Second meetup for the local gov multi-tenant digital services community of interest

Before I get underway describing our second online meetup, I’d like to take a quick moment to make a parish announcement. Kit Collingwood and Cate McLaurin are forming One Team Gov Local for folks that would like to come together to discuss cooperation between hands-on people at local authorities. If you’re interested in finding out more, fill out this form. If you work in local gov, I highly recommend you do so.

Our latest gathering was on the 22nd of June — you can find the slides here and the video of the session can be found here.

We covered the outputs of the previous session, contained in this blog post, and then moved onto our new discussion for the session. This time around, we discussed potential governance models for such services. As before, we collected our thoughts in this Miro board.

The major models suggested were as follows:

• Vendor-client : One council provides a reusable digital service for other local authorities, either for free or for payment. Either way, there would still need to be a contract in place to cover things like assurances about data usage, SLAs and accountability, in case of extreme circumstances such as the service being taken down and not returned.
• Spun-out joint ownership : A group of local authorities come together to form a jointly owned separate body, which would be the contract-holder for councils outside of the group that wish to use the service(s) it provides. There are several ways this could be done, including a standard limited liability business, a community interest company or a joint venture company.
• MHCLG : Since MHCLG already provides funding for groups of councils to create digital services via the Local Digital Fund, one suggestion was for that central government ministry to be the body that could help organise some of these groups and therefore be the contract-holding body itself.
• Open source model : Develop products along the lines of something like the Linux Foundation, while other organisations can then take those and create commercial enterprises offering different levels of support. It’s not clear at this point if this will work for what we want to focus on — shared use of SaaS cloud services — rather than distributing open source products for individual LAs to spin-up their own copies.

Of particular interest was Co-fund and Collaborate to Innovate (CC2i), which describes itself as “a public sector co-funding and collaboration platform enabling public sector bodies to co-fund solutions to their shared digital challenges”. This is a group that many people on the call had not encountered previously and may be very interesting to talk to and potentially invite along to a session in the future.

What most of the models above have in common is that they would involve significant effort to put into place, to create the contract-holding organisation before any discovery work could be done into actually implementing any services. This feels very counter to the Agile maxims of experimentation and “failing fast”.

In turn, this led some present to propose that, in the short term, to get this kind of thinking off the ground, we may be initially limited to the “lead council” client-vendor model, which then returns us very quickly to the fundamental issues of trust and risk. As a potential supplier council, why should we take on the risk of supporting other organisations — especially if they’re not paying us? As a potential client council, why should we trust another local authority to provide us with a digital service when that’s not the core remit of that organisation and it’s much “safer” to go with a long-term relationship with a large well-known vendor?

To focus on this is definitely to be in for the long haul. A lot of budget holders and other senior stakeholders would need persuading that this can be the right thing to do.

We had originally intended for the session to also cover “finding and joining such shared services” and “potential examples of the minimum size services we could start with”, but we ran out of time. We’ll continue to look into these next time.

Speaking of which, the next meetup will be at 5pm on Tuesday the 27th of July. If you’ve already expressed an interest, you’ll receive an invite shortly. If you’re new and would like to attend please email david.durant@hackney.gov.uk.