Challenge

Government Digital Service needed a secure, scalable Wi-Fi solution for public sector staff and visitors nationwide.

Approach

We took a cloud-first, microservices approach and rewrote the app. We focused on phased releases to stay quick and agile.

Result

We delivered a secure system in record time. GovWifi now powers over 200,000 weekly users across 1000+ government buildings.

Challenge

GovWifi was conceived as a way for public sector staff and visitors to sign up once and automatically connect to a single wifi service across multiple public sector locations.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) engaged us to build a robust, scalable and secure solution in the shortest possible time.

Govwifi tablet and phone

Our approach

We took over responsibility for GovWiFi at an alpha stage and followed our digital service delivery process to build the solution. We rewrote the application taking a cloud first and microservices approach, ensuring it would handle security intelligently and perform and scale effortlessly.

A key component of our strategy was to focus on a phased implementation rather than one big bang release. We worked closely with GDS staff as we built the solution, using weekly iterations to move at pace and showcase progress at the end of each week.

Made Tech are one of the top two delivery teams in GDS. GovWifi is one of our crown jewels. It’s fantastic.

David Lewis
Delivery Director at GDS

Results we achieved together

We now run the live GovWifi service for GDS. It is in over 1,000 government buildings and supports around 200,000 active weekly users. Additional up-to-date data about GovWifi users is also available.

At the end of 2019, Public Technology said the “implementation of GovWifi is perhaps the biggest success” of the tools and processes in the Government Transformation Strategy.

  • 200,000 active weekly users of the GovWifi service
  • Service available in over 1,000 government buildings
  • Over 480,000 registered users since August 2016
  • Over 200,000 monthly active users

Usage of GovWifi has shot up in the last 12 months, with about 80,000 connections now made to the service each day, compared with about 30,000 in January 2018.

From The Government Transformation Strategy – has it stuck? on Public Technology

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