Finbarr McCarthy

Why the Irish Government needs an IT Strategy

Like so many others, inefficiencies in government and a lack of transparency have long been a source of minor annoyance to me. More recently this “minor annoyance” has become a significant source of frustration as I now feel that the lack of transparency and prompt action by the Irish Government is hitting me in the pocket in the form of extra taxes and levies every which way I turn. People and businesses everywhere have had to adjust sharply to the current economic reality and my question is, why hasn’t the Irish Government done this also?

There is limited value in me commenting broadly on Public Sector Reform, however I believe I can comment with some knowledge on the situation with government IT. Recently I have been in discussion with a couple of organisations who have expressed interest in collaborating on an Open Government initiative that I am trying to get underway, (more on that over the coming weeks…) a substantial part of this initiative involves taking public information and transforming it so as the data provides transparency and insight into the business of government for the general public.

While researching (digging through Government, Local Authority and State Body websites, publications, annual reports, etc) it became very clear to me that we have very little joined-up thinking when it comes to government technology. My initial purpose was to find most of the major data-sources available to the public, but I came up entirely empty handed. The sad truth is that there is virtually no useful government data made available to the public in any meaningful format.

While I was trying to figure out why we had a complete lack of useful information available from our public sector two very interesting government reports were published;

1. Technology Actions to Support the Smart Economy
2. Report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes

Having read these two reports it struck me that many of the issues faced by Government IT are likely to be as a result of fragmented strategy and a lack of co-ordination between institutions. I began to feel that there was a glimmer of hope resulting from these two reports until I read back over a number of previous reports published by the Irish Government. In particular a report titled “Progress Implementing the Information Society” dated July 1999. This 1999 report is well worth dusting off on its 10th birthday and interestingly progress has been so poor, that this report could easily be re-dated and very few people would notice that it was in fact 10 years old.

I decided to dig a little deeper and signed up to www.etenders.gov.ie to get more insight into the procurement practices of government technology products and services and what I discovered was to say the least disappointing. From E-Tenders there were three points that struck me;

1. The extraordinary level of obstacles that were put in the way of anyone who was interested in tendering for projects
2. The duplication of services each individual government entity was procuring
3. The seemingly complete lack of strategy and standards

In many cases the the “Conditions for Participation” section was in fact much longer than the “Description of the goods or services required” and many of these conditions ruled out any company that wasn’t many years old, this point alone in my view stops us getting value for money as it doesn’t allow many young and agile companies from participating in government contracts.

One R.F.T. (request for tender) in particular caught my attention (Tourism Ireland Imagery Website ). As far as I can make out, Tourism Ireland are looking to add a feature to their website to store and display photos. Sounds simple enough and a good idea (why wasn’t this part of the original design?), they go on to specify that “the contract would be expected to cost between €50K and €206K”. Two points I thought here;

1. Why shoot yourself in the foot by telling everyone how much you are willing to spend
2. Why not use a service like Flickr? Flickr is good enough for the official White House photo stream and at time of writing, hosts more than 3.7 billion images. It also has an API (Application Programming Interface) that would enable Tourism Ireland (Discover Ireland) to do pretty much anything they want to do with all their photos. On top of this there is a thriving community on Flickr that could be used to raise awareness of Ireland as a destination of choice for tourists. The cost? $24.95 per year, while I am not a mathematician, this sounds like a saving of somewhere between €50K and €206K.

Moving forward;

“The Taoiseach announced on 7th May 2008 that responsibility for eGovernment was to be consolidated in the Department of Finance. Responsibility for the delivery of individual eGovernment projects will remain the responsibility of individual Departments and Offices. This new arrangement will ensure that there is strong, coordinated leadership from the Centre, with regular communication between the Department of Finance and the various Departments, Offices and Agencies with responsibility for various projects.”

What exactly does this mean? Personally I think this is flawed thinking and a major throwback to the daft practices of the 1980’s and 90’s where corporates put Finance in charge of technology, added to this the Department of Finance is hardly a shining light of progression and transparency, just take a look at their website, not the most friendly site in the world and much of the content eg. the FAQ section hasn’t been updated since 2003.

In the “Report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes” Colm McCarthy suggests the introduction of an IT Advisory Group comprising senior independent ICT practitioners from medium-large companies in Ireland to advise their counterparts in the civil service, meanwhile in the “Technology Actions to Support the Smart Economy” report Barry McSweeney subtly suggests the appointment of a government C.T.O.

My view is that a combination of the two suggestions from McCarthy & McSweeney could be just what we need. In a sense what we need is a Department of Technology or a Government IT Department. The C.T.O. in charge of this department should be accountable to a committee comprised of senior industry peers, a minister and a senior civil servant and the position should be open for re-appointment every three years (not a civil service job for life, this rotation could be used to ensure the best and brightest was always in charge). The new Irish Government IT Department should take under its control all the IT departments and teams from all government departments, local government and state bodies.

Here are just a few areas that should be concentrated on:

Government Websites;

The new Government IT Department should hire a crack team of web developers & project managers and take all of the development of Government Department, Local Authority and Government Body websites in-house. All of this development should be done on Open Source platforms, such as Ruby on Rials or Drupal. These platforms would facilitate rapid development and deployment of world class websites and should also include mandatory features to share information including the provision of RSS and API’s to enable public access to government information. Government Departments and Government Bodies (such as the Central Statistics Office) should be compelled to openly share all available information (except obviously personal and sensitive information) in an accessible and standard format.

This development would save us, the tax payers millions every year while providing increased transparency and access to information. Additionally I know many developers and entrepreneurs who could use this information in various projects and mash-ups (some existing and some yet to be created).

Government Network;

Many people don’t realise it but the Irish Government owns a very significant fibre optic network in Ireland. Despite this it seems that each government department, independently tenders out its connectivity requirements to external providers. If the government were to leverage this network and utilise it for all its own connectivity requirements they could significantly improve performance and save a very significant amount of money. Again, doing this would require a centralised approach.

Cloud Computing Adoption;

While there has been much mention of Cloud Computing in government circles, there has been (to my knowledge) no actual significant take-up of Cloud Computing Services. Each Government Department, Local Authority and Government Body has its own email and file storage servers. I would suggest that as a matter of urgency we should have a policy decision to immediately migrate all of these services to Google Apps. With a public sector comprising of some 370,000 people there is a potential saving of hundreds of millions of Euros to be made here on an annual basis. It is difficult to tell just how many people are employed in Government IT (according to Colm McCarthy’s report it is 1,300 people, but I believe that this number is vastly understated), but a vast proportion of them I believe are tied up in keeping email and file servers going. In addition, cloud computing is also a greener method of providing these services.

In many ways, what I have mentioned here may only be touching the surface. However, I believe if our government is serious about re-invigorating our economy on the basis of Ireland becoming a global digital hub, it must first get its own house in order. The few things I have mentioned here should not be difficult to implement and while saving us hundreds of millions of euros could also show the world that we are serious about becoming a knowledge economy.

If you have any comments on this topic or if Open Government is of interest to you, please fill in the comment box below - I would love to hear from you.

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