The Import and Export Licensing team has been using different channels to communicate its work, so we will no longer be updating this blog.
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]]>We haven’t blogged for a few weeks because of the election. But progress on the new licensing service to replace SPIRE has carried on throughout, not least on the open general export licence (OGEL) registration process.
Registration, not application
OGELs are reusable licences that don’t require you to declare the recipient of the items when you export them. Instead you complete returns once a year, detailing your use of the licence.
Crucially, you don’t need to apply for an OGEL. You simply register for it, and use it without needing to wait for approval.
We’re now asking for your help with the new version of the OGEL registration service. Hopefully it’s a simplified version of what you’ll find in SPIRE, but we’ll let you be the judge.
How you can help
It’s important to mention that this is just a test. You won’t be registering for a real OGEL.
We’re asking people to run through our classification code service to begin with. When the new service is live you won’t need to do this each time you want to register for an OGEL. At this stage we haven’t yet made OGEL registration a standalone service, but we will.
Email lite.feedback@digital.trade.gov.uk if you want to be part of the test and we’ll send you instructions.
You can email us at the same address if you have any questions about this or any of the other elements of our development.
Thanks in advance for your help. There’s no substitute for testing our new systems with real exporters and we’re hugely grateful for those of you willing to get involved.
]]>And before we go too far down the road with it, we’re once again asking for your input.
SPIRE and the Workbasket
Managing applications in SPIRE isn’t a fun-filled task, but it definitely works. It might take a little time to get used to the various processes involved in resuming drafts, cloning previous applications and so on, but everything an exporter needs in relation to previous or current applications can be found in SPIRE’s Workbasket.
Or can it? These are a few of our big questions:
Plucking things out of the air a little there, but there might be some things SPIRE’s developers missed out that we’re at risk of forgetting as well, so let us know where you think the current service is lacking.
Beyond that, what do you dislike about the way SPIRE does work now? If anything’s cumbersome, time-consuming or flat-out annoying, we need to know at this early stage so clear pitfalls are avoided.
We’re not making a replacement for SPIRE that just looks a bit better – we want to make application management less onerous in whatever way we can.
Onto a prototype
Our aim will be to produce a prototype of the new application management functionality in the next couple of months, depending on how other elements of the new service progress.
It’s important to make clear at this stage that our initial development and prototype will focus on the important functions we need to pull across from SPIRE, before we develop anything more advanced. We’ll make the basics work first, but we need ongoing guidance on where to take development beyond that.
When we have the prototype we’ll be making it available to our beta testers. If you haven’t yet registered as a tester, we’re still looking for volunteers so if you’re keen to get involved please read our last blog entry to find out about our registration survey.
Goodbye 'userresearchforlite’
lite.feedback@digital.trade.gov.uk is also the address for suggestions for new features not currently provided by SPIRE, and to let us know what we should definitely keep, definitely improve or definitely scrap from how online licence applications work now.
Followers of these updates may notice that we have a new email address. It’s true, the famous userresearchforlite@digital.beis.gov.uk has been honourably discharged as the project has moved over to the new Department for International Trade. The old address still works, but the new one’s better.
And that’s the directive we’ve held to throughout this project: ‘the new one’s better’. Please do help us with your insights so we can make sure that turns out to be right!
]]>We’re looking for volunteers to run through what we’ve done so far and tell us what they think. We want all kinds of feedback, good and bad. Interested?
To start with, we’re looking for people to check what we informally call the ‘permissions finder’ – the tool that helps you establish whether your export needs to be licensed. We’ll be adding more modules for testing further down the line (for example our SIEL application form, which we’re working on now).
If you’re involved with exports of military or dual-use items we’re especially keen to hear your views. Perhaps you’re already familiar with the Goods Checker and OGEL Checker – these are the tools our permissions finder is partly designed to replace. Even if not, your comments on the new service will be valuable to us.
We’re after views from a wide range of industries. To make sure we can sensibly order your feedback we need you to answer a few questions about your company and the sector or sectors in which you do business. Please complete this survey – it will only take a couple of minutes.
Please bear in mind that we’re extending this invitation to lots of people – if you respond, you will be included in the testing, but we’ll be sending the details out in batches. Don’t worry if you don’t hear back from us straight away – your turn will come around.
We’ve written a small guidance pack that explains what you need to do to join the research, which we’ll send to you by email. We’ll send you a link to the beta service, and all the details you’ll need to easily give us your feedback.
