The secret to cutting the costs of public sector computer systems

One of biggest problems facing the public sector is the question of how to make ICT work to bring productivity and savings. On the face of it, technology has advanced in so many ways, the potential is obvious: but experience shows that the public sector is not very good at using technology effectively. What has gone wrong?

I am going to propose that the reason the public sector fails in its use of ICT is that it acts within a system based on false premises. I hope I will engage your interest early by laying out those false premises. They are:

1. Procurement is an effective way of selecting the best supplier of a service.
2. Competitive tenders provide a competitive environment that force suppliers to deliver competitive prices.
3. A new computer system that delivers a single service to the UK population or the population of Scotland must be delivered by a single provider. To do anything else would be expensive and more complicated.
4. Strong governance is critical to ensuring that services are delivered in budget and on time.

Ineffective procurement

Procurement of new IT systems is different from many other forms of procurement. Creating IT systems is a creative task: not one of production and delivery. As such the procurement process is much like the process of recruiting a member of staff, choosing an architect for your new building or the artist who will produce a portrait of the Queen. We can look at previous work and assess it but there are no guarantees that the end result will be what we wanted.

However, the added, and very critical, complication is that government procurement is not, usually, about contracting the services of an individual: it is usually about contracting the services of a large company. So there is no guarantee that the individuals delivering past results will be the same individuals serving you. Indeed the service you receive may be subcontracted and delivered by a smaller company that the government would not have considered awarding the contract to because it had no known track record in the public sector.

As many people in the industry understand: at best, procurement is a good guess at which supplier might end up delivering on what is required. At worst, it is just a process that ensures that, out of a range of suppliers, the government can be seen to have been objective in making a random decision.

Competition in name only

Competitive tending sounds like competition—it has ‘competitive’ in the name! But how many large IT systems can you remember that were delivered on time and in budget?

It seems that the competition, which takes place at the point of tendering, is not a competition that determines the cost of delivery. In other words, the price of the end product changes after the contract has been awarded. What is worse is that we all know this. Somehow, we just choose to ignore this awkward truth.

Competition is only effective if it continues to be competitive not just once every five years, but year upon year, week upon week.

Competitive tenders cannot work if the resulting contracts give suppliers a guarantee of being able to provide a service for any substantive length of time. This is not a criticism of any supplier it is simply a fact about what competition is. Competition is competition: a contract for five years is not a competition!

A single service does not demand a single provider

Computer systems have evolved whilst the public sector was sleeping.

How many of us are aware that when we log onto Amazon to buy something we are not all logging onto the same computer? Are we aware that the computer we actually log onto may be in any number of countries in the world and that the computer system may have selected us to trial a new service which is different from the service being offered at the very same time to the person sitting beside us on another computer logging onto Amazon?

The age of the single centrally run mainframe computer are past. The computer industry has discovered that it is cheaper to run vast numbers of anonymous and relatively small desktop like computers than trying to develop and maintain highly complex single supercomputers. (Spot the irony!) The industry is learning to take big tasks and break them down into small numbers of small tasks which can then be farmed out to lots of computers and processors to carry out the work and report back. This system is far more robust because the failure of one computer system is a small setback that can be worked around whereas the failure of a dedicated mainframe may be a disaster. Indeed, modern distributed computer systems expect computers to fail.

So when we log onto Amazon, we are identified and allocated to a computer that deals with our requests. There is no reason why everyone in the UK or Scotland should have their requests serviced by the same computer, nor even the same service provider.

But we are wedded to the idea that centralisation and large scale delivery brings ‘efficiencies of scale’ and mass production. We still believe in the mainframe, even if it is a thing of the past!

But suppling the same service from multiple providers would be complicated and expensive

How could two different suppliers provide the same service to different groups of the public?

This question turns out to be as bizarre as the answer is familiar. How about if I asked, “How could two different plumbers fit gas central heating to different groups of the public?” Well of course they could!

So, why can’t two different providers provide the same IT based public service to different groups of the public? As soon as we see the reference to IT, we focus on the IT system and not on the service. We start to be convinced that the computer system has to be the same. But we don’t mind if two plumbers do their job differently as long as they do a good job and the system works. If one supplier does a bad job, we won’t use them again. It’s called competition!

