Archive for the 'Procurement' Category

“Recipe for Rip-Offs”

Published by Rowan Wilson on August 2, 2011 in Community, Procurement, Standards and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

Here in the UK the Public Administration Select Committee has been looking into the poor record government has in procuring IT systems. The title of their report “Government and IT- “A Recipe For Rip-Offs”: Time For A New Approach“ serves as a neat summary of the content. Stating the problem, the report says

The UK has been described as “a world leader in ineffective IT schemes for government“. There have been a number of high cost IT initiatives which have run late, under-performed or failed over the last 20 years including: the Child Support Agency’s IT system, the IT system that would have underpinned the National ID Card scheme, the Defence Information Infrastructure Programme, the implementation of the Single Payments Scheme by the Rural Payments Agency, and the National Offender Management System (C-Nomis).

The main problem, the report says, is that the Government does not have the internal skills to specify and procure IT systems. As a result they tend to rely on large external contractors to manage the process of developing IT systems (and to subcontract to smaller businesses where necessary) . Naturally this involves handing over very large amounts of both cash and power to the ‘head’ contractors, and it is this complete externalisation of the ‘IT customer’ function that the report points to as the key failing in previous large government IT procurements. The answer, therefore, is to get better IT management skills within departments and take on the management of the smaller subcontractors themselves.

This is not the only failing identified. It seems that Government also tends to ‘gold-plate’ (over-specify) security requirements even on systems that do not require it. The report also criticises the tendency to see IT projects as a distinct kind of problem rather than an exercise in change management like any other. Nevertheless, it is the ‘externalisation’ problem which looms largest in the report’s somewhat gloomy findings, and it is in this context that the issue of open source arises.

Early on the report identifies the creation of ‘a level playing field for open source software’ as one of the approaches to solving the problem of Government IT that had already been suggested. In the recommendations, we find that open source is mentioned in the context of providing an open data platform for Government-held data which could be developed upon by third parties to provide analysis and manipulation applications. While both of these suggestions are sound in themselves, I think it is in the core recommendation that we can see the best opportunity to realise value for the UK taxpayer from open source software and development.

While there are very large scale corporations offering open source solutions, the majority of bidders for Government IT contracts offer closed source solutions, often with the bidder themselves retaining ownership of the IPR in the resultant code and licensing it under very restrictive terms. If the current reforms succeed in getting departments to break down IT procurements into smaller interoperating sections and invite bids for these from smaller, more agile developers, the opportunity for existing successful open source projects to be the bases for Government IT solutions expands. Assuming that the newly-acquired IT experts within departments are able to meaningfully engage with the communities around these projects – both through their hired developers and as users themselves – then huge amounts of value in terms of code, user requirements and expertise which are currently locked into closed, non-functioning projects will be available for the good of the community at large. The projects themselves will learn how to interact with Government clients, and software components of general application will find their way back into the public space to benefit other large-scale users.

All of these benefits, though, depend both on an openness to the use of open source software but also on expertise in managing the relationship with that software’s community. So while I welcome heartily the proposal that Government acquire the IT skills to take a hands-on role in managing their IT procurements, I hope that those IT skills will include expertise in exploiting the unique benefits of joining an open source community.

UK Government Open Standards Survey

Published by stevelee on March 23, 2011 in Business, Development, Discussion, Procurement, Standards and Strategy and Policy. 1 Comment

There’s no date on his introductory post, but Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, has provided an opportunity for us to state which open standards for IT we want the UK government to use. This takes the form of an on-line SurveyMonkey survey that is open until 20 May 2011.

Government must be better connected to the people it serves and partners who can work with it – especially small businesses, voluntary and community organisations. Government ICT must play a fundamental role in making life easier and I want to ensure that it does.

One of our first goals is to organise Government data and systems using an agreed set of standards that make our ICT more open, cheaper and better connected.

If you’re a business or community organisation, helping us choose the right standards will make it easier for you to do business with Government.  It will also help us open up data, better informing your decisions, and hopefully prompting innovation.

There’s a lot of detail in the very long list of obtuse standard numbers, but fortunately a mechanism is provided to skip sections you aren’t interested in. Otherwise you can vote on each standard on a scale between mandatory and don’t use. Refreshingly for a survey, there are spaces for you to add your own thoughts (though you can’t add each on a new line as requested).

