Maximally Entangled
October 26, 2009
Interesting post by Tim O’Reilly on Open Source technology going mainstream in Government with whitehouse.gov leveraging Drupal.
Some important highlights:- Procurement of services by an agency is complex, to put it lightly.
- Due to the overhead involved, an Open Source solution isn’t likely to end up much cheaper than a proprietary one.
- Like me, he subscribes to the “more eyeballs, more security, fewer bugs” mantra when it comes to Open Source development models.
The procurement process for public service solutions needs to change. What if, instead of a classic RFP process, an agency could simply share key data and see which vendor leveraged it the best for the specific purpose they wish to accomplish?
That would make it real interesting. It would open up the game to smaller vendors like my company without having to sub-contract on multi-year umbrella contracts owned by Top 10 IT services vendors. More competition, more recognition, more value and more accountability.
Speaking of accountability - Mr. Kundra in an interview months ago also described how he managed and measured IT initiatives at his agency:Manage IT as if it were a portfolio of stocks, with each project being a “company,” its team being the management, its schedule and financial management being the quarterly reports, and the customer satisfaction to deliverables being the market reaction.
It would truly be refreshing to see Federal, State and Local agencies adopt these measures. For now - the script hasn’t changed, though I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
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