TiB.
How Big…?
One thing that hits you when you first start working in central government is the sheer scale of operations, particularly if you working for one of the larger Departments. The numbers at HMRC tell the story (up to a point): £435.1bn of tax collected, £39bn in benefits and tax credits paid out, 61 million calls handled via Contact Centres, three million visits to our Enquiry Centres, 9.9 million letters received (these numbers are for 2009/10).
How about our website? Towards the end of January when people file their tax return online, it becomes the third busiest in the world, beaten only by Facebook and Google. You don’t need much imagination to understand how integral ICT is to delivering these numbers, but it takes a surprising amount of creativity and ingenuity to understand how to meet the challenges we now face.
