The Tories go open source

In a welcome announcement yesterday the Tories said that they would support open source and go down a more agile route to Government IT if they get elected.

 

For those that don’t understand anything I’ve just said this means an end to the huge corporates such as IBM, Accenture and EDS locked into nearly every Government IT contract. They usually overspend, come in late and provide a large bloated system which barely does what was intended. You’d think that after each project the Government would say, hey why don’t we try someone else, but in effect they go around in a cycle trying each one in turn until they start at the beginning again. Nothing changes.

 

Until now. The idea of going open source is to stop the huge procurement of expensive systems. They would buy something off the shelf and then use many thousands of developers around the world, who develop for free/fun to customize it to the required use. Open source is the way to go. Anyone who religiously buys Microsoft Office, should instead think about downloading OpenOffice. It’s an equivalent which does just about as much – why does it need to be MS Word if all you’re going to write is a letter?

 

Think of the thousands of pounds which could be saved by not being locked into Microsoft.

 

The idea is to get small systems and components (which are easily testable) to work together, rather than the monolithic huge databases such as the new NHS IT system which is years late and cost many extra billions.

 

The other announcement was that they would employ a small in-house development team, this team would take on small projects but would also be used to advise on new systems and make recommendations. Surely it’s a good idea to get experts to make these kinds of decisions rather than ministers who can’t tell their ASSP from their EPROM (*).

 

While they’re at it, they should make sure every large company they work with uses Agile methodology and that a Government IT project manager sits in the Agile Scrums and planning sessions.(*)

 

At last, maybe a Government with some nous. Hopefully they’ll get rid of IR35 tax legislation – which costs more to regulate than it brings in. But you can’t have everything.

 

Squiffy.

 

*Excuse the geekery