{"id":4195,"date":"2015-11-13T14:16:46","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T14:16:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/?p=4195"},"modified":"2015-11-13T14:16:46","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T14:16:46","slug":"oow2015-oracle-in-the-post-big-outsourcing-era-the-dvla-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/oow2015-oracle-in-the-post-big-outsourcing-era-the-dvla-story\/","title":{"rendered":"OOW2015: Oracle in the post big outsourcing era &#8211; the DVLA story"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">The new 16 series of personalised registrations are available to view now at: <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/mxy1Yj62dt\">https:\/\/t.co\/mxy1Yj62dt<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/nRKutJP054\">pic.twitter.com\/nRKutJP054<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; DVLA (@DVLAgovuk) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DVLAgovuk\/status\/663741589643091968?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 9, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>I wrote a post recently about the <a href=\"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/2015\/10\/22\/the-tide-turns-on-big-outsourcing-cloud-agile-reshore\/\">huge changes facing the traditional outsourcing industry<\/a>, driven by the need of enterprise customers to make digital transformations, increase product delivery velocity and improve customer experiences. What I didn&#8217;t expect however was that at Oracle Open World 2015 I would meet a customer doing just that, and sticking with Oracle as a cloud supplier.<\/p>\n<p>The Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency in the UK is the very model of a traditional IT shop, or at least it was until the transformation currently being driven by the Cabinet Office and its IT change organisation the Government Digital Service (GDS).<\/p>\n<p>I have spent a fair bit of time with GDS since its inception, partly because many of its people are friends of mine. It&#8217;s an organisation built from the ground up on the principles of the modern web &#8211; user research, agile development, open source and cloud. GDS is there to prove to hidebound civil departments that there is a better way of doing things, not by talking but by making things that look good and work well for the citizen. Of course motherhood and apple crumble always has its detractors &#8211; and there are those that claim GDS has only built pretty new front ends, without getting a handle on the processes and core transactional systems that constitute government IT. But then, antibodies embedded within billion dollar contracts would say that. You have to start somewhere, and the GDS mission is nothing less than the biggest IT transformation in any industry in any country in the world; it was always going to take time. The GDS transformation is now being distributed out to the Departments &#8211; The Ministry of Justice, Her Majesty&#8217;s Revenue and Customs and so on.<\/p>\n<p>When Liam Maxwell started driving this change program, with direct top down support from Francis Maude, the traditional IT suppliers were directly in the firing line. It wasn&#8217;t just outsourcing that was under attack &#8211; Oracle was a particular bug bear &#8211; being an\u00a0aggressive\u00a0sales-driven company demanding considerable license fees for platforms that weren&#8217;t open source, such as the core Oracle database and Weblogic Application Server. It was hard to see how Oracle fitted into the new world. GDS made a public point of cancelling trips to Redwood Shores and visiting Mongo in San Francisco instead.<\/p>\n<p>So when I met with DVLA in San Francisco at Oracle Open World 2015 I wasn&#8217;t sure what to expect &#8211; the old world or the new. It turns out I got both. Ian Patterson, who was seconded from GDS to run IT at the organisation, is definitely not afraid to take tough decisions, but he is also a pragmatist.<\/p>\n<p>The DVLA&#8217;s IT outsourcing contract was a typical hideous outsourcing contract &#8211; the kind of thing we used to write about when I was a journalist at Computing in the mid to late 1990s &#8211; involving both Fujitsu and IBM, which had taken on responsibility for IT systems and the staff that managed them.<\/p>\n<p>Patterson\u00a0immediately\u00a0identified the contract itself as the biggest problem in moving forward as an organisation.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;You&#8217;re going to spend \u00a3240m standing still, with \u00a380m go to market for a new contract, in order to transform.\u00a0I said why not transform now, to align? \u00a0Ditch the commercial constraints and create some internal capability.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But the\u00a0received\u00a0wisdom is that cancelling such a contract would introduce too much risk. Patterson had to bring the new Permanent Secretary (the Civil Service term for the individual that runs a huge government department) along, and generally Permanent Secretaries are fairly risk averse.<\/p>\n<p>The first task was to reskin the electronic vehicle licensing system, with the Systems Integrator claiming it would take a year and a million pounds. The new team rebuilt the citizen facing parts of the system itself in 7 weeks.<\/p>\n<p>Patterson agreed that Financial and Procurement are not the right people to make choices about technical architecture and approach, which seems obvious, except it is how government IT has worked for the last 30 years.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Why would you outsource skills and capability?