We’ll also be asking whether you’d be willing to take part in other research activities to answer some more questions later on, or perhaps speak to one of our researchers to give us more in-depth feedback on the service. You don’t have to do any of this if you don’t want to, of course.
One thing that we must stress is that this is still a beta service. We’re using genuine export control information to power the service, but we’re continuing to improve its accuracy as we go along. At this stage you won’t be able to rely on the service to give you definitive answers about a particular export – you’ll still need to make sure you comply with all the export control rules you do now.
We’ve come on in leaps and bounds during the first stages of the private beta and we’re looking forward to seeing where a greater exposure to exporters will take us next.
Once again, to get involved in our expanded private beta, please complete this survey and let us know more about you. If you have any questions you can contact our research team at userresearchforlite@digital.beis.gov.uk.
]]>One of the most used areas of SPIRE is, unsurprisingly, the SIEL application form. Finding out which licence might apply to an export isn’t much use if you can’t then get your hands on that licence. Fair to say if we don’t get the process for applying for a single individual licence right, we won’t be able to consider this project a success.
It’s a lot of work, though. Here’s how we’re going about it.
Everything we do on this project is done within an Agile framework. We’ve mentioned this methodology in various blogs along the way, but to recap this means delivering the product in stages, so it’s easy to iterate and change each stage quickly in response to both positive and negative user feedback.
The opposite approach would be to build the entire thing and release it with the whole development team’s fingers crossed. Get it right: pats on backs. Get it wrong and, well, the amount of effort and expense wasted doesn’t bear thinking about.
If we want to get this right we need your feedback along the way. We’ll be delivering the new SIEL application bit by bit so we can find out what you like about it, and what you think we’ve missed out.
This might cause you to worry that some aspects of SPIRE that you need and use now might not make it across to the new service. This is a fear we can put to bed right now.
You’ll be able to continue to use SPIRE until we’re certain its replacement does the things you want and need it to.
We don’t plan to remove any SPIRE functionality, or your ability to use SPIRE to apply for SIELs, while we develop the new system. As we deliver the different components of the new application journey we hope you’ll try it out and give us your feedback.
If things are going well, you should want to switch to the new system for your own convenience. We’ve no interest in making your day-to-day interactions with government any harder.
We’ve mentioned that it’ll be delivered as ‘components’, but what might these look like?
In recent days we’ve been having a first stab at what should and shouldn’t be in scope for the first stages of delivery of the new SIEL application journey. Apart from the obvious – filling in details and submitting the application – we’ll be including the capability to save and resume part-completed applications, tying in a digital version of the end-user undertaking and other things to hopefully simplify the licensing process.
That might seem pretty bare bones. In particular, exporters are going to want the ability to copy or ‘clone’ previous applications so they don’t have to fill in the same details over and over. We’ll definitely be doing that - but not at the start.
The new system’s interactions with SPIRE make copying previous applications a tricky piece of development. If we include that in the first version of the new application, we’re going to lose valuable time that we could have spent asking users what they think about everything else we’ve done.
But if we release an early version without the ability to copy or template previous applications, our researchers can be asking people to try that out, while our developers carry on working on the more complicated components. And all the while, the old functionality will remain available on SPIRE.
We’ve done a lot of work on open licences and on our ‘permissions finder’ tool, but now the hard yards on SIELs begin. We’d like to hear from you on what you like about SIEL applications in SPIRE. What do you need us to retain in the new service? What are your gripes with how things work now?
If you have views on how SPIRE handles SIEL applications, or ideas about improved features for the new service, please get in touch with our research team at userresearchforlite@digital.beis.gov.uk.
We’re looking for your views over the next few weeks. And if you’d be happy to be a test subject for the initial version of the new SIEL application, we’d love to hear from you.
(And let us know if you think we should have used this image instead - it caused serious debate within the team!)
]]>Justin previously gave an explanation of some of the technologies that we're going to use to build LITE and how we chose them. It's worth taking a moment to discuss how these technologies will benefit users of the new service and provide the development team with the capability to meet the range of demands being placed on them.
We're using microservices, and here's why.
Technologies like Docker and Kubernetes are relatively new, but rapidly becoming mainstream. Google, BBC and Netflix (among thousands of other major organisations) are using these tools to build highly scalable and highly available systems that are backed by microservices.
