[FourthProtocol]

GDS did a great job building gov.uk, but everythig else they touched was an abject disaster. From the Diabetes project at the NHS, the fiasco that was the Office of the Public Guardian, the even bigger fiasco that happened at Border Force, the NHS, DWP...

Sure, when they were building web sites they delivered stellar stuff. Agile, break things and all that. But when you had real complexity they just... couldn't...

The Government Gateway is a prime example - single citizen login for ALL government services. It ran well, super robust and mature enough to have ironed out virtually all issues.

Then GDS decided that because the Government Gateway was based on a Microsoft stack, it needed to be re-done. The tech lead didn't understand the concept of Identity Federation, let alone SAML tokens, and that you just! can't! do secure code using agile (2-week sprint no good for meaningful security testing...).

I spent two long years at GDS banging my head against a wall. And then I left. And unsurprisingly the Microsoft-based Government gateway was never replaced, still going strong.