How software standards could drive local government digital improvement

There’s ongoing talk about one of the things holding back digital in local government being the lack of quality in the software market, and there is work ongoing at MHCLG, Local GDS, and – I think – the LGA to look at ways to address this.

I’m still of the opinion that I shared last year:

… that the local gov software market isn’t necessarily broken – it’s probably doing what it is supposed to do, i.e. behaving like a market. The issues are symptoms of wider problems, largely lack of capability and capacity on the buy side.

Councils rarely have enough of the people with the right skills and the time to effectively procure systems and then robustly manage contracts – it’s totally lop-sided, resource wise. Inevitably the last sets of requirements is rolled out, updated in places, and then software very similar to what was previously used is bought.

There’s no incentives for the market to produce anything better, so why would it? It’s a market. The market is the scorpion and the council is the frog.

While I would argue that a more structural change is needed to create capacity and capability across the DDaT board of skills, including procurement and contract management, I do think there are less dramatic changes that could take place that would improve matters.

One is adapting existing, mature open source products to replace the commercials ones that aren’t currently up to snuff. We might call this the LocalGovDrupal approach, because that is basically what it is. It takes a lot of the risk out of trying to write new software from scratch.

But the one I think could have the most immediate impact would be for software standards to be set and (most importantly) audited for commercial off the shelf software in local government.

How could this work?

• For the major software verticals in councils – housing, social care, planning, revenues and benefits, etc etc – groups of experts get together to decide upon a standard for that type of software. I would imagine a lot of this would be the same across all software, so maybe there’s a general standard and then specific stuff for each particular system. That would save time, and make things a bit more, well, standard.
• Councils are encouraged (perhaps backed up with threats of violence) to make adherence to the standard a make or break part of their procurement exercises (one of the “must have” requirements).
• Most importantly, a team at Local GDS or MHCLG actively audits any software that is marketed to local government to ensure it meets both the general and any specific additional for the service vertical. This would be the only thing that a supplier can use to evidence their adherence to a purchasing council.

Because this incentivises the market to deliver what councils want, as it creates an environment where councils can’t carry on buying the same old stuff even though they don’t like it, it ought to help shift the dial – without government or councils having to become software developers themselves.

Now, I am sure something like this couldn’t happen overnight – would legislation be needed? I have no idea – and there would have to be some kind of grace period so councils aren’t left being unable to buy anything, but that kind of stuff can be worked out. After all, government is quite good at setting standards generally, and making markets adhere to them, whether it is food safety, or labelling cigarettes, or whatever else.