BasicGov / BLOG

Change is good!

I recently did an interview with a local journalist about how we moved CloudBench from enterprise software to a SaaS business model (see BC Business article from interview, “The Accidental Innovator”). While we’re still learning how to explain the benefits of SaaS to our local government marketplace, there were some key lessons I learned as we moved from traditional software to a subscription-based product.

Lesson 1: Sometimes the safe, proven solution is the most dangerous for both customers and suppliers.  When we still ran an enterprise business, it was hard work to get customers live quickly.  This was frustrating for them because anyone who takes months – even years – to go live will eventually question their purchase decision.  And it was expensive for us, as more and more working capital was needed to span the time we were working for clients who weren’t ready to pay us.

Lesson 2: SaaS and cloud computing were already being adopted by businesses and consumers.  You didn’t need to be Nostradamus to predict that government would also adopt the technology.

Lesson 3: You can’t run a Hummer franchise under the same roof as a Toyota dealership.  Building a SaaS business alongside traditional enterprise software is a recipe for internal strife.  Enterprise revenues are threatened by SaaS’s dramatically lower cost and time to implement.  As the SaaS team wins more business, enterprise revenues are cannibalized and the staff on the traditional side of the business don’t know whether to switch jobs or change company.

So was the change easy?  No.  Would I do it again? Absolutely!

O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit is on this week in Washington, DC.  There are numerous of well known speakers with discussions mostly focussed at the federal government level and using modern technology to fuel innovation.  The Obama administration with CTO, Vivek Kundra, has taken a strong stance to better connect government to its citizens using technology.  For example, they created data.gov to catalog all of the federal government’s web services to engage in more development and innovation.

While all of this is being discussed and slowly adopted at the federal level, there have been faster grass roots changes at the local government levels using modern technology to better connect with citizens.  Perhaps being smaller makes local government earlier adopters and quicker decision makers or perhaps they are more connected with citizens in their communities and more connected with how to implement improvements to citizen services with basic community development functions - building permits, licenses, neighbour complaints, development zoning, citizen access portals, to name a few.  City halls, county halls and town halls see citizens and contractors daily with new requests, changes to existing requests, status inquiries and regardless of the specifics, they are under pressure to respond quickly.

See some examples of local governments that are innovators and adopters of web-based, e-gov solutions.

Post a comment and share your examples at the local, state or federal government levels ….