Would that it would happen here.
In Short, no.
We don’t have enough population and expertise to support home-grown office/application software.
Can’t do much about the population but expertise is another thing. Not much chance of growing, and every chance of diminishing, it the more we outsource - and we have been working to offshore that expertise for decades. But we can still buy it and grow it if there is a will. Security is another issue.
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Sorry Sam, I have to disagree.
Well, I do agree that we can’t easily support a full home-grown software stack.
However, this is different. It is open source, not home grown. This means that we take existing software and configure it to our needs. We maintain our local configuration, and the wider software community maintains the code.
This is exactly what we do here on the eHealth Forum (with the open source Discourse platform), and this is many times more cost efficient (and powerful) than proprietary alternatives.
If we went in this direction (i.e. Linux based OS vs Microsoft Windows), we would develop the capability pretty damn quickly. In fact, this was proposed (with a working prototype) by some rogue elements in the UK’s NHS 9 years ago:
It was shot down at the time by the somewhat incongruous accusation that it infringed on the NHS’s copyright. Short-sightedness was the true reason.
We could do this in a flash if the will existed within our central agencies. It might be a bit rough and ready at first (and upset a lot of people with Stockholm syndrome), but would become something beautiful quite quickly if it continued to get love.
As to an appropriate office suite, our European colleages are doing the heavy lifting at the moment:
It is exciting that other jurisdictions are able to launch their own sovereignty based solutions.
My issue is that as a government, there are standards for interoperability, and we don’t have sufficient expertise at the price point wise to keep a system going without finding that our systems are subsequently compromised through vulnerabilities unbeknownst to the community of developers.
It’s a 10+ year strategic journey including technical and digital workforce development. Doing it overnight or within a project time line in this country without a clear and realistic support structure means we will have rounds of outsourcing again, even if we get something working.
Yes agreed but considering all the ‘high level’ documents plans and strategies around (ie worthy visions and not much substance or funding for implementation) this is one aspect that is rarely mentioned. Actually IT in general is rarely mentioned. Managing our own data should at least be identified as a long-term goal.
Extending this a bit to health:
The news comes after France announced it would be migrating its national healthcare database from US-based providers to an unnamed new platform earlier this month. It’s also set to pivot from using Microsoft Teams for video conferencing to the French-made tool Visio across all government departments.
From this:
Does anyone know what national healthcare database France has been using?