A few weeks ago, I lodged an Freedom Of Information (FOI) request with the Department of the Taoiseach for information related to the setup and running of MerrionStreet.ie. I requested the development and running costs of the site since its launch in July 2012.

The site was built for the Government on the WordPress Open Source software platform by Arekibo (an Irish digital media company). The reported cost of the project was €40,000 and the project took about five months to build (from initial RFP to the go-live in mid 2011).

The reason for the request was to see if the use of Open Source software (such as WordPress) can really deliver an efficient cost-effective website, or whether there were any hidden costs associated with its deployment. MerrionStreet.ie is a relatively straightforward website based on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, php) stack, and does not require complex interfaces or heightened security. It should therefore serve as a good barometer for whether there is efficient hosting platform available within the Irish Government for such sites.

The costs provided based on the FOI are outlined below and broadly in line with previously released estimates:

The FOI response also detailed the following costs:

• Total running costs for Merrionstreet since inception in July 2010 are € 57,777.35 (as per above € 45,751 in 2010 and an estimated € 12,026 for 2011)
• Total costs paid to Arekibo to date are €35,204
• Total staff costs since July 2010 are €76,965. The team that maintains and updates the site content is drawn from staff in the Government Information Service in the Department of the Taoiseach, with the exception of two temporary staff – journalism graduates requiring relevant experience who were recruited at CO level (although one has recently left the Department).

Hosting spend and cost per request

Out of all the costs above, one of the most expensive is the hosting costs estimated to be €4,500 for this year. This is despite the fact that many of the bandwidth intensive objects on MerrionStreet.ie e.g. videos, are stored on third party platforms such as YouTube. The website is currently hosted by the Local Government Computer Services Board and costs are calculated on a cost sharing basis at the end of each year. The costs for 2011 are expected to be in the range of €4,000 to €5,000.

The site has had 784,336 pageviews (see Google Analytics below – requested through FOI) since its launch in July 2010. With hosting charges of an estimated €6,500, this works out at €8.28 per 1000 page views. In comparison to other sites (i.e. based on an analysis of UK based Gov websites), this appears to be high given the site is a static php site hosted on open-source low cost stack software.

There has been 202,116 unique visitors to the site with an average of 2.47 pageviews per visitor. This works out at a cost per 1000 visitors of around €20.45 – again relatively high in comparison to other sites.

Moving to Cloud computing

Full comprehensive data on the cost and analytics for Irish Government websites is not freely available. Many government websites around the world freely release their web statistics (e.g. NY Senate and UK Dept. Business, Innovation and Skills), but there are no examples of Irish central government departments publicly releasing this data.  This data would make a good addition to the Government’s proposed centralised open data portal.

The Government has said it will continue to enhance the use of cloud computing in the public service and a “Cloud Computing Strategy” for the public service is expected to be published at the end of the first quarter 2012. The recent Public Service Reform plan contains a provision to “Seek, through market exercises, to develop a compelling case over traditional computing provision for infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) provision for the public service”.

Moving many sites (particularly relatively simple static sites such as those under the remit of the Dept. of the Taoiseach), to a concurrent cloud hosting environment would reduce the hosting expenditure and provide for improved performance for the site users. A cloud infrastructure would reduce costs by allocating resources as the web sites require them, and should be seen as a priority during this period of economic austerity. MerrionStreet.ie is an optimum site to migrate and its corresponding hosting expenditure should be monitored to see if some a move can significantly reduce costs for 2012.

MerrionStreet.ie 20100712-20111219 Analytics Dashboard Report

Earlier today, David Cameron and Nick Clegg unveiled their joint plans for government, which they say will  create the “radical” change the UK needs.

The joint Programme for Government attempts to combine the best of both Conservative and Liberal Democrat election manifestos.