Do we really believe that plumbers would be cheaper if there was one central plumbing company for everyone serviced by their own central call centre?

I understand that some people still believe in a non-privatised public sector run by people of integrity concerned to deliver a good service. But we are not talking about public servants here. We are talking about public services that are already delivered by the private sector.

For “governance,” substitute, “delay and cost”

The word ‘governance’ is all the rage. Wikipedia says, “Governance is the act of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance”. It seems to me that most of the governance I hear about is none of these. It is a governance centred around avoiding doing the wrong thing. It reflects a politics more fearful of mistakes than inspired to deliver innovation and greatness.

I would go further and say that governance in the world of public sector ICT in Scotland is all about avoiding making mistakes.

Sadly we will never innovate if we don’t allow people to make mistakes. We may all grow old and die but the ‘governance’ we are talking about here will never give us innovation. I am minded to point people to read Tim Harford’s book “Adapt”. A book which presses home the critical importance of experimentation in innovation whilst reflecting on why this is so hard for governments.

Why are we fearful of mistakes? We are fearful of mistakes because the costs of mistakes are enormous. Why are the costs enormous? Because we believe in delivering centralised services from single providers for contracts lasting as long as ten years. Why do we do this? We do this, because we believe it is the only option.

It isn’t.

The Alternative ICT Strategy for the Public Sector in Scotland

By September 2012, the Scottish Government is scheduled to deliver an ICT Strategy for the Public Sector in Scotland[1].  This is a huge opportunity for Scotland to reform the public sector’s use of ICT into a service that facilitates the move into a citizen centred, efficient public sector tailored to the varying needs of a diverse and distributed population. Unfortunately, it could also turn out to be a missed opportunity.

Here is my ‘alternative’ ICT Strategy document.  It is a work in progress so this blog entry will be changing over time.[2]  This is what I would like the government ICT strategy document to look like!

Core technology building blocks

To deliver public services in Scotland, the government has adopted some core technologies on which everything can be built.  These technologies are well defined, current, standard and adaptable.

The Internet

The Internet is the principal highway of communication in the world.  Rather than re-inventing the wheel by producing a separate Public Sector Network (PSN[3]), Scotland is going to use the Internet.  It will invest resources to ensure that every community in Scotland has high-speed internet and that there is sufficient redundancy in the system to provide reliability and resilience.  The Scottish Government will encourage research into technologies that reduce the energy consumption of the internet infrastructure by reducing power use and allowing redundant capacity to be switch off when it is not required. Work will be carried out to take existing dedicated public sector infrastructure and make it PSN compliant until such times as dedicated public sector networking is no-longer required. This PSN compliant sub-network will be referred to as SWAN (the Scottish Wide Area Network).[4]

Cloud Hosting

Wherever possible public services will be hosted in the cloud using technologies that are agnostic to the cloud service provider.  There will be no Scottish government specific cloud (G-Cloud[5]) but the public sector in Scotland will, given the required security clearance, have access to services offered to the UK public sector on the UK G-Cloud.

All confidential data relating to Scottish citizens will be stored on servers physically located within Scotland where there is absolutely no ambiguity over legal jurisdiction.

Services which do not relate to confidential data or only process confidential data in memory, through access controlled from Scotland can be located on servers anywhere in the world. However, in purchasing these services preference will be given to services located closest to central Scotland by Internet distance as this reduces the carbon footprint of transmissions.

For clarity this means that, given sufficient cloud hosting capacity within Scotland, at a moments notice, in the event of some international crisis, it would be possible to transfer all public sector processing within Scotland and all relevant data would already reside there.  However, under normal circumstances, the public sector would be free to innovate using any service that provide a suitable balance of service quality, cost and ease of use.

In all cases data will be electronically secured to a level which is sufficient to prevent unauthorised access but is not excessive such that it prevents or overcomplicates legitimate use.

HTML5

Whilst the HTML5 standard is still being developed, it has become the point of technological convergence for web based services.  The latest desktop web browsers: IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari support it as does the WebKit engine behind chrome which sits on Android and iOS mobile devices.  There is a Chrome plug-in available that provides HTML5 support for older versions of Internet Explorer on Windows.