&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I asked Patterson how the DVLA was moving forward given it had the contract in place. The answer was surprisingly straightforward &#8211; cancel the contract.\u00a0After 22 years the DVLA once again took responsibility for running its own IT systems, in the process insourcing the staff that had previously been transferred to the supplier. 350 people came back with full TUPE (transfer of undertakings in terms of contractual employment terms) in order to run the mainframe and associated systems.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Now we have full sight of the supply chain. We have full understanding of cost, and we know what&#8217;s in the black box of transactions and services&#8221;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Then the GDS playbook kicked in. DVLA formed a partnership with startup incubator and coworking business <a href=\"https:\/\/swansea.techhub.com\/\">TechHub<\/a> and with local Universities. This allowed them to provide funding for 20 of their existing staff to reskill by undertaking Foundation Degrees in Computer Science whilst also recruiting talent from the local market.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;We picked people with the right attitude. The\u00a0madness is we [usually] had people with tech background and education that took better paid jobs as managers, so\u00a0let&#8217;s employ developers to work on our systems. Let\u2019s create environments in which developers can thrive.<\/p>\n<p>You can&#8217;t put digital in the corner.\u00a0If you have separate corners the old keeps trying to stop the new.\u00a0We have structures so people from the factory floor have a voice to the senior management team.\u00a0We do a lot of internal communications. I protect people from the battles. That\u2019s my job. I\u00a0reengineered the team, but not all at once. I put a new senior team together from people\u00a0<em>inside<\/em>\u00a0the organisation.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So what about Oracle?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;If you look at the licensing model, it was behind Systems Integrators.\u00a0Now we can talk directly to people that build the software.\u00a0You need a technological and strategic view.\u00a0I don&#8217;t want to move to Oracle Cloud because it\u2019s the only choice, but because it&#8217;s the choice we make.\u00a0I want other cloud providers involved.\u00a0I don&#8217;t want lock in if we move something to Oracle Cloud. If I want to put MongoDB in the Oracle Cloud, I want the flexibility to do that.\u00a0The more that Oracle recognises the better it will be.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Oracle is currently suffers negative perception for its aggressive approach to\u00a0customers\u00a0in licensing and relicensing deals, particular in virtual and cloud environments &#8211; so how does the DVLA deal with that?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;At the moment we have View Driver Record sitting in Skyscape (cloud platform) talking to our Oracle database.\u00a0If you put that in cloud, you&#8217;d have to license every machine,\u00a0so we got a license that allowed us to ping things around. I told Oracle if you&#8217;re willing to do that, I\u2019ll\u00a0have a lot of Oracle product. I said I will look at you in line with all the others, rather than just replacing you.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Boom!\u00a0It turns out the guy running IT at the DVLA sounds a lot like RedMonk.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Software companies that are big are going to shrink or they&#8217;re going to change.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But, Patterson added:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Larry Ellison&#8217;s speech yesterday said all the right things to me.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The bottom line is that in 2015 Patterson sees Oracle as a less risky bet than other cloud providers. Surprising perhaps, but he is a hard nosed type, and I have to say that although I have only met him once I trust him to spend the money I pay in taxes wisely, and make the right licensing and contractual decisions.<\/p>\n<p>If Oracle can be flexible, and keep people like Patterson on side, it will be in a good position to make the transition to being a successful cloud provider.\u00a0Plenty of people moan about Oracle&#8217;s approach to licensing discussions, probably justifiably, but let&#8217;s not forget who the customer is. As sadly we seem to have done for too long &#8211; outsourcing and vendor mega contracts can become too big too fail, but that&#8217;s actually <em>not the supplier&#8217;s fault<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>As the DVLA story makes clear contracts can be\u00a0cancelled. Lock in is a two way street. Customers choose suppliers.<\/p>\n<p>I should declare that Oracle paid my travel and expenses to OOW15, and set up the interview with Patterson, but I still felt he was playing a very straight bat, with me, and that he&#8217;s exactly what Oracle needs right now &#8211; to face really tough, IT savvy negotiators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The new 16 series of personalised registrations are available to view now at: https:\/\/t.co\/mxy1Yj62dt pic.twitter.com\/nRKutJP054 &mdash; DVLA (@DVLAgovuk) November 9, 2015 I wrote a post recently about the huge changes facing the traditional outsourcing industry, driven by the need of enterprise customers to make digital transformations, increase product delivery velocity and improve customer experiences. What<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-15F","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}