Essentially, a microservices software architecture is just a way of building software in lots of small, individually deployable pieces, rather than one large program (often referred to as a "monolith").
At this scale, developers can reason about and fully understand the impact of a change they're making, reducing risk and the chances of introducing bugs.
An added benefit of small, succinct code is that it's easier to automatically test (via unit testing and other methods), which gives further assurance that bugs aren't being introduced by changes.
As all of the services interact with each other via an agreed contract, changes that might break other parts of the system can be more easily identified, understood and managed.
This all makes for a more reliable and bug-free experience, and keeps development moving quickly.
The software industry gold standard for how to run projects is now, without a doubt, the agile methodology. One of its core fundamentals is getting feedback quickly and iterating the design based on that feedback.
Getting quick feedback is reliant on being able to show off your work. One of the best ways to do that is to deploy it to an environment where others can see it (a testing or staging environment).
To this end, Docker and Kubernetes act as a cutting-edge deployment mechanism helping our development team to tighten the feedback loop.
The traditional method of delivering software via a so called "big bang" release (after weeks or months of development) is going out of fashion – and for good reason. Software is of more value to everyone if it can be released and updated more rapidly, incorporating feedback and changes as necessary.
An ideal situation is one where we're delivering updates to production systems on a regular basis – potentially many times per day. That might sound risky, but it's actually one of the best ways to remove risk from software development.
If changes are so small, and so easy to understand that they can move through your entire development, QA, build and deployment pipeline in a day, the overall risk is significantly reduced. From an operational perspective, smaller, more regular changes are also easy to manage, test and revert if there's a problem.
Kubernetes and Docker allow us to move away from an era of deployment where a whole system is turned off for a few hours for maintenance and upgrades. We'll be able to upgrade small parts of a system at any time – no more 'Service temporarily unavailable'.
We can react to problems faster, with no need to wait until the evening or weekends to release crucial fixes or changes. We can test changes with a subset of the user community before performing a wider roll-out. We can A/B test changes (by providing two different implementations in parallel).
Most importantly, if changes have adverse effects we can roll them back easily and investigate further.
During the alpha and early beta, we've been producing a set of building blocks that allow us to deliver a first class export licensing service. Later other licensing regimes related to export controls can be brought on-board, so that exporters have a single, consistent way to interact with government.
A services-first approach enables us to easily on-board other development teams (who could even be using different tools and programming languages). And we can change or add to our own software ecosystem as the requirements and approach for these other pieces of work starts to become clear.
These benefits don't come for free. Some of the challenges that we face are around log management and debugging – in that when a problem comes up, we have to be able to identify which part of the software ecosystem is causing it.
As with everything in software, we're making a trade-off, balancing the day-to-day costs of microservices with the benefits of faster deployment, a tighter feedback loop and a more resilient software solution. We believe the trade-off is worth it, and that we'll provide a more stable and maintainable service for our customers.
]]>But of course, the service is not yet freely available for you to make licence applications with – we’re in private beta at the moment - so we’re hardly done yet. Here’s what to expect in the first few months of 2017.
A lot of our early focus was on making open licence applications simpler, and OGELs more appealing to exporters as a result. But not every export is covered by an OGEL, and not every exporter wants to use one.
The existing paper SIEL application is quite burdensome. Much of our current focus is on tracking down duplication and shortening the application process as we digitise it.
The end-user undertaking inevitably comes into it: where we can, we plan to carry over information you’ve entered from the SIEL application to the EUU, or vice versa, depending on the order you complete them in. If you want to continue using the old paper system you’ll be able to.
Testing of the various iterations is ongoing; we’re getting invaluable info from every exporter we talk to. If you want to get involved please email userresearchforlite@digital.beis.gov.uk.
We’re also working on the system you’ll use to manage your licence applications and view the licences you hold. We’ve been calling it a ‘dashboard’ for a while, but it may not turn out that way.
A lot of the work in this area is visual; we need to make sure everything looks right to eyes accustomed to online shopping baskets and such like, without suggesting there’s about to be a sale on sofas.
We’ll soon be reaching a stage where we have something to test, so we’ll be looking for people accustomed to the equivalent system in SPIRE. If you’ve used the SPIRE ‘Workbasket’, and you’re keen to see how we’re trying to improve things in this area, please get in touch at userresearchforlite@digital.beis.gov.uk.