All public services will be delivered as web services using HTML5 on standard devices that support it.  All systems will be open-sourced and the private sector will be encouraged to develop alternative ways of interacting with these services.  The public sector will have local freedom to adopt alternative solutions where they are felt to provide cost effective benefits to the community.

99% of existing hardware infrastructure within the public sector can support Internet based web services so no extra hardware investment is required up front to support this strategy.  In many cases, when computer systems require to be upgraded they can be replaced by Raspberry Pi[6] computers that will act as fully function internet clients at a fraction of the cost of computer systems in use today.  These savings will be used to fund the one-computer-per-pupil programme described later in this document. 

Other technologies

Other technologies can and will be used in small scale pilots and in circumstances which specifically require them.  However, all the systems built to use these technologies will be open-sourced and any dependency on a propitiatory and unsubstitutable technology will be clearly documented and explained.

Procurement of hardware

In the past the government has tended to favour large scale procurement of hardware with the view that the larger the purchase the better the deal. However, in practice it turns out that large purchases are very slow to procure and the costs of administration and delay can outweigh any apparent economies of scale. It is also the case that such procurements are often far too large to be tendered for by companies based in Scotland.

From now on the government will, wherever possible, allow procurement to be carried out at a local level.  However, to ensure that this is carried out in a cost effective way, all procurement costs will be published within one month of the transaction along with all contractual terms. This work will be carried out in coordination with the Benchmarking of Scottish Public Bodies[7]SG-Benchmarking-2012-06 which will be standardised across every public body in Scotland to address issues with the existing process[8].

No procurement can or will take place under company confidential contractual terms without a public written explanation.  By publishing this information prices can be driven down and local purchasers can compare costs from local suppliers and make informed choices based on this information.  A central government procurement team will be made available to provide skilled procurement and administrative support so that the cost of procurement is minimised.  The central team will fulfil the administrative burden of publishing procurement details.

IT Hardware and Infrastructure support

Central government, as well as maintaining its own hardware and infrastructure will offer hardware and infrastructure support to local services at no less than full cost price including an appropriate share of all the associate overheads.  However, this support will be prioritised to new, smaller and remote services and larger and more established services will be encouraged to establish or buy in their own support locally where it can be tailored to local needs and can be located close to the need at lower cost.

As with hardware procurement, all costs will be made public and shared across the public sector within a month of any contracts being signed to provide the Management Information (MI) to enable sharing of cost savings without tying organisations into restrictive shared services contracts.

Public sector software development

Wherever possible the public sector will choose to use existing standard ‘off the shelf’ software to deliver services. In contrast to previous policies the assumption will be made that ‘free’ open source solutions are the first choice unless there is a good case for using a commercial product. Wherever a commercial product is used instead of an equivalent open source solution, a justification for this decision will be published along with the invitation to tender.

Whenever software has to be custom built for the public sector, this software will be open sourced by default[9]. Any exceptions will have to be justified along with a published explanation of the reason for the exception. Under normal circumstances commercial confidentiality will not be an acceptable reason for closed sourcing software built specifically for the public sector. As we transition to this policy there will be a number of public sector software systems which will contain new open source elements that depend upon legacy closed-source systems. By the end of 2013 a full list of these will be published along with a proposed time-scale for phasing out the closed-source dependencies. Note that this specifically relates to software custom built for the public sector and does not prevent the use or dependency upon standard close-source software libraries, tools or packages.

The general principal is that public money invested in the development of software for the public sector should result in publicly available software which can be openly used and developed over time. By doing this we are working to removing the unfair advantage currently afforded to the current supplier to government. This will also enable smaller companies to contribute to parts of an overall system.

The Scottish Government Digital Service (SGDS)

In order to manage this central repository of publicly owned open-source software, a new Scottish Government Digital Service (SGDS) will be set-up modelled around the early successes of the Westminster Government Digital Service[10]. This service will take over the work of the Direct Scot portal and begin its work by developing a number of simple services for the public sector throughout Scotland. As well as open sourcing and taking over the development of the the Scottish Public Sector portal: “DirectScot”[11], the SGDS will also work with research groups in Scotland to develop and open source the core Revenue Scotland tax calculation models which will be used to process all tax calculations for Revenue Scotland. The SGDS will work closely with the vibrant and world class developer community in Scotland and will encourage contributions and ideas from that community.

