Cost is an interesting issue, of course, because whilst open source alternatives are cheaper and quicker to deploy than the bespoke solutions that government seem to be so keen on, you do need to find someone to support it for you, whether in house or bought-in. I think this is one of the real barriers to a wider take-up of more innovative IT solutions.

The other is for all of government, whether central or local government, health, police, fire etc etc to start working together, sharing what works and what doesn’t.

On many occasions I found ways to do it for a lot less money, for instance using cheap servers on the Internet instead of in house machines (£50000 for a unix server !) and using MySQL instead of Oracle. The locals at the LA looked baffled at the idea of even bothering to try to do it for less money. The usual answer was “somebody else will spend it if we don’t”.

Within the Authority several teams fought with each other and battled to control the maps and data. If the ‘business’ had had an owner he would have banged heads together to stop wasting his money, but the whole disfunctional mess was very very stable and is still in place today.

If the public only knew.