Open licences are handy things, saving people having to apply repeatedly to send similar shipments overseas. Unfortunately, over the years the number of open licences has increased beyond sensibly manageable levels, as new OGELs are added at the request of trade bodies or to cover specific activities and industries.
Alongside the SPIRE replacement project, we’re looking into how we can simplify open licensing (including OIELs). The new import/export licensing service is not dependent on this, but the two projects go hand in hand. If you have any views or suggestions in this area, let us know at userresearchforlite@digital.beis.gov.uk.
OK, so this isn’t the most exciting section of an otherwise exhilarating blog. During the more public-facing development we’ve been running a sideline in tidying up the systems case officers use to process licence applications.
We’re not looking for external help with this – after all, you probably don’t know much about how these systems look now. But rest assured we’re making things easier at our end so we can try to make things easier at yours!
We’re well aware of our focus on exports so far. Imports are a key strand of future development – eventually the new service is intended to replace the Import Case Management System (ICMS) in the same way as SPIRE.
Some licences and permissions are dealt with elsewhere, such as CITES permits and authorisations to import controlled drugs or nuclear material. To begin with, we’ve built a simple, interactive decision tree to direct importers to the right type of licence where one is needed. You’ll be able to take a look at this when we reach the public beta phase.
Replacing ICMS and the other systems is some way down the line, but if you regularly deal with the government over imports and have input for us in this area, please email us at userresearchforlite@digital.beis.gov.uk.
We’re currently scheduling our public beta phase for May/June, though that’s subject to change. The public beta will be when we open the new service to general use, though with the caveat that it’s not a final version and we’re still iterating and looking for your input. There’ll be more blogs about this as 2017 moves along.
New year resolution alert: we’ve not been keeping our readers up to date as well as we’d like, so we’re going to write more frequent blogs in 2017. What we cover depends on how we progress with the things above, but if you have anything you want to know more about or think there’s a blog we could write to fill a gap, let us know and we’ll see what we can do.
]]>As we strive to move end-user undertakings from a paper-based system to a digital one, we've come into contact with numerous exporters with excellent ideas about how we can improve and speed up the process. The amount of information required, the methods by which the end users can complete their sections, carrying over data from one form to another to reduce duplication - these are all things we're looking to tighten up based on user feedback.
But there's a key set of users we haven't had a lot of contact with yet: the end users themselves.
It can sometimes come as a surprise to end users of exported goods, software and technology that their end of the deal can include completing forms destined for the UK Government. What might seem like a simple transaction between two companies can suddenly become far less straightforward when they're confronted by demands for information about how the items will end up being used.
It's on us to try to make this less of a hold-up for you and your potential customers. While it's vital that all parties understand their obligations - there are obvious and necessary reasons for end-user undertakings for controlled items to exist - it's in nobody's interests to make the process onerous, or to put contracts at risk.
So we need to see this process from both ends - we have great feedback from exporters already, but we now need to shape things from your customers' perspective.
We'd like to ask you if you have any overseas customers, end users of your products, who would be willing to help us shape the other side of the end-user undertaking. We need to know what they find tricky about the current process, what causes hold-ups at their end and if there's any information they're asked to provide that they often find they can't.
But, naturally, there's a chance your end users might be suspicious that we're somehow using this development process to check up on them. We're hoping that, as readers of this blog who have been following our aims and goals for this project, you'll be in a position to reassure your customer that anything they tell us will be used solely for the development of the new service, and not attributed to them in any way in the future.
All we're after here is as much information as we can get about end-user undertakings - with plain-sailing weather we'll be able to develop a system that speeds up and simplifies things for both you and your customers, but without the input of end-users themselves we'll be missing a big piece of the puzzle.
If you can think of any of your customers who may be willing to help us, please do forward them a link to this blog so they can see what we’re about. Please don’t send us their details without checking with them - end users are likely to prefer not to have us contact them directly.
Alternatively you can simply give them our research address, userresearchforlite@digital.beis.gov.uk, and let them know we’d be very pleased to get any input from them on the current end-user undertaking process, and what they want to see (or don’t want to see) in the new one.
If you have any anecdotal evidence from customers who have found the paper-based process a problem in the past, we’d be happy to get that too.
And though we’re focused on how end users find the undertakings, we’re still keen to get any feedback on the exporters’ side of things. Please send anything you think might be useful to the address above.
