The Government Applications Store (G-AS) strategy sets out to enable a substantial reduction in the 10,000+ of unique applications and applications contracts that are currently used by public sector organisations. The goals are to enable annualised savings exceeding £500 million per annum by 2020, to heighten the public sector’s ability to respond to change, and to move to standard approaches for providing citizen and business facing services across the public sector.
The vision for the G-AS is for the reuse of existing assets to become the standard approach across the public sector for delivering new ICT solutions – including those for both policy and efficiency driven initiatives. In contrast to today’s approach, where new business requirements almost always result in development of bespoke solutions and thus the proliferation of systems, reuse will become the norm across the entire range of ICT enabled services – from relatively common back-office requirements through to customer facing front office services that are unique to the organisation Involved.
The G-AS will be an online portal that enables sharing and reuse of business applications, services and components between public sector organisations. Even where organisations have unique requirements it is normal to find that many steps in the business process are similar to those of other organisations, even those that have radically different roles. For example the approaches used for authenticating employees, and authenticating customers, and making payments through the banking system are similar in most organisations.
The future will see each of the steps in a process being defined as a reusable service – these reusable services can then be used as the basis of new business solutions, joined together using “mash up” technology, with only any additional and unique components of the new business solution being implemented as an additional service.
The G-AS will thus enable re-use of existing assets to become the standard model for delivery of new business services. The approach will be closely integrated with the Desktop, PSN, Data Centre and G-Cloud strategies, and the combination establish the standard infrastructure platform on which reusable services will be delivered, removing today’s technical barriers.
The net effect will be to increase visibility of software already owned by the public sector so that other public sector bodies, and those bidding for public sector work, can see what’s available at no basic cost. Re-use is, in principle, already accepted as the preferred delivery approach across the public sector. However in most cases today, it is easier to do a fresh procurement.
New assets in the applications store will benefit from the policy that future public sector ICT procurements will be done on behalf or the Crown rather than the purchasing organisation, enabling reuse across the public sector. The G-AS will provide automated electronic support for the applications procurement lifecycle and reduce the overhead costs of reuse of applications. Providing this automated electronic support will use capabilities that are proven today – including an online store front with search and user feedback capabilities, e-procurement platform technology that automates the “procurement to payment” process, and an interlinked online repository providing access to software, documentation, tools and related assets.
The scope for savings by 2020 runs here into many hundreds of millions of pounds given that it is not uncommon for large government organisations each to have between 300 and 1,000 applications in its portfolio; the opportunity is to reduce this to the order of 1,000 business services for the entire public sector.
A key dependency for achieving this change will be overcoming a major cultural challenge that exists across the public sector. Business leaders are accustomed to specifying unique requirements that are then met on a bespoke basis – today’s approach is costly and leads to proliferation of systems. Under the new model there will be the expectation that existing capabilities will be re-used on an “as is” basis wherever possible. Unique requirements will be implemented only where this is unavoidable and where there is very clear business justification for the additional life cycle costs.
The CIO Council will build support for the new approach amongst senior business leadership across the public sector. Wherever possible, reusable business services that are already owned by the Crown will be provided “free at the point of use” to public sector organisations. There will be a charge only for those aspects of the service that directly impact cost for example G-Cloud usage costs, support services, helpdesk calls and printed outputs. As the number of assets in the Government Applications Store increases over time, the business case for public sector organisations to progress a reuse based approach will become ever more compelling.
Work to progress the application store will continue in autumn 2009. The target is by early 2010, to define the initial “market entry approach” – enabling a pilot to commence in the first half of 2010. The initial priority will be on establishing a proof of concept service (probably for existing off the shelf software contracts that can be shared across public sector organisations) and for shared services reducing the barriers for more cross organisational deployments. Other existing shareable assets will be included at the earliest possible stage; Public sector organisations will be requested to nominate candidates for reuse from their existing asset base – there will be an evaluation and ranking exercise to select the most suitable applications.