The coalition partners said it represents a programme for five years of partnership government driven by the values freedom, fairness and responsibility:

“We believe that it can deliver radical, reforming government, a stronger society, a smaller state, and power and responsibility in the hands of every citizen. Great change and real progress lie ahead”

Coalition Programme

Transparency

The coalition agreement devotes a whole section to government transparency. It says how important it is for government to open the doors of public bodies to ensure they are held accountable for their actions and spending. The importance of setting government data free is also recognised as a catalyst towards “enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites”.

The coalition pledges are taken primarily from the Conservative party manifesto, but it also includes election promises from the Liberal Democrats. The pledges include

• We will require public bodies to publish online the job titles of every member of staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale, and organograms that include all positions in those bodies. - Conservative manifesto pledge
• We will require anyone paid more than the Prime Minister in the centrally funded public sector to have their salary signed off by the Treasury. - Conservative manifesto pledge
• We will regulate lobbying through introducing a statutory register of lobbyists and ensuring greater transparency. - Lib Dem manifesto pledge
• We will also pursue a detailed agreement on limiting donations and reforming party funding in order to remove big money from politics. - Lib Dem manifesto pledge (although not capped at £10,000 as in their manifesto)
• We will strengthen the powers of Select Committees to scrutinise major public appointments. - Conservative manifesto pledge
• We will introduce new protections for whistleblowers in the public sector. - Conservative election pledge
• We will take steps to open up government procurement and reduce costs; and we will publish government ICT contracts online. - Conservative manifesto pledge
  
• We will create a level playing field for open- source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components. – Conservative manifesto pledge (“Better” IT procurement though utilising open-source software was also a Lib Dem pledge)
• We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000. – Conservative manifesto pledge
• We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis. - Conservative manifesto pledge
• We will require all councils to publish meeting minutes and local service and performance data. – While not explicitly stated in the Conservative manifesto, it in the spirit of their overall aim to ensuring ‘people have a right to government data thus making the performance of the state more transparent.’
• We will require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full. - Conservative manifesto pledge
• We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties. - Conservative manifesto pledge

“Our political system is broken”

Along with the pledges on transparency the government also commits to “fundamental political reform”. This was a key Liberal Democrat demand, and the statement below seems highly influenced by their perspective of the UK electoral system. While they won almost a quarter of the overall vote, that earned them only 9 percent of the seats in Parliament:

The Government believes that our political system is broken. We urgently need fundamental political reform, including a referendum on electoral reform, much greater co-operation across party lines, and changes to our political system to make it far more transparent and accountable.

There are many other pledges on political reform, but one of the most participatory in terms of civic engagement is the the plan to ‘introduce a new ‘public reading stage’ for bills. This is intended to give the public an opportunity to comment on proposed legislation online. Along with this there will be a dedicated ‘public reading day’ within a bill’s committee stage where those comments will be debated by the committee scrutinising the bill.”

This was a Conservative election pledge to try to open up the legislative process and improve the scrutiny of proposed legislation, while still retaining the fundamental character of our representative democracy.

The next government looks set to vastly expand the range of data available on sites such as data.gov.uk, while also expanding the scope of the Freedom of Information Act (another pledge outlined in the coalition agreement). The plans outlined today regarding government transparency and accountability look all set to meet David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s stated ambition to:

distribute power and opportunity to people rather than hoarding authority within government. That way, we can build the free, fair and responsible society we want to see.

For more on today’s Coalition agreement, and for a video of the event check Number 10 news page.

The Federal Government has an overriding obligation to American taxpayers. It should perform its functions efficiently and effectively while ensuring that its actions result in the best value for the taxpayers. - President Obama (March 2009).

Last month, the Center for American Progress (CAP) launched a new two-year project called “Doing What Works”. The aim of the project is to analyse government spending performance, to ensure resources are focused where they’re needed the most, and on efforts that generate the greatest returns.

The project aims to demonstrate how government could achieve results at lower cost, set priorities based on outcomes and efficacy, and restore public confidence that government spending works. It is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Campaign for American Workers, and includes experts from government advocacy groups like OMBWatch and the Sunlight Foundation.

