30 years — part two

The second decade of my career — roughly 2000 to 2010 — was bookended by two pieces of received wisdom that turned out to be wrong.

At the start, the consensus was that the dot-com crash had killed off serious investment in web technology for a generation. By 2010 it was clear we were in the middle of the most significant technology shift since the personal computer. In between, Jersey caught up with the rest of the world on broadband, regulators started taking online services seriously, and "the website" stopped being something IT did and became something the whole organisation had to think about.

A lot of the projects I worked on during this period were about replacing print-and-post with self-service. Online banking. Tax returns. Company filings. Driving licences. The mechanics were rarely the hard bit — the hard bit was rewriting the policy and process to match what was now possible.

I'll cover 2010 to today in part three, which is where things really speed up.