Technology in education

Open source, open data and education

The Scottish Government sees a great opportunity to bring together open data and computer systems for public services with the needs of education to provide students with interdisciplinary learning opportunities for learning information technology skills.  A significant proportion of learners struggle to engage and find relevance in curriculum content.  However, the government will be open sourcing almost every aspect of public sector computing systems including data processing, statistical analysis, financial processing, graphical design, user interface design and animation.  This means that there are opportunities from primary education through to college and university to use real-life examples as case studies, projects and exercises.  But unlike education as we know it today, the work produced and submitted, in whole or in part, can be incorporated into the services of the nation within days of the work being completed.

Imagine for example a primary school project to enhance or redesign the Visit Scotland web page for a local tourist attraction where the end result was used for real within days of the project ending.  Imagine a university accounting project to report on weaknesses in the code used by government to compare regional expenditure on roads maintenance.  How about a computer science project to improve the algorithm for choosing the shortest public transport route between locations used by the public transport infrastructure of Scotland.  This is truly win win for everyone.  Even the private sector benefits by being able to build products and services on a rich and vibrant infrastructure of open systems and data.  Such products and systems would have a global market.

Computers become the new paper and pencil

For many years the level of use of computers in schools has poorly reflected their use in the world of work.  This situation has been confounded by the cost of providing computers in schools and means that most pupils have only limited access to shared computers at school.  Consequently computing has been seen principally as a subject to learn rather than computers being common place tools like pen and paper.  However, from August 2013 every pupil in every school in Scotland will have access to their own Raspberry Pi[6] computer which they will take with them from class to class and class to home.  In a dramatic step forward, the curriculum will be able to rely on the availability of technology to support the individual learning of every pupil in every subject in every school and every home.

Future Glow

After some consultation, the Government has decided to withdraw from plans to adopt a closed Microsoft managed and designed replacement for Glow for Education[12]. Following extensive feedback received, we recognise that committing to a service delivered and designed by one company would be a waste of taxpayers money as it would lock the government into monopoly control over modifications and advancements in the platform. Indeed we recognise that the whole concept of using large multinationals to both advise government and then supply services is inappropriate and will no longer take place.

We have invited Charlie Love, the author of Glew[13] to work on secondment to the SGDS and work with an agile software team there to put the necessary infrastructure, support and security in place to make this service available to all schools in Scotland in pilot form by December 2012.

High speed broadband and WiFi Scotland

As well as fulfilling our commitment to rolling out high speed broadband throughout Scotland, we will also be facilitating the delivery of free public access WiFi hotspots in community centres (libraries, post-offices, etc.) within every community in Scotland. Branded “WiFi Scotland” these hotspots will ensure that everyone in Scotland is close to a point where they can connect to high speed broadband with their own WiFi enabled device. We will also be working with local councils to ensure that every community (that does not already do so) has a public access area where anyone can access the internet without having to have their own computer.

WiFi Scotland - building on a Scotland as the best place to do business

In addition to ensuring that every community has access to broadband, we will also set up a scheme to enable every hotel and conference venue in Scotland to provide free WiFi under the same consistent “WiFi Scotland” branding and logon. The cost of this scheme will be fully met by the venues but will be highly competitive and provided through existing commercial providers contracted to central government. The Scottish Digital Service will support this by providing an open data service listing all available access points throughout the country and enabling a mechanism for users to report faults or service problems so that we can work to ensure that the quality of the service is high.

We believe that this service will build on Scotland’s existing high ranking as a place to do business giving business travellers and conference organisers the confidence that wherever they meet or travel in Scotland they can be confident of high speed internet sufficient to meet requirements like live video conferencing and broadcasting.

Meetings redesigned

Whilst we will always recognise the particular value of personal interaction and face to face meetings, it is impossible to ignore the huge costs associated with arranging and conducting physical meetings within the public sector. We also recognise that such meetings are not always an effective way of conducting business which may require ideas to be discussed and commented upon in a way that could be carried out more effectively online. Beginning in September 2012 the Scottish Government will embark on a one year consultation to establish a new strategy for carrying out public sector meetings. The aim of this consultation to determine when and in what circumstances we can conduct meetings that do not require everyone to be physically located in the same place or necessarily at the same time.