On announcing the initiative John Pedesta (President of the Center for America Progress) explained how the federal government needed to operate more efficiently, boost its productivity and direct its resources where they’re needed the most and on efforts that generate the greatest returns.

Approaches that prove effective should be replicated. Those that perform poorly should be redesigned to boost results. And those that are redundant, misguided or misdirected should be eliminated.

President Obama’s Chief Performance Officer, Jeffrey Zients, addressed the event and explained how the U.S. government must and will “do more with less”.

Zients on Inefficiency, Strategies to improve and Early Success

Jeffrey Zients and the Obama administration have already taken a number of important steps to set high goals, strengthen performance evaluation and cut waste in federal contracting and other operational systems. While these actions present an ambitious agenda to transform and modernize the way the government does its business, more is necessary. There still exists many examples of inefficiency within the federal government, that contribute to a continuing perception that government wastes taxpayers dollars:

[...] The Department of Veteran Affairs still processes disability claims by hand, passing manila folders six to 12 inches thick from metal desktop to metal desktop. Veterans wait 160 days to receive their benefits.

[...] The Patent Office, the institution right at the center of protecting and promoting innovation, now receives more than 80 percent of patent applications electronically. That’s good. However, these applications are then manually printed out, rescanned and entered into an outdated case management system. The average processing time for a patent is about 3 years.

These types of antiquated processes are too common across government.

In order to improve performance and eliminate these kinds of “antiquated processes” he presented 6 strategies which he is working on (quoted from the event):

• Eliminating Waste – The most sustainable way to save money is not to trim around the margins, but rather to cut what doesn’t work, what is duplicative and what is outdated. Through the line by line review of the 2010 budget, we identified 121 program terminations, reductions and savings totaling $17 billion.

• Drive top priorities – In most organization, leaders set priorities and then drive the organization to meet these goals. This is hard in government because senior political leaders tend to focus on policy development in crisis management – not execution and not implementation. To focus senior agency leaders on getting the most important things done, we launched the High Priority Performance Goal initiative in June 2009.

[...] If you take a look at the High Priority Performance Goals, you will see three attributes. First, the goals are aligned closely with the agencies’ missions…You will also notice that many goals span across agencies, attacking the problem that the government too often works in tight silos, in programs, bureaus and departments…They’re working together with a shared goal to reduce the homeless veteran population by 70 percent by the end of 2012.

• Leverage purchasing scale – The federal government is far and away the world’s largest purchaser. We buy over $500 billion of goods and services every year. Despite this scale, we too often do not get the best prices or value for our money. And our contracting processes are slow and cumbersome.

The president has committed to saving $40 billion through contracting reform by the end of FY 2011. This serves as an important catalyst to push us to action. How do we do this? To start, we need to leverage our purchasing power and buy smarter. We need to work across agencies to take advantage of our scale. Take the simple example of office supplies. Over 100 federal organizations have separate contracts for office supplies. As a result, they’re paying 30 to 50 percent different prices on any given day for the exact same pens and paper.

We do our purchasing like we’re 100 medium-sized businesses, not the world’s single largest purchaser. By standardizing specs for commonly purchased items and working together across silos, we can pool our purchasing power to leverage our size and lower cost.

• Close the IT performance gap – I believe IT represents the largest gap between the private and public sectors. Technology has been at the center of those private-sector productivity gains across the past two decades – both efficiency gains and service quality improvements. For the most part, the federal government hasn’t participated in these gains. In service quality, we’re falling further and further behind.

If you can book dinner for an airline flight online, then why shouldn’t you be able to make an appointment at the local social security office the same way? On the efficiency front, the story is the same. We have antiquated systems and processes throughout many agencies. For example, the government system for managing retirement records is stuck in a different era.