Mashups are great for things that don’t matter much – but they are impossible to test thoroughly. So using them for critical govt. applications is utter madness.
There seem to be some basic misconceptions here in what software “ownership” means.
For bespoke software, it’s quite likely that the IPR will be held by the public body.
But for Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software, the IPR will be held by the developer. The public body will have entered into a right-to-use licence which, in all likelihood, will have a per-user licence fee.
As such, for COTS the reuse savings are likely to be minimal.
@Ian.S if by mashups they mean integration in the client portal then that’s a pretty well-proven approach is it not?
@Gooman but even with COTS there should be some savings:
a) by redeploying licences from leavers to joiners
b) by reducing the number of distinct apps which have to be integrated into the environment, monitored for upgrades etc.
c) reducing the range of apps but increasing the number of each one in the catalogue should enable purchasing efficiencies and better licensing deals
Why it take so long for government to develop G-AS? I get gas every time I think about them.
Seriously though, if the US can get MilForge off the ground fast and start seeing the value of the app store concept in the military, why will it take until 2020 to see the savings in the UK? It’s hardly a new idea and there are plenty of folks in the communities that understand how to make it work.
1/10 Must try harder.
I enjoy the mildly amusing name of G-AS, shamefully, the government is already full of it.
“The scope for savings by 2020 runs here into many hundreds of millions of pounds given that it is not uncommon for large government organisations each to have between 300 and 1,000 applications in its portfolio”
It is absolutely shocking to find out that “large” government organisations have 1,000 applications in their portfolio.
Perhaps the person who did this research has included items such as Notepad, Character Map, Calculator, etc. Usually these are not included by organisations when doing an audit of their software, because understandably, they are bundled as part of most operating systems.
300 is a reasonable figure, assuming “large” means 3,000+ employees doing everything from marketing to poop-scooping.
But what concerns me is not the number of applications, rather the licensing of said applications. All too often, as a large organisation grows larger, Person X will want say, Adobe CS4 and will be given a license. Person X then leaves the organisation and that license goes unused for 5 years, resulting in a total waste of money.
Therefore, before looking at re-using the customer information database from poop-scooping for child care, why not rationalise all licenses and set up a system (oh I don’t know, say, a key server,) that ensures such expensive software does not go unused because of employees wandering astray.
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Not sure the app store concept will scale up this way. Very large govt operations with huge customer volumes tend to have to cope with many exceptional cases which commercial organisations would choose to avoid. The scale of operations means that it is often thought worthwhile to put up with the cost of elaborating IT applications rather than employing and supporting (training etc) staff to deal with them. If things from the govt app store don’t save departments time and money, they will produce business cases ‘proving’ it is better to do something more specific and local. This behaviour will occur unless something is actually preventing it.
Expect this idea might have fairly limited impact in economic terms.
Putting open source apps on the store is vital so that civil servants are confronted each time with the cheap/free options and the price differentials of proprietary tools. No doubt that price will be justifiable some times, but often not.
Being able to click and download OpenOffice.org rather than blow the departmental budget and add to the licensing paperwork overhead will provide an excellent incentive to become cost efficient in software use.
It feels as if you’re trying to invent a ring-fenced public-sector only version of the open source idea here. And it feels as if you dont entirely “get” the open source idea.
Sourceforge exists. Why not just say all public sector apps will be open source and put into the public domain? Why limit your recycling to the public sector, and limit the creativity on which you draw to public sector only? Again, the whole document feels as if conceived inside a public sector ghetto, which can presenrve its unique qualities if it remains cut off from the rest of the world (but then has to buy everything from companies which in turn rip it off because of its unworldliness).
Open source has more powerful application eg for health, local gov and edu where same apps are needed over nd over than for Whitehall where the business is distinct and unique (tho basic office services of course remain generic)
If the government restricted itself to paying for support and not for applications (by using software using one of the Free licences) it wouldn’t need an app store – a double cost saving