Paul Geraghty sticks his neck out

Were you expecting to see transparency on local government IT spending some time soon? Where does a large part of that council tax money go and just what does it pay for?  Read on to get the skinny on why the status quo is likely to remain and has already taken steps to shut you out.

By way of scene setting I need to present some things l learned in ten years of working in local government IT, local government IT truths.

Fear of merger

In some councils the biggest fear among top employees and members (councillors) is that their organisation is merged with a neighbour in order to share resources and save money.  In the resulting consolidation, they might lose their job/status/power.

This truth manifests itself when the time comes to select an IT supplier for a product.

The cost of merging two neighbouring councils will depend to a great deal on how quickly, easily and cheaply integration of back office IT can be achieved. If too many of our software packages match that of any single one of our neighbours, then we will be making ourselves an easy candidate for merger.  We must avoid this in order to maintain the status quo.

If all of our Financial, Housing, Content Management, CRM, ERM, GIS, Planning, Knowledge Management (KM), Internal Email and messaging etc etc systems are different from our neighbours then it will cost untold millions to merge us and therefore will not happen.

In fact as long as only one or two the top six or seven applications overlap we will still be able to stymie any attempts from above to merge us with neighbours.

Lets say we work for District-C.  Our northern border is shared with District-B, our southern shared with District-A.

Now the tenders are in for our Financial Software package, and we, District-C have a choice of Supplier-X, Supplier-Y or Supplier-Z's Financial product.

"So while Supplier-X really does have the right CMS product for us, with wonderful drivers and mappers linking to our existing CRM which would result in massive savings - we have to discount them because District-B already uses it.  We already have GIS and Email in common with District-B, so no, we cannot chose them."

"Similarly Supplier-Ys product, while a good fit, for the same reason - too much in common with District-A."

"Supplier-Z. Staff in the demos said they did not like using it, and we've heard bad things about it from other councils too.  Suppliers-Zs product is the most expensive, and we don't have any Language-Z programmers on staff."

Contract awarded to Supplier-Z then, by unanimous vote. The Fear of merger gene takes precedent, see?

Things become more convoluted if your shared eastern border with District-D is in a different County, but hopefully you get the picture. The threat of merger may only surface every 5 years or so, but it is real in the minds of council people.

When this fact of life was explained to me I was awestruck, it was beautiful and horrible at the same time. I was wide-eyed, I felt like Yossarian in Catch-22. I imagined the country as huge 3D chequerboard, separated by layers of intentional obfuscation which would take absolutely decades to unpick.

Charging yourself up with this knowledge will explain the pre-ordained doom waiting in lie for suggestions for projects like a "National CMS".

Any of this ring true for you, Miss local government officer? Ever overheard those remarks after visits to a neighbouring council "Christ, their systems are easy to use, cheaper too.  Why didn't we buy that?"

Welcome to the overriding logic behind many unfathomable decisions regarding big ticket public IT spends, I mean think 6 or 7 figure sums and multiply it by say, 50% of councils (200?) on probably 6 massive enterprise solutions and repeat every 4 years.  The sums will make your eyes water.

Of course this is not the case in every council, or every type of council but this tendency to Balkanize for survival is real and is costly. This is the reality of how the status quo is maintained. IT managers, CEOs and elected members are aware of this.

Seemingly Mr Pickles is not, or he does not care to admit it. Last week at the LGA Conference he reportedly said:

Back office functions should be shared: "Is it really right, in this day and age, to have separate planning departments?  Lawyers?  Communications teams? Wouldn’t it be better if people were working together? That’s especially important for the highest levels and the most expensive people."

Risk aversion

The second trait exhibited by local councils when purchasing IT is that of risk aversion.

This is very true of small ticket items.  No matter how small the spend you propose, the immediate question is "who else is doing it?", and if you cannot find any other known (trusted? lucky? talisman?) council sporting this product already - then you know you have a strong chance of losing the (hidden) argument between squabbling members/officers and losing your case.

Ironically, being able to say "Ah, but Council-A has already tested and started using this software!" can be both your trump card and the kiss of death as you play to Risk aversion but incur the wrath of Fear of merger.

Safety in numbers

The third truth about local government IT involves the very powerful organisation which represents them as a whole.

SOCITM is a private company which represents IT managers, it might help to think of it as a kind of union. I cannot say I know much about SOCITM because they operate like some kind of black box - unaccountable and opaque - no-one knows what is going on behind their closed doors.

In the last 12 years they have increased their fan-base and revenue by setting themselves up as judge and jury of what is both acceptable and recommended on local government websites - enabling them to recruit a legion of web-team and marketing types. 

I have never been a fan of the value of their content or advice as I have documented elsewhere. They just don't have the IT chops, and in fact are partly responsible for many of the lumbering and dumb local government websites horrorshows we see all around us. They are quite capable of emanating conflicting, nonsensical information and neither feel the need to admit nor apologise when they get things wrong. They just deftly repackage and repeat all the things that were talked about on the internet last year without adding anything new, and silently ignore the new elephants in the room which everyone is asking themselves about now.

When they make a mistake, when they miss important movements and swell changes on the web their effect on local government, the web and the country is crushing.

SOCITM seems to consists of sharp suited consultants and a sharp tongued marketing machine well versed in extracting public money from councils, they know exactly how to play the fear card.