Here it is, a cave in Boyers, Pennsylvania. Yes, a cave and, yes, the retirement records are stored in 35,000 metal file cabinets. It reminds me of that famous last scene at the end of “The Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Every major IT project is rated against performance expectations and we’ve launched tech stat review sessions and accountability sessions. If a project is over budget or behind schedule or not performing up to expectations, we will either develop a credible turnaround plan or we will terminate it.

• Open government -Let’s turn to the next strategy, open government. That’s about opening ourselves up to get feedback that can help us perform better. The president has committed to an unprecedented level of openness. In terms of performance, opening government gets us two things.

First, it makes us more accountable (e.g. USAspending.gov and Recovery.gov) by holding our feet to the fire. Second, it accelerates innovation (e.g. SAVE Award) by engaging the best minds to get to the best solutions.

• Attract and motivate top talent. – Too often, we don’t focus on people as a primary tool for achieving our missions and we underinvest in training and development. To attract and retain the best people, we need to fundamentally rethink how we both hire and develop our employees.

[...] You need all three of these slides in eight-point font to map out the hiring process at HUD. It’s a 40-step process. Nineteen different signatures are required, 139 days from start to finish. Not surprisingly, this results in terrible satisfaction scores from both managers and applicants. And HUD’s 139 days to hire is not the exception.In fact, it’s right at the average across all agencies. I spend a lot of time recruiting in the private sector and my experience is that the best people don’t loiter for five months. They find another home.

[...] Our goal is to cut the hiring time at least in half. We will focus on making the process more candidate-friendly and less bureaucratic. Starting with short, plain language, job descriptions, not 20-page documents full of government lingo. Requesting resumes and cover letters, not burdensome essays that don’t predict performance anyhow.

In conclusion, Zients explained how collaboration and an emphasis on success can bring about the organisational changes required to enable the government to “do more with less”. This spirit of collaboration has been one of the essential tenets of the Open Government initiative, with executive departments and agencies expected to ‘use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves and across all levels of Government‘:

We’re working with the agencies not from a compliance perspective, but with a collaborative spirit that acknowledges that we’re all after the same result. This focused collaboration is a key lever for driving change. But leaders have also got to convince people within the organization that change is possible.

Too often, I believe, organizations spend too much time thinking about and planning for change management and all the steps that are needed to prepare the organization for change. My strong belief is that the best way to prepare an organization for change is by changing and by celebrating the early wins that build change muscles and convince people that change is not only possible, but right within their reach.

After outlining examples of inefficiencies and a path forward, Zeints highlighted some early wins:

Across the government, there are examples of public servants and agencies who are demonstrating this point with early wins.Like Nancy Fichtner, who recently won the SAVE Award and met with the president for suggesting that veterans, leading VA hospitals should keep their medications rather than throwing them out and then having to reorder them at the local pharmacy.

The procurement executive at NNSA who saved 18 percent through eBay-like auctions in reverse, where contractors bid down the price for the services they’re competing for. Or the CIO and his team at the VA who pulled the plug on 12 IT projects when they saw how off-track they were. Or the team at Citizen and Immigration Services, the old INS, which in just 90 days, replaced its opaque application process with a transparent tracking system that allows people to check their status online, better and cheaper.

How Doing What Works facilitates these objectives

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government. – President Obama’s inauguration address.

Doing what works seeks to realise the vision of a more efficient, accountable and transparent government, that can meet crucial national priorities with less resources.

The project will focus on three areas (overlapping with the strategies outlined by Jeffery Zeints):

• Eliminating or redesigning misguided programs and tax expenditures focused on areas such as health care, energy and education;
• Boosting government productivity by streamlining management and improving human resources, IT and contracting;
• Develop a foundation for better decision making through a transparent and metric based approach.

Achieving this objectives will require elected officials and federal agency leaders and managers to:

• Challenge the status quo
• Measure what works
  
• Experiment with what works
• Coordinate and consolidate
• Enlist the public
• Be ready to execute

Along with this, the project seeks to address the public’s mistrust in government’s ability to do what’s right. Some 61% of the public agreed that government spending is almost always wasteful and inefficient. Such mistrust is a significant barrier to advancing the policies above and those outlined by Zeints.

