Government seeks to define basis for software adoption

The Coali­tion Gov­ern­ment laid out plans to re-eval­u­ate, rene­go­ti­ate and open up its infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy rela­tion­ships with ven­dors short­ly after it was elect­ed. This mas­sive cost-cut­ting effort was applied with gus­to, but then it stalled.

Now, two-and-a-half years on, what hap­pens next will depend on the results of a pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion. The gov­ern­men­t’s dilem­ma is how to imple­ment the pol­i­cy. The ques­tion for the con­sul­ta­tion is what “open” in open stan­dards and open source real­ly means.

The premise was that the IT mar­ket had become stag­nant. Projects were expen­sive because gov­ern­ment was using so few com­pa­nies to run them and to sup­ply the tech­nol­o­gy to be imple­ment­ed. This lack of com­pe­ti­tion, the gov­ern­ment con­tend­ed, had inflat­ed prices and pub­lic IT projects were dis­as­trous because the tech­nol­o­gy options had become stag­nant. This lack of com­pe­ti­tion had sti­fled inno­va­tion.

The gov­ern­ment pro­posed a two-part solu­tion in its Coali­tion Agree­ment in 2010. It would inject a breath of fresh air through gov­ern­ment dat­a­cen­tres by back­ing open source tech­nolo­gies wher­ev­er they offered cheap­er imple­men­ta­tion and inno­va­tion. It also planned to shake up the mar­ket by break­ing down big IT projects into small­er com­po­nents, which could be han­dled by a larg­er num­ber of sup­pli­ers, and not just the major pro­pri­etary ven­dors of the past.

Liam Maxwell, deputy gov­ern­ment chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer at the Cab­i­net Office, insists the gov­ern­ment is still com­mit­ted to this pol­i­cy. “We spend a large amount of mon­ey on IT in gov­ern­ment because we have for years spent our mon­ey with the same old crew – which my min­is­ter refers to as the ‘oli­gop­oly’ – under large, long-term con­tracts,” he says.

The future of gov­ern­ment is open source

Set­ting his ideas out in a 2010 report for The Net­work for the Post-Bureau­crat­ic Age, a Cameron admin­is­tra­tion think-tank, Mr Maxwell says gov­ern­ment IT had become so expen­sive that its total expen­di­ture was more than the entire pub­lic bud­get for Wales or more than the Min­istry of Jus­tice and Income Sup­port bud­gets com­bined.

“Have we got val­ue from IT?” asks Mr Maxwell. “We don’t think we have. “When we break up the big, black box con­tracts – dis­ag­gre­gate them into their com­po­nent parts – we are look­ing at sav­ings of 20 to 30 per cent,” he says.

Mr Maxwell believes the gov­ern­ment has made progress. The Cab­i­net Office has saved £400 mil­lion this year by dis­ag­gre­gat­ing con­tracts that have come up for renew­al. It has also been deploy­ing open source soft­ware where it can. The Gov­ern­ment Dig­i­tal Ser­vice also launched an ear­ly ver­sion of a web­site called GOV.UK which was built using open source soft­ware.

“The future of gov­ern­ment is open source,” he says. “GOV.UK is all open source. It’s the pub­lish­ing plat­form for the future of gov­ern­ment.”

Yet the cen­tre­piece of gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy – the piece that brings it all togeth­er – has still to be set­tled; name­ly, its pol­i­cy on open stan­dards.

Both coali­tion pro­pos­als – to pro­mote alter­na­tive tech­nol­o­gy and to break projects into small­er parts – begged for a way to glue the parts togeth­er. There would be lit­tle point in break­ing projects up if it only made them so dis­parate it cre­at­ed a dif­fer­ent prob­lem.

In the first place, the orig­i­nal dif­fi­cul­ties that gave rise to the lim­it­ed IT ecosys­tem derived from tech­nol­o­gy’s inher­ent need for its parts to work togeth­er as a coher­ent sys­tem. This was achieved by using spe­cif­ic stan­dards of com­mu­ni­ca­tion so one part of the sys­tem could co-oper­ate with anoth­er, shar­ing appli­ca­tions, func­tions and data.

The prob­lem was that the mar­ket had coag­u­lat­ed into com­pet­ing islands of tech­nol­o­gy based on pro­pri­etary stan­dards. Dom­i­nant ven­dors used their stan­dards tool kit to lock com­peti­tors out, stag­nat­ing the mar­ket and mak­ing open source hard­er to inte­grate.

The coali­tion pro­posed it would place gov­ern­ment func­tions and data in the broad­est pos­si­ble ecosys­tem to ensure no sin­gle sup­pli­er or tech­nol­o­gy was so pow­er­ful that it could not be swapped with any oth­er. In this way, con­tracts could be dis­ag­gre­gat­ed and dom­i­nant sup­pli­ers replaced with­out caus­ing prob­lems for exist­ing sys­tems, paving the way for open source soft­ware to be deployed because it would not be ham­strung by pro­pri­etary stan­dards and pro­to­cols.

The gov­ern­ment would do this by employ­ing open stan­dards – pro­to­cols and con­nec­tions that could be used by any mar­ket par­tic­i­pant and imple­ment­ed in any tech­nol­o­gy with­out con­straint.

Fol­low­ing dis­cus­sions with lead­ing ven­dors and stake­hold­ers in the IT mar­ket, includ­ing the British Stan­dards Insti­tu­tion and Inter­na­tion­al Stan­dards Organ­i­sa­tion, the coali­tion decid­ed to form the Open Stan­dards: Open Oppor­tu­ni­ties Flex­i­bil­i­ty and Effi­cien­cy in Gov­ern­ment IT com­mit­tee to define what an open stan­dard might be in con­text with its plans for open source imple­men­ta­tion.

A key con­sid­er­a­tion is whether open stan­dards should include those for which a roy­al­ty fee is charged. This would include con­sid­er­a­tion of soft­ware that con­tains some pro­pri­etary code, but is oth­er­wise open. Exam­ples of these would be fair, rea­son­able and non-dis­crim­i­na­to­ry (FRAND) stan­dards which are usu­al­ly core ele­ments of an appli­ca­tion. These are essen­tial, par­tic­u­lar­ly for ini­ti­at­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­to­cols and because of this are charged for at non-pre­mi­um prices.

This is a con­tentious area because purist open source advo­cates spec­i­fy that no licens­able mate­r­i­al should be used in the soft­ware.

The UK pol­i­cy was designed to cre­ate a lev­el play­ing field for all com­pa­nies, large and small, with inter­ests in sup­ply­ing ser­vices and prod­ucts to the gov­ern­ment IT strat­e­gy, espe­cial­ly the move to a cloud envi­ron­ment (G‑Cloud). Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it was swept up in the inter­na­tion­al tus­sle between the inter­ests of pow­er­ful pro­pri­etary tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies and their open source com­peti­tors. The result will deter­mine the blue­print for the future, based on the con­clu­sions reached by the government’s Open Stan­dards: Open Oppor­tu­ni­ties inquiry which is due to report its find­ings.

How much it will save also depends on this out­come. Esti­mates range from £600 mil­lion to bil­lions of pounds but, what­ev­er the sum, the true vic­to­ry would be a free­ing up of the stag­nat­ed gov­ern­ment IT ecosys­tem to allow new blood in.

It remains to be seen if this island will be home to tru­ly open stan­dards which will pave the way to a har­mo­nious blend of open source and pro­pri­etary soft­ware.