The sucker punch

This week saw a SOCITM masterstroke pulled right under the noses of the new government. They have privatised the what was until then the open but little known e-Government Register (eGR) and stuck it away behind their own members only paywall in order that they can "cherish and look after it" on behalf of the British people.  "Closed Data Now" SOCITM does a "Times".

Now let me remind you what was the eGR (e-Government Register) was, put it in context and explain why it is relevant to these three previous local government IT truths. You could skip the next few paragraphs if you read the previous story.

The eGR showed which Supplier was providing which Product to which Council.  It provided for example transparent evidence of the Fear of merger and Risk aversion patterns - so you would have been able to argue with me using facts, but no longer - because it has just gone.

Over a period of around 6 years the screens on the eGR had been improved and added to until one was able to pick a Product and see which Councils used it, pick a Council and see which Suppliers provided them with Products. It had been further enhanced with nice but unnecessary Google maps so that you could appreciate the geographical spread of products throughout the country.

But, as an SME I can attest that it also provided a good overview to the cracks in supply. I could see where all the big suppliers were concentrating their efforts and where there were opportunities.  One of the small products I maintain is a Committee System a SAAS which manages Committees, Members, accessible agenda and minute documents etc.  I could see who my competitors were, to which councils they were supplying.  OK so the information may have been out of date, but I could see that less than 20% of councils were using any system at all.  This eGR should be a great driver for small software houses to develop those important niche products which could offer savings to councils.

Surely this is the kind of thing that the UK government should be fighting on our behalf to keep open and free - not subjecting me to a SOCITM tax of £795 per annum.  Most SMEs will not be aware of it, and I doubt any will be willing or able to pay the exorbitant fee.

The old eGR was getting out of date - hardly surprising seeing as few knew of its existence.  I would take a guess that nobody in the present government knew of it - how else can you explain the scandalous disappearance of this existing open public dataset at a time when they are lauding the opening of new sets.

To say that "the public would not be interested in this information" is to totally miss the point of the Open Government Data movement, the public have a right to view this information, and that right has just been taken away and handed to a closed-shop union which only stands to benefit from maintaining the status quo of a Balkanized local government IT scene.

It is the equivalent of Maggie Thatcher coming to power and handing the responsibility for reporting on coal stocks to Arthur Scargill.

To say that we do not have the wit to maintain a database the schema of which the majority of the web programmers I know could draw up in their lunchtimes, locate and match it to a taxonomy for local government applications and host it in the cloud somewhere means we really are up a creek without a paddle.

Gone is the chance for hundreds of small specialised software houses to apply their agile skills to solving local government problems because they will not even be aware of the opportunities.

Gone is the ideal resource that could have been used to de-reference suppliers and individual services mentioned in upcoming Linked Financial Open Data triples has been pulled out of circulation.

Most importantly and most ominously, GONE is the one thing that could have answered the question, "Blimey, Mother, have you seen this: Payment £245,000 by Council-C to Supplier-Z - FFS! what the HELL was that for?".

Moves are afoot to force councils to publish all spends over £500, but it requires another data set to answer the question what does that Supplier supply to that Council? This so called "de-referencing" by linking is something which I can tell a machine to do for me, or you or the bloke asking that question.

With the eGR in place the army of h-activists be they working for transparency, democracy, accountablity or looking to explain to people what money was being spent on, journalists, do-gooders or trouble makers would be able to link payments to applications and start to make interesting comparisons our our behalf.

Given my evidence above you can see how some of those comparisons could lead to nervous glances in some councils.

I remind you, the eGR was there last week, this week it has been locked behind the SOCITM paywall, with the knowledge and help of people in local government who, er, fail to fully grasp the severity of the situation or felt sufficiently hogtied so as not to put up a strong enough defence for this already public data set.

So what is SOCITM playing at here? Are they a load of dummkopfs for not realising the value of the eGR in outputting LOD or are they cunning masterminds for withdrawing from public view the one piece of valuable evidence which identifies which council pays which supplier for what purpose?  Is this the amazing service they are providing for their "members", tightening up the drawstings on the sack to make sure the glare of public scrutiny can never illuminate inside for fear someone might demand some searching questions?

I suspect it is the former - the evidently capable and ruthless but IT challenged SOCITM marketing department out to make a profit but it could be the slamming sound of ranks being firmly closed in order to protect their real paymasters  - big IT companies.  Which is it?

Thanks to a mix of greed and/or stupidity a huge pillar of the evidence about what goes on in local government has just been sidled out of the door.

Are you angry? If you are not angry then somehow I have not explained myself properly, so please go ahead and ask a question. If you are angry then please mention this post to your MP, blog or tweet about it. Please.

Maybe this issue has not yet appeared on the young government's radar and they will now take some positive action to rectify this deplorable situation. I don't care about acknowledgments, justifications or arguments. Just let the correct data emerge on data.gov.uk well before the Jan 2011 deadline for councils to publish their spending data.

M/billions spent on local government IT systems some not fit for purpose, talk of cuts to front-line services, massive public debt, the movement for open data and a government minister who can talk the talk vs ingrained fear of merger, risk aversion and a powerful quasi union whose marketing department has worryingly convinced many in government that it is part of the solution.

Gonna be an interesting one to watch.

Now, can we have our data back please? This time I'd like it sorted against a recognised and acceptable taxonomy.