Public attitudes will not change unless the public sees that government is acting responsibly and working to deliver maximum return for taxpayer dollars. As such, the CAP released an adjoining paper called “Golden Goals for Government Performance” that provides five case studies of state governments and foreign governments that are leading the way in terms of defining policy goals.

Government Performance

While the Government Performance and Results Act, requires agencies to define goals, there are often so many goals that it is impossible to get a sense of what different government departments and agencies are actually trying to achieve.

The Golden Goals report sets out a federal government performance model based on an analysis of what works at five different governments in the UK, Australia and the US. It examines examples where governments have successfully defined outcome goals that set out what they intend to achieve for society. The examples include:

• The state of Victoria in Australia in defining goals for government as a whole across a 10-year timeframe in 2000.
• The commonwealth of Virginia adopted a similar approach in 2004 by building consensus across state Democratic and Republican party lines, and involving the legislature, executive branch, and citizen and business leaders in defining success for Virginia should look like.
• The government of Scotland followed the Virginia model, but has gone further by adopting a single overall goal for government, focused on increasing sustainable economic growth that sits above five strategic objectives, including promoting a smarter and a greener Scotland.
• The state of Washington took a slightly different approach by redefining the way budgets are set. After the formulation of goals across government, agencies work together to rank potential programs depending on their likely contribution to the goals.
• The United Kingdom first adopted a set of clear government performance goals across government departments and agencies as part of the budgeting process in 1998. These goals cover the whole range of government activity, from international development to educational attainment and from crime reduction to community relations.

Summary

Last year’s report from OMBWatch on Building a Better Government Performance System outlined various recommendations for reforming current performance systems used by Government. These included changes to PART and GPRA, Promoting Leadership and Accountability, Fostering Policy Innovation and Owernership with Positive Reinforcement, Balancing the roles of OMB and Agencies, Engaging outside Stakeholders and Improving Data. Over-and-above this, however, they specified 6 principles that should guide the Obama administration in its efforts to reform and enhance government performance systems.

These principles include: Enhancing the Public’s right to know how well Government programs work; Strengthening Leadership and Accountability from Top to Bottom, Building on Current Systems rather than creating new ones, Re-Balancing the roles of OMB and Federal Agencies; Improving Performance and Accountability with Positive Reinforcement and Seeking input from Outside Stakeholders. All these principles are contained within CAP’s Doing What Works agenda and Zeints’s performance strategies.

No one topic is more or less important than the others, and many overlap and intertwine in a variety of ways. The overhaul as envisaged by Jeffery Zeints and CAP’s doing what works project is crucial to ensuring the creation of a new government performance system is fair, effective, and widely used. Only through this can we truly understand what works and what doesn’t and ensure resources are directed towards where they’re needed and in efforts that generate the greatest returns.

Related:

• Doing What Works – Includes papers on Government Transparency, Contracting, Performance measurement and more
• Doing What Works Transcript
• Federal News Radio story on Doing What Works
• Building a Better Government Performance System
• Performance management in the Public Sector

The RSA recently posted video of Matthew Taylor’s lecture on how brain and behaviour research is increasingly being incorporated into political and policy debate.

A section of the debate is animated below:

His lecture explores what’s wrong with our democracy and what needs to be done. Extracts of the speech are outlined below:

Democracy can only be successful as we the people make it. But how well suited are we to being good democrats. We come, over recent years, to understand more about the idiosyncrasies of our mental processes. Some of these appear to compromise our ability to make wise and fair democratic judgments.

[...] The problem with our democracy is not, as we often think, about the performance of our politicians nor the workings of our constitution, but it’s about the content of the democratic conversation. Proper processes of democratic deliberation in which we either participate directly, or which we can acknowledge as legitimate, would help us to be less petulant, wiser and more responsible task masters for beleaguered representatives. These are some of the practical ways we might encourage people to be better citizens.

