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30 years – part 2

This year I am celebrating 30 years in Jersey’s IT industry. I thought it would be fun to look back on my journey. This is part two, covering 2000 – 2019. If you missed the first instalment (1989-1999) I recommend you read that first.

2000-2009

On 1 November 2000, Itex announced that Ray Curtis had sold the company to the Guiton Group, the parent company of the Jersey Evening Post. Guiton already had a technology subsidiary called Matrix Computer Services, so Itex merged with them.

My team of developers had been based at the Itex offices at Rue des Pres, but pressure on space there meant that we moved into the Guiton offices at Five Oaks. We were there for a few years until space became available in a new building built behind the main Itex offices at Rue des Pres.

The Itex development team based at Guiton House

I do enjoy people management and I am capable of managing finances. But there’s only so many hours in a week, and I was finding that things like appraisals were being overlooked. In February 2002 my role of Development Manager was split. A colleague took on the line-management of the developers and financial management. I was then able to focus on the leadership and consultancy parts of my role. I remained a member of the senior management team at Itex.

In 2007 I led a bid for a multi-million pound project to take over the design, development, hosting and management of all the Government of Jersey’s websites.

2010-2019

Itex decided that it wanted to focus on managed services rather than professional services. Several areas of the Itex business would be sold off or closed down. I reviewed the proposals that companies submitted and selected that TCB Consulting would take over the software development contracts that Itex had. Two of the team would become TCB employees. So in February 2010, I started working for TCB Consulting. In some ways, it was a big change – going from a company of 120+ employees to one with six. In other respects it was a straight-forward move – I would be doing the same work for the same companies. Working for a small business meant less ‘red tape’ – decisions were made much more quickly and I no longer spent hours a week in meetings.

From supplier-side to client-side

In July 2012 I started a new role working for the Government of Jersey as its Web Services Manager. As my first priority, I wanted to address how the government built online services. At that time, new online forms could only be developed by external contractors, at a considerable daily rate, meaning that each new service was very expensive to implement. There were further costs whenever enhancements were required. Instead of this, I tendered for a new online forms platform. This would enable us to take more of a cookie-cutter / production line approach to new online services. It has been very successful – to date, 142 forms have been made live, with a further 45 in development.

The use of smartphones to browse the Internet was increasing steadily. I knew it would be a while before I could launch a responsive version of gov.je. In the meantime, I commissioned the m.gov.je site. This was designed to be a simple, mainly text-based, fast to load site offering access to information that islanders wanted to access while on the go. It included the weather forecast, tides, jobs, airport arrivals and departures, harbour arrivals and departures, roadworks and a list of useful contact numbers. These were displayed as hyperlinks so that people could initiate a phone call with only a couple of taps. Later we would add the bus tracker to the site.

Various live data feeds were needed to feed into m.gov.je and with the same feeds driving www.gov.je, www.ports.je, www.jerseyairport.com etc. I introduced data.gov.je as a publisher/subscriber interface between the feeds and the sites that consumed them. This made the feeds much more robust.

Another of my priorities was to address a range of legacy websites, some of which had not had any attention given to them for many years, like the Jersey Met website. I transformed this from being a stand-alone website that used Microsoft FrontPage into a modern, responsive part of the gov.je site.

The Government of Jersey is a heavy user of Microsoft SharePoint, both as the basis for its intranet and for several public-facing websites which at the time included Jersey Tourism and Jersey Harbours. When I joined, these were running on SharePoint 2007, by then five years out of date. I commissioned an upgrade to SharePoint 2010, and in due course an upgrade to SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016.

e-government

In March 2014 the e-government programme began. Over the course of the next five years, we would deliver a wide range of projects. The £10m+ programme would come under considerable scrutiny, both from the Comptroller & Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee. I led on the following initiatives:

I also participated to varying degrees in projects like Active Jersey, breast screening online appointments, customer service platform, design authority, driver and vehicle standards systems, e-petitions, Love Jersey, Gazette online, people directory, States Assembly website refresh, track my bus, updates to the GST payments system and ICAR.