]]>When they think about exporting, many people believe it only refers to selling physical goods to people or companies in other countries. They often don’t realise that software and technical information may also be subject to export controls, even if no money changes hands.
In fact, even transferring knowledge within this country may be subject to export controls in certain circumstances. So you don’t have to move something physical to be an exporter. You don’t even need to leave your office!
Here are some examples of transfers of software and technical information:
A) A global distributor sells encryption software for military satellites. This company buys the software from manufacturers and transfers it to resellers. The reseller has to log in to a server located in another country to download the software.
B) An SME’s day-to-day business requires collaboration by transferring software specially designed to modify end-user data and avoid detection by computer monitoring tools.
C) An SME has staff visiting from an overseas office. Designs for a new toxic gas monitoring system will be discussed at their business meeting.
D) An academic takes source code to a convention to share with a colleague. The source code was developed in conjunction with the military for national defence purposes.
Just like physical goods, exports of software and technology are controlled for several reasons, including:
• concerns over potential human rights violations
• preventing development of weapons of mass destruction
• foreign policy and international treaty commitments
• national and collective security of the UK and its allies
• regional security and conflict
The aim is not to prevent transfers of software or technical information for legitimate commercial, research or governmental applications but to help companies conduct business while addressing these concerns. This is why some software and technology may need a licence before it can be transferred abroad.
We are starting to work on a set of tools to make it easier for you to find out if you need a licence to export software or technical information. If you have experience in either of these areas, we would be grateful if you could complete a short survey where you can tell us about your needs and the challenges you face. You will also be able to leave your details if you would like to help us test our tools at a later date.
Alternatively, if you have any comments about this area or any suggestions for how we can improve the process, but don’t want to fill in the survey, please get in touch with us at userresearchforlite@digital.beis.gov.uk or respond in the comments section beneath this blog.
]]>One of an exporter’s more onerous tasks is the completion of an end-user undertaking. These are commonplace across the export control community and usually come in the form of paper documents that an exporter has to get their customers to fill out in advance of trade, outlining what the end user plans to do with the exported items.
There’s no doubting the importance of an end-user undertaking; nobody wants the items listed in the UK Strategic Export Control Lists to end up in the wrong hands, to be used in ways that can cause harm to innocent parties. We need to know where things are going so we can ensure safe trade – it’s the absolute purpose of export control.
That said, the process can be a real pain for exporters because of how an EUU has to be filled out, and how documents need to be shifted back and forth between the parties to the deal. Delays, miscommunication, documents lost, all these and others can add to the difficulty of an already tricky business.
So we’re going to digitise it - with your help.
Our plan is to include a digital end-user undertaking as part of the implementation of SIELs and other licence types in the new licensing system. OGELs don’t normally require an end-user undertaking, and as we’re moving those across from SPIRE first our work on the EUU is in its infancy, but we’re now at the stage where we need input from exporters.
Can you answer these questions for us?
So we can make a system that works for exporters, we need to know what you don’t like about how the EUU works now. We already have an idea from previous research where issues often arise while completing an EUU but at this point we need those assumptions either confirmed or challenged, and the more feedback we can get the better.
An example of the type of information we’re after involves emails. With a digital system, it seems a retrograde step to ask you to fill out the end user’s details and then print out a form to physically send to them – our assumption is that our users will want the end user to fill out their part of the documentation online as well.
But will this cause any problems? Do you work with customers who don’t have an email address, meaning we need to retain some form of paper-led service, or does virtually everyone in the import/export field in 2016 communicate electronically?
We're also looking for people who actually fill out the end-user undertakings. If you complete EUUs either as an importer or in any other capacity, we'd very much like to hear your views on the process. We're interested in:
If you, or anyone you know, has filled out EUUs in the past, we'd love to know all about it.
If you can help us out in this area, you can either respond with what you need from the EUU in the comments beneath this blog, or get in touch with our researcher Andrea (andrea.agueci@digital.bis.gov.uk). We’re aiming to have a prototype of the digital EUU ready soon, at which point we’ll be looking for users to help us test it so if you’re willing to get involved with that please indicate that when you get in touch.
Also, if you have any contacts who you have sent an EUU request to in the past, who you think might be willing to discuss the process with us, please ask them to contact Andrea at the address above. Hopefully we can smooth this process out for both exporter and end user, but we'll need your help to get there.
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