[…] I believe both the case for a new collective spirit and the principles that could underpin the development of modern civic and democratic spaces, are to be found in thinking about human nature.

Co-operation and engagement are not things we ought to do, they’re a necessity to help us steer a course through the modern world, using brains that evolved before the invention of the wheel.

[…] As a schoolboy socialist…the first explicitly political arguments I ever had were about human nature. My vision of a good society rested on the view of people as fundamentally collaborative and benign, something only hidden by the depredation of the system.

In this vein, the essence of Gov 2.0 and the Open government movement – as a means of facilitating collaboration and engagement – can, in time, lead to democratic renewal through empowering us all to become better democrats.

A new UK Government IT strategy is due to be launched next week according to UKauthority.com. This will be a refresh of the four-year-old Transformational Government programme is expected to be accompanied by a Treasury report on ‘Smarter government’.

A draft version of the ICT Strategy has been leaked to the Conservative opposition who have described it as ‘unambitious’. The document sets out the direction for government ICT until 2020 and seeks to save billions through greater use of social media and innovations such as an ‘App store’ and Government cloud.

The document gathers ideas from John Suffolk (UK Gov Chief Information Officer) and others into a strategic IT vision that is aligned with other government strategies including:

• Digital Britain Strategy – ‘programme to secure the UK’s position as one of the world’s leading digital knowledge economies’
  
• Cyber Security Strategy – sets out government plans to create an Office of Cyber Security and Cyber Security Operations center to ‘make cyber space a safe, secure and resilient place’
• Building Britain’s Future – plan on working ‘with the British people to shape our economic recovery and together build a stronger, fairer and more prosperous country’
• Excellence and Fairness – approach to improving public services through Citizen empowerment, New professionalism and Strategy leadership
• Operational Efficiency Programme – requiring ‘£4 billion of savings a year on back office operations, and £3.2 billion of savings a year on IT spending’.
• Recommendations from the Power of Information Strategy – a call for action to improve government’s use of digital technologies

Strategy Summary

UK Government ICT Strategy

The UK Government is the largest employer of IT Professionals in the UK. It spends approximately £16bn per year on technology which accounts for 4.6% of overall public sector expenditure.

The ICT Strategy has been developed to support the delivery of core public sector goals through: Improving the delivery of public services; Improving access to public services; and Increasing the efficiency of public service delivery.

It acknowledges how:

Demand for public services and expectations of levels of service are ever increasing. Citizens and business expect the same levels of access and personalisation that they see from large private sector organisations such as Amazon and Tesco.

As such public services need to be more citizen focused and utilize the power of social media and the internet as a means of transforming delivery (similar to how the web has transformed the music industry through changing the platform for delivery).

The ICT strategy is based on 14 strands of activity, which include the following initiatives:

1) A Move to Cloud Computing – The ‘G-Cloud’

The strategy envisages developing and implementing a government cloud infrastructure (or ‘G-cloud’) that would enable public bodies to source ‘ICT infrastructure, development capabilities and software applications from a secure, resilient, flexible and cost-effective service based environment’.

A target prototype of a G-cloud infrastructure in expected in early 2010 with the expectation of a standard model by the end of 2010. It’s expected the development of the G-cloud will be a key enabler ‘of the £1.6 billion savings from ICT outlined in the Operational Efficiency Programme report.’

Government departments will be able to adopt a ‘pay as you go’ model – paying only for the time applications are actually in use. They’ll be able to scale up and scale down based on the seasonality of their application needs in a similar way to how Amazon or other cloud services work. 

In the US the General Services Administration (GSA) is already working on this type of approach. Casey Coleman (GSA CIO) recently spoke about the possibility of moving up to 45% of applications – those with a FISMA rating of low – to public/private clouds. Along with this Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has been pushing for the adoption and use of commercial cloud computing services for information not classified or sensitive in nature.