Responsive redesigns

In 2014 I led a responsive redesign of gov.je. I started by commissioning user research to understand the challenges that real users had in using the site. I also commissioned an accessibility review of the old site. Armed with the output from this research I commissioned a ‘dream team’ comprising experts from the leading web design companies on the island: Webreality, e-scape, Switch Digital, Mallet Crane, C5 Alliance and usability consultant Melissa Chester. Also on the team was the Digital Accessibility Centre. We went through a series of wireframes, designing for mobile-first, then tablet and desktop. Once these wireframes were signed off we moved onto high-fidelity designs and only then to working prototypes. The development phases were run as a series of six sprints. A blog entry documents the before and after screenshots.

Also in 2014 I persuaded the parishes to go ahead with a redesign of parish.gov.je – this was a low-cost responsive redesign and didn’t go as far as I would have liked but was much better than the previous one.

I was also instrumental in the responsive redesign of ports.je, jerseyairport.com, the creation of the webanalytics.gov.je site and the introduction of survey.gov.je as a GDPR-compliant, UK-hosted survey platform to replace the government’s use of SurveyMonkey.

Digital ID

From March 2015 until late 2018 my main project was to research and implement a digital identity solution for Jersey. Over the course of 3+ years, I led research into how digital identity works in other countries including an in-depth look at GOV.UK Verify and the Estonian e-ID systems. This ultimately led to writing a tender for a solution which led us to the implementation of Yoti. Working in the open, I blogged on the subject fifteen times.

Digital leadership

While the e-government programme was busy delivering a technology platform on top of which new services could be built, I was convinced that the people element was missing and without it, the programme would fail to deliver the transformational change that the business case called for.

In the winter of 2015-16, I spent six months of evenings and weekends studying for the Executive Diploma in Digital Business Leadership. The course covered how to articulate the digital imperative, the value of user research and data-driven decision-making, how to develop an innovation mindset and achieve organisational agility, digital channels to market, new ways of working, and most importantly – how to engage others in digital vision at scale.

Armed with the skills I had gained on the diploma course I convinced my colleagues in the government’s small Learning & Development team that we needed to equip staff across the whole organisation with the ability to lead the digital transformation of their own departments and teams. Working with Tom Bryant, Jeremy Cross and my colleague Geraldine Cardwell, we delivered digital leadership training to some 300 mostly senior staff from all parts of government.

In September 2016 I was promoted to Head of Digital Delivery. This was a new role created as part of a restructuring of the senior management of the Information Services Department. It reflected that I had been successfully influenced my director that digital was (1) a different workstream and (2) required senior leadership with a different skillset/focus.

Further evolution of gov.je

In 2017-18 I felt that I had to do something about the gov.je site not being engaging enough. Some areas of the site were just a wall of links. What I had in mind was to retain the existing top-level navigation, but to have a template that allowed us to create a site-within-a-site. This would address the recurring problem we had of departments wanting to go off and create brand new separate sites rather than build on gov.je. The new template was first used to help promote fostering and adoption. It was then used to help market the private patients offering at the Jersey general hospital; then it was used for Brexit, the moving to Jersey section, and most recently a revamped section for pregnancy and birth. My team wrote a blog about the latter and it includes before-and-after screenshots.

A similar approach was taken to a new section of the site called Future Jersey. This served to demonstrate to naysayers that there was nothing inherent in the gov.je platform that limits the ability of developers to implement attractive page designs. It was simply that a 2009 edict from my predecessor to stick to the small set of page layouts for consistency was being over-zealously applied.

Time for a change

In Q1 2019 a proposed revised structure for the Modernisation & Digital department – as it was now known – reversed the 2016 recognition that digital was (1) a different workstream that (2) required senior leadership with a different skillset/focus. I was unable to dissuade the new COO from abolishing the role of Head of Digital Delivery. His thinking was that ‘everything is digital now’ and that the responsibility for leading digital could be spread across a range of more generalist IT managers on a lower pay grade.

In April 2019 I became self-employed and began a contract with the Jersey Legal Information Board. As their Programme Director, I am leading a range of initiatives including the digital transformation of the Jersey courts.

By Marcus Ferbrache