… to be continued

Change log

• 4 April - added reference to cloud computing.
• 4 April - added “Technology in educational” section and reference to savings in IT hardware through the deployment of Raspberry Pi’s in some public service contexts.
• 9 April - posted as Gist on Github (to make it easier for others to track changes) and added sections on open sourcing software and setting up a Scottish Government Digital Service.
• 28 April - added WiFi Scotland and study on meeting redesign.
• 25 June - updated facts relating to delayed release of government ICT strategy and the announcement of SWAN; added links to cross reference blog articles on issues raised such as the PSN and Open Source software in the public sector; and added reference to the SGDS taking on the role of developing the Revenue Scotland calculation models. Also added references to Glow, Glew and yet another policy change :)

---

1. The ICT Strategy was originally due to be delivered in Spring 2012 but is now due for release in September 2012 after a public draft is released for informal comment.  ↩

2. The original Markdown format text of this document is stored in a GitHub:gist https://gist.github.com/2342423 where it can viewed along with a history of edits since 9 April 2012.  ↩

3. Public Sector/Services Network (the name changed during the development of the idea): http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/public-services-network. Despite strong arguments made about the cost savings of introducing the PSN, the arguments seem to be internally inconsistent: http://stuartroebuck.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/what-is-public-sector-network-psn-cloud.html.  ↩

4. The Scottish Government announced SWAN (Scottish Wide Area Network) in June 2012. A nod to this is given here to fit in with policy commitments.  ↩

5. The G-Cloud Programme: http://gcloud.civilservice.gov.uk/.  ↩

6. The “Raspberry Pi” is a low cost computer designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation charity as a $35 computer for kids. For more details see: http://www.raspberrypi.org/.  ↩

7. SG-Benchmarking-2012-06

   “Benchmarking of Scottish Public Bodies’ Corporate Services 2010/11”, Scottish Government, 14 June 2012. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2012/06/1600.

8. Figures obtained from the “Benchmarking of Scottish Public Bodies” would either suggest huge waste in expenditure on ICT provisions or a failure to standardise the benchmarking process around useful and comparable measures: http://stuartroebuck.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/ict-costs-in-scottish-public-bodies.html.  ↩

9. A fuller background discussion and FAQ on using Open Source in the public sector in Scotland can be found here: http://stuartroebuck.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/open-sourcing-public-sector-in-scotland.html.  ↩

10. Westminster Government Digital Service: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/working-for-gds/.  ↩

11. The current prototype DirectScot website can be found here: http://www.directscot.org/.  ↩

12. The full text of and further discussion of the Glow announcement of 8 June 2012 can be found here: http://stuartroebuck.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/glows-next-phasea-response.html. A more recent news update was also published on 23 June here: https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/NPF/2012/06/23/end-of-term-news-from-glow-continuing-to-light-up-learning/.  ↩

13. Glew is beta software of a single sign-on framework which can be used to integrate Google Apps for Education and other services such as Wordpress Blogs, Media Wiki, Moodle and many more: https://www.glew.org.uk/.  ↩

Glow2—Managing Open Technologies in the Public Sector in Scotland

The need to reduce costs and improve services is bringing the use of free and open source software to the centre of discussions about strategies for ICT in Scotland. But it appears that Scotland isn’t about to change its ways.

Where are we now?

An article in the Spring edition[1] of the UK publication, Central Government says:

Free, Libre or ‘Open Source’ Software … has been the big success story of the IT world, taking the enterprise by storm and exposing proprietary software as over-priced, inflexible and insecure. Governments from Brazil to China have rushed to adopt the free GNU/Linux operating system (OS), to benefit from software that can be adapted to local needs. Held back by their cautious procurement policies and procedures, the UK Government and local authorities have so far just dipped the occasional toe in the water, then rushed to embrace the next special deal from proprietary software vendors.[1]

How true that is, and how relevant to the current process of developing a new ICT Strategy for the Public Sector in Scotland, and for the decisions being made now about the successor to Glow[2] (the Scottish “national online community for education”). Glow, when it launched for full in 2007[3], was “the world’s first national education intranet”[4]. Surely we don’t want to be overtaken by the rest of the world!

