New Media Awards 2007 Atos Origin

DVLA Personalised Registrations

http://pda.dvlapl8.com + wap.dvlapl8.com

Nominated in Modernising government award category.

If people choose to spend their money on personalised registrations it is better that it generates revenue for re-investment in Britain’s public infrastructure. DVLA Personalised Registrations is a small, highly efficient department within DVLA that sells in excess of 240,000 registrations every year and has generated over £1.2bn for the Exchequer since 1989. Maintaining a strong public profile and facilitating an easy to use service has been central to this department’s success and the use of new technologies to promote and deliver this service has been a leading feature of their drive to achieve the highest standards in public service.

1 nomination from readers

  • Building and maintaining public confidence in its service has been at the heart of DVLA Personalised Registrations’ ethos since 1989 when the department was formed to make personal registrations widely available to the public. The advent of the web redefined how the public could interact with this DVLA service, creating easier access to the vast range of available registration marks, which now number in excess of 30 million.

    In 2006 DVLA launched a new service specifically for the rapidly growing mobile environment and in-so-doing became the first department in central government to embrace this evolving technology.

    The project was given three technical but public centric criteria that it must meet before the decision could be taken to commission it. These were:

    1. The application must be capable of operating on most web enabled handsets

    2. It must offer intuitive search capabilities to help customers explore the full potential of marks available within the huge database

    3. It must deliver a fast response to data queries

    As a result DVLA Personalised Registrations combined pda and wap mobile services supporting 2 distinct search functions; one designed for people who have some knowledge of the British registration system or already know what they are looking for and the other an intelligent search to take natural language keywords and query the entire database of over 30 million personalised registrations in under a second. For image-capable devices, the pda version also displays a graphical representation of the user’s results, providing helpful visual confirmation of their choice of plate.

    This move to mobile technology has helped DVLA Personalised Registrations continue to deliver a more open and accessible environment for the public, further building on the department’s service orientation and it has become a pathfinder project, paving the way for the adoption of similar applications throughout DVLA.

    Nominated by Louise Pierpoint, 31 May 2007