FixMySpine. JP muses over what would happen if huge government IT contracts were handed to small, agile teams like MySociety instead of gargantuan IT consultancies. I’ve often wondered the same thing.
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FixMySpine. JP muses over what would happen if huge government IT contracts were handed to small, agile teams like MySociety instead of gargantuan IT consultancies. I’ve often wondered the same thing.
What'd happen is, we'd get better applications, but you'd kill the extremely lucrative government contract IT business, and MySoc aren't prepared for what you need to do to *get* a government contract. It's all about five-hundred-page SLA documents, all that sort of thing. In order for this to happen, you'd need to re-invent the whole world. What you're talking about is the stupid stupid "enterprise software" sphere just going away.
I'd love that to happen, but it's not going to happen overnight, because the whole system is set up so that contracts go to the people who are the best lobbyists and know their way around the government, not the ones who can write the best software. There is a reason I am leaving my current job for a new one, and that reason is: the whole world of enterprise software sucks. Not just the world, but the way that world is set up. See Larry Lessig's current quest against institutionalised corruption in government for one manifestation of this.