NASA already has a pilot cloud computing environment setup called Nebula, and State authorities (such as Utah) are already developing their own hybrid clouds. Such developments are in their early stages, but represent a recognition of the importance of cloud computing to improve services and reduce costs throughout government.

2) The Government ‘App store’

A Government Application store will be developed to enable sharing and reuse of business applications, services and components across the public sector.

The strategy envisages reuse of a range of ICT services becoming the norm, with anticipated savings of over £500m per annum by 2020:

The net effect will be to increase visibility of software already owned by the public sector so that other public sector bodies, and those bidding for public sector work, can see what’s available at no basic cost. Re-use is, in principle, already accepted as the preferred delivery approach across the public sector. However in most cases today, it is easier to do a fresh procurement.

The G-AS will provide automated electronic support for the applications procurement lifecycle and reduce the overhead costs of reuse of applications.

The scope for savings by 2020 runs here into many hundreds of millions of pounds given that it is not uncommon for large government organisations each to have between 300 and 1,000 applications in its portfolio; the opportunity is to reduce this to the order of 1,000 business services for the entire public sector.

An example of this is already up at running at GSA’s App store. It was setup earlier this year as a means of reducing the cost of IT infrastructure by utilising commercially available software. It provides access to Business, Productivity and Social media applications that have been vetted by GSA, and for which there are government agreements. Cloud IT services are expected to be added to the site soon. Over time it is expected to become a one-stop shopping site for commercial technology and services. While it’s still in an early stage, it does provide an insight into how government procurement could be rationalized and streamlined.

The Strategy notes how the ‘average procurement of an ICT services contract takes 77 weeks.’ Reducing this lead time, has the opportunity to produce significant savings, which increasing the adoption of innovative services within government.

3) Greater emphasis on Open Source

The ICT strategy explains the limitations with commercial off the shelf software:

COTS software uses proprietary code and cannot easily be reused across the public sector – reducing value for money, flexibility and agility. Importantly, this also impacts our opportunity to reduce risks to service delivery.

As part of a plan to increase the use of open source across the public sector the Open Source, Open Standards and Reuse Strategy was published earlier this year. It states:

that Government will actively and fairly consider open source solutions alongside proprietary ones in making procurement decisions. In addition, Government will, wherever possible, avoid becoming locked in to proprietary software. In particular it will take exit, re-bid and rebuild costs into account in procurement decisions and will require those proposing proprietary software to specify how exit would be achieved.

The ICT strategy seeks to build capability within the public sector to increase the amount of open source code and software in use and to make it available for reuse elsewhere. There is already many examples of open source software in use in government e.g WordPress use at 10 Downing St and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Along with this RedHat ranks the UK 7th in its government open source activity.

Local Government also expects to increase it’s use of open source software significantly over the coming years. Nevertheless, the use of open source is not a panacea. The strategy notes many widespread barriers to the adoption of open source, but highlights how the establishment of the CIO Council and other initiatives are helping to increase it’s reach and acceptance.

The development of open source communities, and EU policy and initiatives (such as the Open Source Observatory and Repository) should help with open source adoption. However, particular initiatives e.g. the White House move to Drupal, can serve as a catalyst to embedding trust and acceptance of open source applications. Bold moves such as this are needed to drive adoption to where it can effect substantial change in government IT budgets and cultures.

Other strands of activity expected to create significant savings include:

• Data center consolidation strategy – with development of 10-12 highly resilient strategic data centers  implemented to common standards saving £300m a year and cutting power consumption by 75%
• Common desktop strategy – will involve 80% of government PCs using a shared utility service by 2015 potentially yielding savings of £400 per year

Make IT Better

The Conservative opposition party has criticized the ICT Strategy for lacking ambition and for failing to consult with the public:

We think there’s a better way. Not only is it possible to develop a more ambitious, cost-effective and transformative vision for government IT, but we believe that it’s also possible to pursue a completely different approach to making policy. Rather than the traditional closed approach to policy making that this report typifies, we want to throw open the process and allow people to contribute their ideas on how policy should be designed. In the post-bureaucratic age, we believe that crowdsourcing and collaborative design can help us to make better policies – and we think this approach should begin now.