It is perhaps encouraging to note that soon after the above quote, the UK Office of Government commerce produced a report[5] on open source software trials in Government and concluded, amongst other things, that:

Open Source software is a viable and credible alternative to proprietary software for infrastructure implementations, and for meeting the requirements of the majority of desktop users[5]

But whilst it is great to know that the UK Government is behind the use of open source software, one might look at the very comprehensive report by the Institute of Infonomics for the European Union[6] (produced two years earlier) and ask why it has taken the UK government so long to get its own act together? Here’s a quote from that earlier report where it talks about the cost benefits of free and open source software:

Despite the possibly high costs of migration (which would also arise by migration to another proprietary technology) this shift should be gainful in any case. The situation after the migration to open source software will lead to lower life-cycle costs. Furthermore costs of service, support, and maintenance can now be contracted out to a range of suppliers, being placed in the competitive environment of a functioning market. The costs of this more service-oriented model of open source are then also normally spent within the economy of the governmental organization, and not necessary to large multinational companies. This has a positive feedback regarding employment, local investment base, tax revenue, etc.[6]

Back to reality

But I’m sad to say that I may have been a little misleading. The reports quoted above are not new reports. The first two quotes were published in 2004, and the European Union report on FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) was published in 2002—ten years ago and five years before Glow first launched.

So, when late last year (Sep 2011), Mike Russell (Cabinet Secretary for Education in Scotland) announced a move to using “the free tools and the open source services that already exist on the web”[4], this “new approach” was proposing something that had been recommended to the public sector in the UK at the beginning of the previous decade and long before the first version of Glow was even conceived.

But let’s give Scotland a chance to catch up, after all, the first reference I can find to the Scottish Government making a policy of using free and open source software was in 2007:

Next Steps

41. There is a need to maximise the returns on, and benefits from, investments in publicly funded software. The ability to freely share software which has been developed within the Scottish public sector or bespoke software funded by the Scottish public sector would be enhanced by making this available as FLOSS [Free/Libre and Open Source Software]. Copyright of software, documentation, design materials, manuals, user interface and source code should be released under an OSI-approved open source licence unless there is a compelling argument why this should not be the case and an alternative licensing model proposed.

42. Further consideration will be given to mechanisms for sharing ICT products and architectural components as part of the ICT transformation work which the Scottish Executive is taking forward under its public service reform agenda.[7]

I’ve carefully kept in the heading of this section of the policy statement because these two points represent the complete “next steps” of this report. But now in May 2012, I am not aware that these points have been taken forward at all in any area of the Public Sector in Scotland. Unaware of this, I had a very similar policy in my “Alternative ICT Strategy for the Public Sector in Scotland”[8]. Sadly the first in an unfulfilled policy and the second is just a dream.

So how do we escape from standing still for the next ten years?

Let’s be clear to start, that the use of free and open source software in the public sector would save money. It would also open up opportunities for the private sector in Scotland to provide services to the public sector that have previously been exclusively delivered by multinational companies headquartered outside of Scotland and the UK. In other words, it opens up ways of reducing public spending without cutting jobs. It would transfer the profits of multinationals taxed outside of the UK to those of smaller companies that are based in Scotland and taxed in the UK.

Let’s also be clear that this is not in dispute, it is not new, it is well known, it has been recommended to the public sector for years and has been an unimplemented policy in Scotland for the last five years.

But unfortunately, the public sector does not appear to have the skills and leadership to understandstand how to deliver on these policies. So it tries to outsource the management to the very companies that would loose money if they implementing them.

Look at the current situation with Glow 2 (explained in the blog post “Glow2: Intranet or Ecosystem?"[9]). Rather than having a skilled public sector team manage the delivery of free software to schools in Scotland, it appears that the government has decided to try and pass everything onto Google and Microsoft. It no-doubt feals more comfortable with the idea of a large company with seemingly limitless resources making the decisions rather than the Scottish Government. It’s also hard for central government to manage these things because they have progressively outsourced all the skills they would have needed to do it in-house. A situation that was recognised in Westminster last year[10] just as Scotland’s report on the delivery of ICT[11] was recommending greater outsourcing.

