Government gets a bad rap when it comes to IT, a bit unfairly in my opinion.
We’ve all seen the headlines and spectacular fails. Back that up with conversations I’ve had with senior government IT managers – despondent about their team’s own ability to deliver.
But here’s a couple of things to consider in their defence.
Firstly, there have been some pretty spectacular fails in the private sector – and when we see #zuckergate, Woolworths merchandising problems, CBA outages or Qantas booking system problems – we don’t seem to conclude that “the private sector just can’t deliver IT”.
Even when government procures their disasters, like #censusfail – the vendors seem to get off the hook and government gets the blame.
The reality is that government is in a tough spot – they face complex changing business rules specific to their jurisdiction. They live at the whim of their political masters – (I remember my time as a team-leader on the NSW StateRail ticketing system when the minister decided to credit several million people for a day’s travel “tomorrow”). They deliver systems to an IT savvy public, often under constrained budgets, and can’t afford to take shortcuts with security, privacy, reliability, or usability.
In a fairer light, you could also argue much of the private sector is not so far ahead, with many businesses paying enormous amounts of money for systems that don’t deliver (or deliver poorly) and are often captive to costly lock-in contracts.
Turns out, delivering IT systems – is tough across the board.
Buying off the shelf or SaaS can present a complex compromise, because high usage costs and the difficulties of integration and customisation can cancel out the supposed benefits. You’re either at the mercy of the provider’s choice of features and approach, prohibitive licence fees and usage costs, or you’re back to building bespoke capability at some level.
At the same time, in-house development is hard – mobile accessibility, client engagement, maps, content, big data, security – require a huge body of knowledge to build, support and integrate. It’s just too hard & too expensive for organisations to maintain high levels of expertise in the wide variety of technology required to provide sophisticated enterprise scale solutions to an IT savvy public.
We’re serious about solving this problem.
Over the last 12 years we’ve been developing the Skyve Enterprise Platform – a new breed no-code/low-code platform. It’s open-source and free to use, with no requirement for ongoing licencing, and open standards so there’s no lock in.
Low-code is an approach to software that lets you focus on business rules and concepts, rather than writing code. You provide a high level description of the capability you need – with small amounts of code where necessary – taking advantage of a integrated platform.
It means that non-developers can build and trial apps without needing a degree in IT. It also means that a small team of skilled developers can exceed the output of much larger teams, with higher levels of confidence, lower costs and lower risk.
This keeps you focused your core business, rather than attempting to pick winners between flavour of the month technologies like React or Angular – I mean, is that really where you want to be spending your time?
We’ve demonstrated the value proposition for government – even in blended teams with internal IT staff – to deliver sophisticated, high-quality, mission-critical solutions. And we’d love to tell you more.
If you’re interested in how you can make a step-change to the success of your IT, reach out and let’s meet online or for a coffee.