I spotted couple of typos and more seriously, the Microsoft originated ISO/IEC 29500 Office Open XML is incorrectly called ‘Open Office XML. This is bound to lead to confusion as the alternatively listed ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) standard was originally implemented in OpenOffice (and is now implemented by LibreOffice).

Open standards play well with open source software developement and we encourage you to take the survey. However do bear in mind the government’s past record in implementing open technology policies. You might also want to look at Glyn Moody’s related post about the Government’s definition of open standards provided in the procurement policy note.

Use OSS Watch’s resources within your organisation

Published by Sander van der Waal on December 1, 2010 in Business, Community, Development and Procurement. 0 Comments

Open source software projects can form a perfect example of a level playing field in software development. This is especially true for projects that have a meritocratic governance model in place, which by definition recognises all contributions to the project equally regardless of the person or organisation contributing. This is one of the reasons why we believe open source software projects are the prime example of open innovation in software.

It is therefore of no surprise that a lot of the materials that we write at OSS Watch are not just applicable to the Higher Education and Further Education sector in the UK (which form our remit as defined by our main funding body JISC). On the contrary, many of our documents discuss issues related to open source that apply just as well to the public sector at large, or to the commercial sector for that matter. I will highlight a few of the most relevant documents here.

Suppose you are in an organisation that’s developing software either for itself or collaboratively with other departments or other organisations. If you are considering the longer term sustainability of your software you might want to consider releasing your code under an open source licence. To better understand what software development in open source projects actually entails, our document that deals with getting to grips with the open development method could be of interest.

In many cases it is more beneficial to join an existing project community rather than trying to create your own. Joining an existing project means that you can tap into an existing body of knowledge and benefit from the development efforts of other, potentially myriad, developers. To better understand the mechanisms of contributing to an open source project some of more technical documents, like the one that explains what a software patch is, could be helpful. In any case you will have to make sure that all the provisions are in place to be able to contribute your code to the project.

If you are sure there is no existing project where your code will fit, you could consider starting your own open source project. In that is the case, it is important to consider what the right governance model is for your project. Do you want to go with the benevolent dictator model, which leaves all decision to one person or governing body, or do you want to create a level playing field by choosing a meritocratic governance model? Another important aspect in open source projects is ensuring the Intellectual Property is properly managed, which means that you should consider putting a Contributor Licence Agreement in place.

A completely different use case that we come across often is considering open source in a procurement process. Also then many issues are the same irrespective of whether your an academic institution, some other organisation in the public sector, or a commercial company. Our document on decision factors for open source software procurement could be useful in these circumstances. To get a more detailed and substantial view on existing open source projects, we have developed the Software Sustainability Maturity Model that guides you through the most important issues you should consider as an end-user of open source software.

To summarise, there are many aspects of open source software where our resources may be of use. All OSS Watch documents are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales licence, so you are free to reuse our content as long as you mention where you got it from and make any derivative work available under a similar licence. These are the documents that were mentioned in this post:

Can open source reduce costs?

Published by Ross Gardler on March 1, 2010 in Development, Procurement and Strategy and Policy. 1 Comment

It is often said that open source software will reduce costs.

Those with little or no experience of implementing computer systems assume these savings come from the fact the free and open source software does not carry a license fee. However, this is not usually the case.

Anyone who has rolled out an software solution, even in a small organisation, will tell you that there are hidden costs. These include training, support,  customisation and maintenance.

In 2005 BECTA published “A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs” which concluded that training and support costs accounted for 60% of total cost for any software solution. The report also found that open source software reduced these costs by 40-50%.

Further to reducing training and support costs, open source can reduce the cost of customisation for specific environments.

It is extremely rare for a back-office software solution to be a perfect fit for any specific organisation straight out of the box. Consequently, the software needs to be customised to suit specific needs. In a closed source environment there is a single provider, or a limited set of approved providers, who can make these modifications. However, in an open source environment anyone with the appropriate skills can make these modifications, including internal staff.

As a result of this competition, market forces can often result in a lower cost for a tailored product. Just how much can be saved here depends on the customisations you need to make.

Finally, the open source culture of code sharing results in lower development costs for the software in the first instance. That is, once one user has commissioned a specific feature or configuration option the results of that work is available to all. As a result, the more a product is used and developed within any given domain, the more widely the development costs are shared. In addition to a reduction of costs open development can significantly increase the rate of innovation as it brings together great minds to collaborate on shared solutions.

