Shape the market and buy better stuff

Last week we stopped the implementation of a major upgrade of a piece of legacy software as it really didn’t meet the hype it was sold with and clearly wasn’t going to support our modernisation work.

Stopping something like this is hard in any circumstances and stopping a project with sunk costs — emotional and financial — is even harder. It was however a well thought through decision by the team and the right thing to do.

It has made me reflect on a few things though:

• How pleased I am the team did stop the project when they realised it wasn’t going to achieve its intended outcomes. It takes a lot of thought and courage to do that when something has been in flight for a while
• How projects can progress through the process without being stopped even when a number of people look at them with some concern (me being one of them) — the default of any Prince2 style project is ‘we have started so we will finish’ rather than the more agile approach of MVP and proving value at each stage
• How infuriating it is to be constantly faced with really poor options when purchasing core systems

I am constantly struck by how often we in local government are forced to buy poor technology. For all the brilliant digital work done over the last decade we as a sector seem remarkably content to put up with badly designed stuff that is built on legacy architecture which is badly translated to the cloud.

It’s simplistic (though tempting!) to blame client side skills gaps for our purchasing decisions and I think thats part of it. I think it’s also down to us not creating an internal appetite for better technology — once you give people an awareness that something better is possible then they will be more demanding.

Thinking about it though, I put more weight on market failure and the need to do something different to give us better choices.

Local government is a highly fragmented but highly convergent market — we all buy separately but we tend to buy the same stuff. There is little incentive for an incumbent to innovate and there is a big hill to climb to break into a market (trust me — I have been in both scenarios in my previous roles). I know other parts of the public sector less well but it’s a pattern I see repeated there.

In the public sector we tend to box off the market as being something ‘other’ despite being one of the biggest investors in technology in the country. To ignore this ignores the massive opportunity we have to shape the market and to drive the innovation cycle for our technology. We have been global leaders in Govtech previously — we could be again if we thought differently about how we shape and buy it. Our purchasing decisions could and should be part of the economic growth that this government is trying to unlock.

This would need a very different approach to public sector procurement but I am hoping that the decision to move GovTech into the Department for Science, Technology and Innovation is a move in that direction. The next move would be to make it easier for us to collaborate around our buying decisions. This was part of the value of the GCloud framework — something I, as a small new and innovative supplier, found hugely helpful.

Buying innovative technology brings with it risks — which is also why we don’t do it — but to not to it brings the bigger risk of a public sector unable to keep up with the pace of change in the wider world.

Leaning into the zeitgeist, the tech world is obsessed with AI at the moment and government seems equally besotted. This is a technology which has profound social implications and which needs government to be thoughtful shapers of the market — not just blind purchasers of someone else’s vision of the future. We don’t have to just use the things we are offered by a market shaped by commercial drivers — let’s make sure that we are shaping and buying better stuff.

Originally published at https://www.curiouscatherine.info.