SBA

Are Small Countries Braver?

I, like many come-overs from the UK, used to despair at the UK Government’s repeated waste of money on IT; the number of big IT project failures costing hundreds of millions, or even billions, of pounds is legion. Actually I still despair because my connections with UK IT are still strong, but at least it’s not my tax money that’s being wasted anymore. Almost all of these huge failures have been projects which have been commissioned from big name global IT suppliers to develop custom systems for the UK government. Massive budget overruns are common, and in many cases the software proves to be incapable of performing the job for which it was purchased. One can blame the competence of the people working in the UK Government - and sometimes I do - but one cannot accuse them of using risky unknown suppliers. However one looks at the problem, the way the UK Government procures big computer systems is broken.

Fortunately we can’t say the same for the Isle of Man. Our Government computer systems are, on the whole, not bad. They may not always be up to the standards I would wish to see, but few Manx Government IT purchases have been unmitigated disasters. Being small, with a relatively small budget, has benefits.

Bulgaria, with a population of over seven million, is much larger than the Isle of Man but much smaller than the UK. It’s a bit bigger than Scotland or Ireland. As of the first of July this year Bulgaria brought a law into force, the Electronic Governance Act, which requires new software written for the Bulgarian government to be Open Source. That’s not to say that it must be existing Open Source, but that new software written for the Bulgarian Government must be Open Sourced, meaning that the source code must be publicly published and made freely available for use.

This seems to me to be a “brave” move - much as I support Open Source I am sure that some commercial software suppliers will baulk at the idea that their software source code must be published for public scrutiny. Equally I am sure that some departments of the Bulgarian government will not welcome the software they use being open to public scrutiny - for instance the algorithms used to calculate income tax or benefits entitlements. Not everything will need open source coding; the military, police, secret and some other services are not included in the subject of the Act.

The argument being used by the proponents who achieved the creation of this law are interesting. Usually one of the primary arguments for Open Source is cost - much Open Source software is either free or available at low cost - but the Bulgarians don’t appear to have used the cost argument. Instead they say:

“It means that whatever custom software the government procures will be visible and accessible to everyone. After all, it’s paid by tax-payers money and they should both be able to see it and benefit from it.”

So the Bulgarians are adopting Open Source for public transparency and accountability - which would appear to directly address the types of problems encountered by the UK government with some of its major IT programmes, which the UK National Audit Office, Audit Commission and Public Accounts Committee have repeatedly criticised for their opaqueness, overspends and delivery failures.

The Bulgarians go on to say:

“As for security — in the past ‘security through obscurity’ was the main approach, and it didn’t quite work —numerous vulnerabilities were found in government websites that went unpatched for years, simply because a contract had expired. With opening the source we hope to reduce those incidents, and to detect bad information security practices in the development process, rather than when it’s too late.”

So they clearly expect that adoption of Open Source will both help to improve both IT security, and the “Abandonware” problem (Abandonware is used to describe the situation when the software supplier disappears or fails to continue upgrading and maintaining its software, frequently meaning that it must be replaced by buying new software simply in order to get support).

It will be interesting to see how this move pans out over time. It seems likely that some big commercial suppliers will simply not bid for future Bulgarian Government software contracts, potentially opening the field to smaller suppliers - something that the UK Cabinet Office is keen to do but Government Departments are not.

Here at home on the Isle of Man we don’t have the scale of IT problems that the UK Government suffers, and our Government IT generally works “OK”. There have nevertheless been criticisms of our Isle of Man Government’s procurement of IT systems, not least because some tenders appear to have been written in such a way that they effectively exclude Manx suppliers or favour specific off-island suppliers thereby depriving the local IT sector of the opportunity to develop new exportable products and expertise. It may be that we can learn something from the Bulgarian approach.

One could question the wisdom of Bulgaria’s radical move in demanding that publicly-procured software be Open Source - they could potentially be excluding experienced suppliers with the best software for their needs - but the Bulgarians are hardly naive when it comes to technology.

Before the fall of the wall Bulgaria was described as the “Silicon Valley of the Eastern Bloc” and was a major supplier of technology to the Communist world. That heritage has not withered, Bulgaria operates the only supercomputer in South-Eastern Europe, and ten percent of Bulgarian GDP is generated by the ICT sector. Apple, Hewlett-Packard and SAP have research and development centres in Bulgaria, and the country has previously been measured as having the highest proportion of certified IT professionals per capita in the world. I think it’s reasonable to say that when the Bulgarian Government passed their Open Source law they did so from an informed perspective.

I can only think that this radical move by one of the most technologically informed governments in the world is one to watch. It is perhaps not so much brave as far-sighted. It appears likely to reduce the cost of government IT by making it more secure and sustainable, and likely to encourage the use by government of more smaller home-grown suppliers thereby further boosting Bulgaria’s exceptional tech sector. The Isle of Man, with its ICT growth aspirations embodied in Vision 2020, would do well to take a look at Bulgaria’s approach.

Interestingly the first automatic electronic digital computer, basically a calculator, was developed by  John Vincent Atanasoff  who was half Bulgarian. It was not a programmable computer, credit for the first programmable digital computer goes to Britain for the Colossus developed at Bletchley Park as part of World War Two codebreaking - but the Bulgarians have been in the tech business for a long time.