Where there is no pre-existing solution to match ones needs the open developent model can be an extremely cost effective way of reducing cost. This process is examined in more detail in our document “Meritocrats, cluebats and the open development method: an interview with Justin Erenkrantz.”

Guest Post: FOSS and the European Parliament

Published by Rowan Wilson on June 1, 2009 in Community, Guest, Procurement and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

From time to time OSS Watch will be publishing guest blog posts here to highlight interesting opinions from around the FOSS community. This post is by Gerry Gavigan, chairman of the Open Source Consortium.

Elections for the European Parliament are scheduled for 2 June 2009, and this seems like an ideal opportunity to broach the subject of ICT policies and draw the attention of candidates to the issues surrounding choices by government and its administration concerning software and systems. Hopefully, this will at least raise the profile and gain better consideration of the underpinning issues and lead to wider adoption of Free and Open Source Software.

One initiative attempting to do this is the Free Software Pact (FSP) providing candidates with a method to inform the voting public that “they favour the development and use of Free Software, and will protect it from possible threatening EU legislation.”

As Chairman of the Open Source Consortium I was asked to help promote the FSP. Fundamentally I agree with the underlying objectives of the FSP but I am not sure that the approach to implementation is well thought through.

I am convinced that level playing fields coupled with open and transparent processes topped off with effective governance (easier said than done, of course) are all that Free Software needs for new installations and also to trickle through the arteries and capillaries of existing ICT deployments, eventually eliminating the externalities of proprietary software (largely summarisable as the deadweight costs arising from distortions in the market). I should add that this opinion is vendor neutral. I don’t care who it is or how Free Software is supplied.

If we are to achieve this nirvana we need to approach those we are seeking to influence in terms that are meaningful to them. This is not always easy but that is not an excuse not to try. And it may require several goes. Additionally if one is seeking to influence politicians or administrations is is easier to go with the grain of things than start again somewhere else.

With that in mind and prompted by the FSP, it seems right to put my drafting where my opinions were. Accordingly the OSC has created a draft form letter that hope as many people as possible will send it to the candidates in their constituency.

Dear…

Support Implementation of draft European Interoperability Framework V2 “EIF V2″

As you are a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the European Parliament I am writing to seek your support for a simple measure that will help citizens, businesses and European society.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has become a critical part of European infrastructure; a modern economy cannot function without it.

Optimal choices in ICT need a European policy on interoperability in ICT.

Interoperability means it does not matter how you mix and match the constituent parts of ICT, they will just work with each other without problems or issues. Such choice also means that users of your ICT systems (e.g., users of European or national government on-line services) do not have to make ICT choices based on your decisions, e.g., having to use a specific web browser (that itself may require a specific operating system).

Many European and national ICT systems have been implemented using software which does not enable easy interoperability, and instead creates an effect where it becomes easier, and some cases necessary, to choose more of the same supplier’s products, and harder to choose competing products.

Moreover, once governments or local administrations have decided to use software that does not enable easy interoperability, that choice imposes a requirement for the citizen or customer to choose the same software.

This network effect prevents choice, competition and limits opportunities to promote innovation outside vendor control, in the whole European arena for ICT.

To have agreed as policy the (draft) EIF V2 ( http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728) will halt and eventually reverse this situation.

This draft has been criticised by vendors currently benefiting from the current uneven playing field, but its adoption would not prevent any vendor, current or future, from supplying ICT to European or national governments.

The EIF is not considered to by all to be perfect, but getting it firmly “inside the tent” would enable it to be improved. I urge you to adopt or adapt this letter and write.

You can find your existing MEPs and candidates here.

Gerry Gavigan

Procuring Software is not (even) as simple as buying a car

Published by Ross Gardler on April 15, 2009 in Business, Discussion and Procurement. 3 Comments

Here at OSS Watch we often get asked things like “which is the best open source twitter alternative” or “which is the best open source financial managment tool?” We don’t answer these questions, and for good reason. Instead we focus on helping people understand how to find and evaluate open source software solutions. In this blog I’m going to try and explain why we take this approach.

With simple things like microblogging we can point to Laconica with a resonable amount of comfort, but should we really be ignoring Open Micro Blogger simply because we have not used it ourselves, after all, it does focus on a stronger and more scalable back-end. What about the solutions we’ve not yet heard of? A quick search for “open source microblogging” turns up a fair number of projects that are worth a look, not to mention a promising looking article with the title “Top 10 open source microblogging services. Perhaps it’s not as simple as we first thought.