Discussions about procurement often focus on the lack of an “intelligent customer” function within Government to enable it to engage effectively with external suppliers and stakeholders. The Government’s inability to act as an intelligent customer seems to be a consequence of its decision to outsource a large amount of its IT operations to the private sector.[10]

“Shiny Granite”—a whole knew world leading school building infrastructure for Scotland

Let’s put this in more general terms for those less familiar with the technological issues. Let’s imagine for a moment that Glow isn’t an ICT infrastructure for schools but instead the actual physical school infrastructure for Scotland. Let’s call it “Shiny Granite”.

So re-writing history we find that Scotland has invested lots of public money in paying a private company to build new buildings for every school in Scotland. The work started in 2005 and by 2007 it was launched with school children gradually moving over to the new buildings. The management team said how wonderful and world-leading this was despite the fact that the schools were old refurbished buildings and weren’t designed for easy access. Some schools were without accommodation for 5 years.

Then, in this history re-write the government needed to decide what to do next, because the “Shiny Granite” buildings were owned by the private company, not the public. So in September 2012 there won’t be any school buildings in Scotland anymore and we’ll have to buy some new ones. Naturally, this makes the government a little nervous and they decide to rent from now on, which in changing times isn’t a bad idea. Indeed it’s a particularly good idea because the suppliers are offering the properties rent-free!

So, does the government compare the offerings and choose the best buildings? No, it tells the companies that they have to enter a competition to win the chance to rent their properties for free. Oh, and in addition they want the companies to promise to move and accommodate lots of the important property and equipment from the old buildings to the new but they can’t say what and how much. Oh, and they would like the companies to use a completely different security firm in Scotland to their own.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the company (Google) which already has well equiped tried and tested buildings ready and waiting to be used has decided that it should focus on doing what it does well[12]. It would seem that it feels that when it is giving something away for free it doesn’t really make sense to be spending time competing for the priviledge.

---

In reality I don’t know the details of what is actually going on right now. But it doesn’t take an expert to realise that the current situation is a mess and the clock is ticking.

How is it that in a country full of talent and expertise the Scottish Government can’t assemble a team of experts with the vision and leadership to take this mess and transform it into the success it can and should be?

---

1. Richard Smedley, “The Price of freedom”, Central Government, Spring 2004(http://m.publicservice.co.uk/article.asp?publication=Central%20Government&id=125&content_name=IT%20and%20e-Government&article=2965).  ↩

2. Glow (http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/usingglowandict/glow/)—“Glow is the world’s first national online community for education”.  ↩

3. Glow, “The story so far” (http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/usingglowandict/glow/whatis/storysofar/index.asp).  ↩

4. Cabinet Secretary for Education Michael Russell discusses the future of Glow. Video and transcript: http://www.engageforeducation.org/2011/09/the-future-of-glow/.  ↩

5. “Open Source Software Trials in Government (Final Report)”, Office of Government Commerce, October 2004 (http://www.epractice.eu/files/media/media_540.pdf).  ↩

6. “Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study”, International Institute of Infonomics, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands, Section 2.2. (http://www.flossproject.org/report/Final-2b.htm).  ↩

7. “Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Scottish Policy Statement: A Report by the Open Source Software Working Group”, March 2007. (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2007/04/10104126/0).  ↩

8. Stuart Roebuck, “The Alternative ICT Strategy for the Public Sector in Scotland”, April 2012 (http://stuartroebuck.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/alternative-ict-strategy-for-public.html).  ↩

9. Theo Kuechel, “Glow2: Intranet or Ecosystem?”, 11 May 2012 http://theok.typepad.com/digital_signposts/2012/05/there-is-a-fundamental-debate-taking-place-in-scotland-at-the-moment-with-regard-to-the-next-implementation-of-glow-scotland.html.  ↩

10. “Government and IT — ‘a recipe for rip-offs’: time for a new approach, Twelth Report of Session 2010–12”, House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, 27 July 2011. (http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-administration-select-committee/publications/)  ↩

11. John McClelland, “Review of ICT Infrastructure in the Public Sector in Scotland”, June 2011 (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2011/06/15104329/0).  ↩

12. Google’s letter, pulling out of the tendering process, 2 May 2012, http://mimanifesto.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/20120502-161203.jpg.  ↩