As part of this they’ve setup a website called Make IT Better, which allows the public to post comments and suggestions on the leaked report. They have split up the report into different sections and have already received hundreds of comments relating to different areas of the strategy.

While I don’t necessarily agree with all the criticism of the report, there are a few areas in which I feel it falls short. My primary concern is around the lack of transparency and openness in relation to IT projects, contracts and spending.

Waiting for US Style IT openness

The Conservatives claim that since 1997, Labour ministers have spent approximately £100 billion on IT projects. They cite a study, however, that concludes 70% of recent IT projects have failed. This equates to ‘tens of billions of pounds wasted on systems ranging from the calamitous £20 billion NHS supercomputer to the poorly managed Home Office probation service IT system.’

In relation to IT project control and governance the strategy claims:

Once that strengthened management [of the Gateway review process] is established, by 2020, we will follow the lead of the Office of Management and Budget and public sector CIO community in the USA by publicising the objectives and progress of our major projects, including naming the leaders and the results of all external assurance reviews.

The Gateway review process will be strengthened and KPIs will be developed to ‘ensure departments continually test their projects for compliance through their internal portfolio, programme and project governance.’

There is, however, no mention of making the results of these reviews open to the public. Tony Collins notes how this reveals ‘the UK government is as enthusiastic about openness on IT projects as it would be to a corporate visit to the dentist.’ It has taken years for FOI requests to reveal details of these reviews. Instead, these results should be published online, allowing the public visibility of the status of major IT projects.

The strategy appears to reference the Federal IT Dashboard, but suggests the UK will not have such a service until 2020. This is a real disappointment as transparency in this area could serve to increase trust and accountability of the annual £16bn government technology budget.

Openness and citizen participation

The Conservatives have compared the leaked strategy with their own plans to break up large IT projects into smaller components and encourage more use of open source software. They claim this would end the government’s reliance on a handful of large suppliers (they’ve called for a moratorium on the £100 billion of government IT contracts.)

They outline three main principles in relation to IT policy:

• Big is not always better – increase the proportion of IT budgets spent with innovative young companies
• Openness – increase the use of standard data formats and open source. They’ve also claimed they’ll publish online all items of government expenditure over £25,000 – hence spending on IT projects could be analysed in a similar vein to how Recovery.gov/USASpending.gov analyzes spending
• Empowering citizens – opening up government data for others to build on e.g. through releasing data through services such as data.gov.uk (expected to be released in beta this month)

While aspects of these principles are contained within the strategy e.g. the release of government data, the Strategic principles of Better, Greener, Cheaper lack inspiration. The concepts of a government cloud and App store have been mooted since June, and can been seen as just a natural extension of current IT trends. For example, if a citizen App store was announced e.g. such as DataSF or appstore.dc.gov, that would be a real innovation.

The commentary and debate already live on MakeITBetter reflect the desire of many to contribute to this strategy. The Conservatives have taken the lead in setting up a website to crowdsource comments on the strategy. They’re using this as a guide to frame the party’s response when it’s officially released. The government would have been wise to provide the public with the opportunity to comment on the strategy as it was being developed, or at least before the final report was released (similar to the Power of Information Taskforce report).

Maybe the one interesting thing to come from the leak of the report is crowdsourcing has now become a political topic, with parties seeking to be the first to ask the public for their views on policy matters. It’ll be interested to observe whether the site will attract a partisan crowd or whether it’s produce substantial debate on the policies themselves. The recognition of citizen engagement as a tool for framing policy may yet be the most important principle overlooked by this ICT strategy.