I work for a Danish municipality, we’ve bought a few SaaS products in recent years. The fastest implement was two days, and we had a working product before we w

I work for a Danish municipality, we’ve bought a few SaaS products in recent years. The fastest implement was two days, and we had a working product before we were even done with the contract. We bought it from a local software house, that knows how political organisations operate, they host in AWS, but they could have hosted it in Azure for all we care. (We would prefer Azure because they are better in Europe, but AWS is fine). So government operations and contracts can work fast. Until you meet a certain amount of cost that is. We have laws that govern how we buy software, and once they kick in, the process is long, tiresome and really, really, ineffective. Because often the company who wins a bidding war, underbids, and end up delivering a lot less than promised unless you pay ridiculous extra money, and nothing in those laws protect us from this, not really. The big issue is that government isn’t similar, so you have to govern in for the lowest common denominator. My ciry has technical competences on staff, this allows us to actually utilise SaaS products that require integration into our business processes and 300 existing systems. Our neighbouring municipality doesn’t, and as a result, they don’t even really know what the word SaaS means. The government has to write laws that work for both of us. I think the real issue is lack of technical competences in the public sector, and the reason is really beyond me. Sure I have a vested interest, but I think I can defend it by my ability to write software in a few weeks that would cost us half a million on the private market. That’s not the primary importance of technical staff though, I don’t think we should build all those 300 systems ourselves, but we need to know how to cooperate with the private sector, and we need to build an enterprise architecture to support that, and to do that, we need technical staff. The fact that this isn’t obvious in the political command structure in 2019 is just silly. Especially in Denmark where we’re competing with Estonia for having the most digitised public sector in the world. But to add some numbers to it, we have 7000 employees, they use a digital device or a computer for an average of 5 hours a day. We have 245 physical locations with network (schools, libraries, child care institutions and so on). We have more than 300 different systems, some major some minor. We’re expected to operate this with 5 people in operations, two people in development and architecture and 3 people in support. I think I know why though. We don’t have a single elected official in my entire country who knows how to program.