Councils 'could save at least £51m' with shift to ODF and open source

Maidenhead railway station. Photo by say_cheddar on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Yesterday we pointed to the interesting work being done by OpenlyLocal with its council spending system, where you can interrogate its database (garnered from a so-far small but growing list of councils) to see which suppliers are getting the most money from them.

On the way I queried the reported complaints by Liam Maxwell, the councillor responsible for IT policy at the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, about the challenge of getting open source implemented at the council. He was quoted saying that it needed central government to mandate the use of open standards in office software - specifically, the Open Document Format (ODF) - so that RBW&M could migrate to cheaper desktops.

Do you really have to standardise on ODF, I asked? Won't the existing Microsoft formats do the job just as well?

Now Maxwell has got in touch. He's got an interesting story to tell - and his council is one which is thinking very seriously about how to get the cost of IT in local government pushed down. The logic: reduce those costs, and you don't have to cut other services when you're faced with an across-the-board reduction in your grant from a central government bringing in austerity measures.

I spoke to him earlier today and asked if he was serious about the necessity of ODF being mandated before real change could happen - and how much the savings could be, and what's happening with local government. Here's how he explained it - and these thoughts are going to be expanded in a paper that he is preparing to release next week with much more detail.

"If one council goes to a service provider such as Capita and asks for a change to its Revenues and Benefits system so it works with OpenOffice and ODF instead of Microsoft Office, Capita will tell them to go away. But if government mandates it, then Capita or any of these other companies that do this work for councils could get it done in six months. It's a dysfunctional market because it's set by standards which are set at the centre." And the centre - in this case the Cabinet Office - has heretofore said that Microsoft Office is the standard.

(Note that Tom Watson, the Labour MP who was a Cabinet Office minister under the previous Labour administration, did in 2009 try to push along efforts to encourage open source in government. That's not quite the same though as mandating ODF for office documents in local government.)

"Only the Cabinet Office can set this standard. It does sound a bit wet [to be waiting for that instead of just doing it in the council] but this is what's actually stopping it happening. There's a huge saving to be made. If just half of councils moved half of their employees from Microsoft Office formats to ODF the cost of running desktops could come down dramatically - it would save £51m. If all of the councils moved all of their employees off Office, the savings would be £200m, though of course you're not going to get that happening."

What's tying them into Office? As Maxwell put it to me, "you assume Office is only used for, well, office-y things like writing a letter or doing a presentation. Sadly it is not that simple, if it were £300 Office licences would have gone years ago (because it is a commodity, there's an open source version of it).

"However, because Microsoft Office is integrated into the applications our officers use (when they want to write a planning letter they have to use Microsoft Word because it is coded that way in the planning application) we are stuck with it. So engineering our way out of that is pretty complex."

But moving to OpenOffice would mean all those systems could interoperate - and it would even be possible to interoperate with Google Docs, which would represent an even bigger financial saving on Microsoft Office-based systems. And once you start to shift to Google Docs (and email and calendaring), everything is in the cloud which means that data centres suddenly aren't your concern any more - they're Google's. (Or whichever cloud provider you go with.)

Maxwell says that once you get there, then the dominoes of spending start to fall. Why, for example, do local councils duplicate so many of their services? "95% of what we do is the same as what every other council does. There's about 1% localisation. It's a commodity service. But if you go to other local councils and talk about shared services, they say 'fine, as long as you use our service.'"

Even so, open standards on the desktop have the potential to save huge amounts of money. At Windsor & Maidenhead, the council desktops cost an averaged amount of £345 per year to run. In central government, the amount is £800-£1600. But in Madiera Extremadura, in Spain, the cost is about £130 per year. And in a single year the Dutch government achieved improvements in interoperability (31%), cost reductions (8%), and quality improvements in municipal government (225) in moving to mandated open source across central government.

So where do the costs come from in central government? A bit more security - but, asks Maxwell, is there really £500 more per year in security costs for every desktop there?

He suggests that IT is costing central and local government about 10 times more than it should. Certainly, initiatives like the G-Cloud could push that down; but what's clearly needed is for Francis Maude, in charge of the Cabinet Office, to mandate ODF as soon as possible, so that councils can start tomorrow on migrating to cheaper desktops. We'll all benefit, after all, if they can provide the same services at lower costs. Well, possibly some suppliers won't do so well - but every gravy train has to hit the buffers at some point.

And another couple of statistics to ruminate over from Maxwell: "we spend 1.2% of our GDP on government computing. We spend more on procurement in government than we do on Wales."

He insists that the Windsor & Maidenhead "aren't being drips. There's a real technical reason [for not moving to open source] which only central government can change. And Francis [Maude] has said he will do it. ODF would open everything up. The Dutch government did that, and that's why they saved so much money."

The Dutch example may be one worth examining further - but in the meantime, our apologies for doubting Mr Maxwell yesterday. And watch out for the discussion paper next week.