Weeknote #3: w/c 2023-08-28

This section is not part of the standard

The content in this section is only included to help explain the standard, provide examples or make recommendations about use.

It does not contain requirements for complying with the standard and is not governed by the formal standards process.

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Welcome back to the Tariff Data Standards weeknotes. It’s Steve Corder again, fully recovered from the joy of doing my first ever public weeknote and ready for round 2 (or weeknote 3). Simon Worthington is also here to cover what he and Patrick have gotten up to in the past week.

Weeknote cadence

Firstly, I thought I’d explain how we’re going to use weeknotes. I want these weeknotes to be transparent and make sure we’re working in the open so that everyone can understand one of the most important data models we use in government (although I might be a little bit biased!).

However, I don’t want weeknotes to become stale, so whilst for now we’re publishing weekly we may move to a fortnightly or monthly affair. If you are familiar with agile sprint cycles you may know that two weeks is the standard sprint length, so future weeknotes might align to our teams’ sprint cycle.

What the Tariff Application Platform (TAP) does

Secondly, I thought I’d use a few paragraphs to explain ‘TAP’. The Tariff Application Platform (TAP) allows our department to collate the Tariff policies from 11 different government departments and produce a dataset that realises those policies as a structured data model for our partners. They are HMRC for use in their Customs Declaration System (CDS) as well as the Customs and Excise System for the Administration of Revenue (CAESAR) and the Guernsey Electronic Manifest System (GEMS) for Jersey and Gurnesey’s respectively. TAP is the ‘reference implementation’ of the data model we are standardising.

TAP replaces the equivalent EU system built by DG TAXUD. It’s probably the only tariff data system that combines the TARIC3 data model with UK Data Standards, adheres to the UK Technology Code of Practice and utilises the very successful GOV.UK design system allowing for accessibility and ease of use for users.

TAP is built in-house by a team known as the TAP Team (we’re original with our naming). It started life as a database requiring data engineers to make tariff changes and has evolved into an editing tool called the Tariff Management Tool (acronym TaMaTo – an in-joke as the tariffs charged on tomatoes can be complex!) which allows Tariff Manager users to make multiple changes to the tariff. Each change is fully auditable back to the originating policy. Our roadmap for this year focuses on improved journeys for our users as well as improvements to how we check data for consistency.

As a product manager, I could talk about TAP for days, however I’ll now hand over to Simon to cover the more important work of getting us to a recognised Data Standard.

Bringing new thoroughness to data documentation

One of our big tasks on the journey to standardisation is ensuring that users of the standard can access clear, concise and thorough documentation at the level of detail that they need. Our work this week has focused on establishing a house style for this new documentation.

Content Designer Patrick and I collaborated in a pair writing session. We went back and forth on reducing the complexity of documentation without compromising on detail or precision. As ever when working with content designers, the process felt a little like magic as redundant content fell away to be replaced with sentences that just gave the essential meaning. The result can be seen in our updated page about footnotes.

Now that we’ve established what detail matters, we can produce more content without requiring Patrick’s constant supervision. As a content designer Patrick is one of the experts on the multidisciplinary TAP Team but that doesn’t mean he has to write every word – his time is just as well spent showing others the correct way to do things. Tune in next week for more about the users we’re targeting and how we’re ensuring our new documentation is up to scratch!

We also got some very positive news this week as we now have a date for the first step on our recognition journey – a session at the Data Standards Authority’s Peer Review Group on 20th September! At the session, data experts from across government will be introduced to the work and will have their first chance to provide feedback and guidance.

We’re very excited about this first session but it’s still a few weeks away, so in the meantime we’ll be continuing with our documentation and engagement efforts to ensure the standard is in a good shape prior to being introduced to PRG.