Public sector organisations that don’t innovate nor increase their efficiency loose trust from the society. For years, organisations in Europe have been buying much of their digital innovation from companies controlled by other continents and under none EU law. Given recent cost increases and global political turmoil, it has become very inefficient and costly to continue to buy digital innovation and tools in this manner.
Also, by buying ready-made solutions, no or little actual innovation is really happening since the competition is using the same tooling. The result of this has been obvious to some industries in Europe already as their competitive ability have been significantly impacted and challenged by more innovative vendors from other continents.
To address these challenges and regain some of the advantage lost, many large organisations in Europe today are turning to Open Source software to be used for catalyzing digital innovation, lower costs and share innovation.
A great model for innovation and cooperation
The Open Source software development model is not new and has by now been around for decades. The basic idea is to share what you innovate freely with others and in return they provide you with additions to your innovation, to make it even better, or share their own innovation with you.
When this works, innovation is let loose and no one has to wonder about how to lock users in, create a fantastic business model to make as much money as possible or get stuck in complex license models. A great model for innovation and cooperation, where the best solutions are premiered and great tech is set free to support innovation.
This is why large organisations for a while now has turned their focus on this cooperation and software development model to catalyze innovation internally, but also utilize Open Source software to speed up their own innovation and be more cost efficient. One popular and often successful way to do this is to establish an OSPO (Open Source Program Office) to support Open Source implementation and usage.
An open collaboration environment
An OSPO can support your organisations initiative to increase usage of Open Source software, but also assist with processes, methods and tooling to support a more open internal collaboration environment. The OSPO is supposed to (at least over time) address all potential challenges with using Open Source and an open development model.
This includes legal advice/support, support when using SW with certain licenses or which license to use for developed SW, but also create connections with both external and internal eco-systems, support tooling choices, methodology, training etc.
To be able to handle all these tasks, an OSPO needs to contain a lot of various competencies. An OSPO is ideally a virtual kind of organisation, where competencies are brought in from various parts of the organisation or externally to manage/address specific tasks. It is important to be able to source the competencies required when needed, but they don’t have to sit idle and wait for something to do.
To manage this, the OSPO is ideally managed by a smaller group of people with a broad understanding from open development and collaboration principles. This way the right resources can be steered in the right direction.
An open internal collaboration environment
If you are interested in more details or want some guidance on which resources that you might need in an OSPO, Redpill Linpro has developed our own OSPO concept. This includes a description of the resources/roles needed and activities that the OSPO would include in our minds.
