How did we get here?

HackIT has put a broad range of new services live really quickly (report repairs online, manage a tenancy, online rent account etc.).

This speedy delivery meant the structure behind the services wasn’t as organised as it could have been. Every service has a very specific API running it and, often, a very specific data set. This means not much of the work we have done is widely reusable.

It's a bit like having a messy garage. It only gets worse the more stuff you try and put in there!

It's hard to tell where to start cleaning, you don’t know if what you’re looking for is even in the garage, it’s hard to know and keep track of where everything is, you have to do a lot of work every time you want to take anything out of it and it’s a lot of effort to keep it tidy and stop stuff falling over.

If we want to keep putting services out there for our citizens and staff to use then we need to tidy our garage. At the moment, the messy garage is hindering our speed of delivery and our ability to innovate. We want to keep providing services to an even broader range of users so it's really important that we get this right.