If it is this hard to identify “best of breed” open source solutions for something as simple as a microblogging service how hard would it be for a “Financial Management and Reporting” system? These are complex systems that need to be customised (or at least configured) for each use case.

Sometimes the enquirer pushes a little harder, often indicating that it should be possible to identify “best of breed” and that OSS Watch should do so. However, our position remains firm, we can’t evaluate everything out there, but we can help people identify and evalate the options in the context of their needs.

Lets consider the financial software market. I’ve used Compiere for Financial Management in the past. I was very pleased with it, but it’s not really a financial system, it is a Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management system that has some financial functionality.Would the CRM and ERP functionality help or hinder our requestor?

As well as Compiere I’ve used a pen and paper based double entry ledger system. It worked, requires minimal technical knowledge and is easy to source. Unfortunately it is error prone, requires considerable training and usually needs a real accountant to do magic periodically, magic you don’t want to be paying accountant hourly rates for when software can do it, perhaps GnuCash or jGnash would be a better option. However, these are targetted at personal finance not business (or academic) finance.

Then there are OpenER, SQL Ledger, TurboCash and all the others that are out there. These are all “best of breed” within their own domain. They all have strengths and weaknesses. The “best” depends entirely on whether their strengths are important to the user whilst their weaknesses remain hidden.

How did I come up with the (incomplete) list of financial tools above? Simple, I spent 7 minutes (yes I timed myself) searching the web and making snap decisions on the viability of the open source community built around the products. I rejected another four or five as they looked like unsustainable or immature projects. It is this skill that I think we can offer to people looking for open source solutions. The customer must then narrow down the choice by looking at the feature set of the product base. Once a short list is drawn up, OSS Watch can help evaluate the support options available for the project, that is we can help the customer decide if the open source solution fits their culture, e.g. is there a suitable commercial support offering or is there an active and supportive developer community that internal IT staff can engage with?.

Even when we explain this in some detail we find that some people still insist that we should be able to tell them what to buy. So, I’ll say, here and now, as loud and clearly as I can:

Procuring something without actually considering the functionality it will need is insane. It is almost certainly doomed to fail.

A software procurement specialist once told me “there is never enough time to do it right, but there is always enough time to do it twice”. I wish I’d listened to him then (I’ll not go into why, but involves lots of wasted money). At least I’m listening now. If you are ready to listen, you can stop reading and contact OSS Watch when you want us to help you evaluate some open source solutions.

For those still unconvinced let me try and illustrate the problem in a domain most of us know a little about.

Imagine you are buying a new car. All cars have the the same basic functionality and features, they go forwards and backwards, they have a steering wheel and they stop before hitting things (assuming the driver is alert enough to hit the brakes).

Despite all cars being the same (when considering base functionality) we don’t walk into a the local car dealership and say “what’s the best car” and immmediately buy the first thing that comes into their mind. Instead we find out which are the most suitable cars for our kind of use (driving to the shops, commuting, long distance travel, fun at the weekend etc.). We probably also read literature and reviews. Most of us would test drive a couple of our favourites. Eventually we would buy one.

It’s true that we rely on reviews and salespeople to help us narrow down the choice, but we have other methods for making the final selection, and, importantly, we would usually ask salespeople from each of the major manufacturers.

Anyone who watches car “review” programmes like Top Gear knows that even in the simple world of cars there is never a clear winner between two cars built for the same purpose. One will be better cruising on the motorway, the other may be better on country lanes. One will be cheaper to run, but the other mighter be cooler to look at, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is not usually possible to say “this car is better than that car, regardless ofwho you are and what you are looking for”.

Sometimes it is possible to say “this car is just rubbish, it broke down 5 times in our road tests”, but once you get past obvious flaws that affect everyone you have to understand the drivers needs before saying “this car is the perfect car for you”. I’m 6′ 4″tall, I simply don’t fit comfortably into some cars, it doesn’t matter if everyone else in the world thinks it is the perfect car, for me it is rubbish.

[This is getting to be a long post so I won't even start on considering maintanence options for the car once it is purchased.]

Since most people wouldn’t ask a really general question such as “what is the best car?”, why do people insist on asking OSS Watch things like “which is the best open source financial management software solution?”

OSS Watch can help you procure open source solutions, but we can’t tell you what to buy – sorry, it just is not that simple.