At the heart of open government’s digital future

There are still those who con­sid­er open source to be a mar­gin­al option, less secure than pro­pri­etary soft­ware and not as good as the big, brand­ed soft­ware pack­ages – but their day has long gone.

Open source soft­ware is a core com­po­nent across enter­pris­es and gov­ern­ment. Indeed, it feels strange to think it was once viewed as unortho­dox. Com­pa­nies now rou­tine­ly mix both pro­pri­etary and open source soft­ware as a means of low­er­ing the cost of IT and stim­u­lat­ing inno­va­tion.

Until recent­ly, gov­ern­ment was behind that par­tic­u­lar curve, yet open source played a cru­cial role in under­stand­ing why gov­ern­ment IT projects were so big, com­plex and expen­sive. The treat­ment of open source by gov­ern­ment IT depart­ments in the first decade of this cen­tu­ry iden­ti­fied many areas of mis­un­der­stand­ing in strat­e­gy, archi­tec­ture, deliv­ery and pro­cure­ment. It also showed a way to rad­i­cal­ly low­er the cost base for gov­ern­ment IT. And this need­ed to come down – in 2009, indus­try experts such as Kable [mar­ket intel­li­gence] showed that, across the pub­lic sec­tor, IT costs were approx­i­mate­ly 1 per cent of GDP.

We firm­ly believe that estab­lish­ing a lev­el play­ing field for open source and pro­pri­etary soft­ware changes that dynam­ic and unlocks effi­cien­cies

The Coali­tion Agree­ment in 2010 was the first pro­gramme for gov­ern­ment to car­ry a detailed tech­ni­cal objec­tive: “We will cre­ate a lev­el play­ing field for open source soft­ware and will enable large ICT projects to be split into small­er com­po­nents.”

Too often, gov­ern­ment con­tracts adopt­ed a default posi­tion of using a small num­ber of large IT sup­pli­ers – the “oli­gop­oly” – on long-term con­tracts.

The result was a lack of com­pe­ti­tion for our con­tracts, poor val­ue for mon­ey and high lev­els of ven­dor lock-in. That lock-in often includ­ed uncom­pet­i­tive soft­ware deals – deals we have recent­ly rene­go­ti­at­ed to release tens of mil­lions of pounds in sav­ings.

We firm­ly believe that estab­lish­ing a lev­el play­ing field for open source and pro­pri­etary soft­ware changes that dynam­ic and unlocks effi­cien­cies. It cre­ates a much need­ed com­pet­i­tive ten­sion in our pro­cure­ments and opens up inno­va­tion.

It also enables gov­ern­ment to be an intel­li­gent cus­tomer, so that we can break up uncom­pet­i­tive con­tracts, place our­selves in con­trol of our IT archi­tec­ture and reduce the cost of gov­ern­ment IT.

We have shown this year that dis­ag­gre­gat­ing black-box sys­tem inte­gra­tor con­tracts into small­er mul­ti-sup­pli­er con­tracts saves us up to 30 per cent. To date, for 2012/13, we are book­ing £400 mil­lion in sav­ings from our spend con­trols process as we dri­ve through that change.

Now, all gov­ern­ment depart­ments use open source to some degree and intend to build on that base. The Depart­ment of Ener­gy and Cli­mate Change (DECC) and the Depart­ment for Busi­ness, Inno­va­tion and Skills (BIS) stand out as lead­ers and in some large oper­a­tional depart­ments there is now a strong pres­ence – for exam­ple, 30 per cent of Rev­enue and Cus­toms (HMRC) IT is open source.

We have under­tak­en a pro­gramme of myth-bust­ing to address unfound­ed con­cerns around the secu­ri­ty of open source soft­ware and tak­en steps to address any require­ments spec­i­fi­ca­tions that unfair­ly pre­clude open source – or pro­pri­etary – soft­ware. We have also pub­lished our open source tool kit to pro­vide guid­ance to the pro­cure­ment and IT com­mu­ni­ties so we can address capa­bil­i­ty issues in depart­ments.

But use of open source is about more than back-office effi­cien­cy – it is also at the heart of our com­mit­ment to deliv­er pub­lic ser­vices designed around the needs of cit­i­zens: dig­i­tal ser­vices that deliv­er bet­ter ser­vices for less mon­ey.

The future of gov­ern­ment is not about IT – actu­al­ly we have to fall out of love with IT. It is about dig­i­tal pub­lic ser­vices. The first stages of con­struct­ing this dig­i­tal gov­ern­ment were com­plet­ed ear­li­er this month with the launch of GOV.UK.

As my col­league Mike Brack­en, who leads the Gov­ern­ment Dig­i­tal Ser­vice (GDS), explained at the launch of the beta ver­sion of GOV.UK in Feb­ru­ary, this open gov­ern­ment plat­form is “inher­ent­ly flex­i­ble, best of breed and com­plete­ly mod­u­lar”.

For the inquis­i­tive, GDS has pub­lished its tech­nol­o­gy stack here: http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/with-govuk-british-government.html

This is the future of gov­ern­ment – and it is based on open stan­dards and open source. 

Liam Maxwell com­bines his role as deputy gov­ern­ment chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer (CIO) with that of direc­tor of ICT futures at the Cab­i­net Office where he is respon­si­ble for devis­ing new ways for the pub­lic sec­tor to use tech­nol­o­gy to increase effi­cien­cy and reduce cost; he has also worked as head of com­put­ing at Eton Col­lege.