If you have ever wondered why:

• your borough uses a line of business systems that is barely working and will sign up for another 5 year extension with the same supplier;
• even your supplier doesn’t want to continue to sell you that software; 
• something that is cheap in the high street costs many times more to when you order it internally;
• you can’t use technology at work at the level that you can use at home;
• it takes so long to bring a new technology into your borough;

Then the answer might relate to procurement.

How do we help remedy this in the LOTI community?

We first started with a ‘Thinkin’ this month, a nuanced debate with provocations about the challenges and opportunities that are available. The idea was not to come up with solutions but to air the problems and dive deep to get to better questions.

Some of the provocations were around some of these concepts in procurement for boroughs:

• In regards to governance, why bad governance takes so long, how de-centring governance box ticking and having governance only from people qualified to do it where they can add value.
• In asking who should be involved in procurement we touched on ideas of moving from procurement being a one off event every few years to a continuous process, making it a more collegiate approach, thinking intelligently about thresholds when buying software and how Shadow IT is a signal of needs in your organisation.

We also discussed the perception that some boroughs might feel about being ‘locked-in’ with certain suppliers, the market for local government software and what the path to software autonomy might look like and who would have the appetite to do it.

It was a thrilling discussion and we are grateful to the panel who gave up their time and experience as well as the audience who fully participated by sharing their opinions in the debate.

The one question we all had at the end of the event, is what is going to happen next?

To this end, we’ve created a new Buying Better Tech Community of Practice for LOTI members to make connections with each other, discuss and hopefully solve some of the key pain points in buying the technology and services they need to improve resident services. This is an all-community effort – we are not going to get better if we don’t help each other.

This group is for officers of any level in London Boroughs who:

• are going through a procurement and want help and support
• want to find best practice from another London Borough
• want to bring in service teams into the conversation about services
• are in charge of transformation and find procurement difficult
• want to do pre-procurement properly

We are using a new platform and we’ve created a quick start guide as an intro to help you on-board and be part of our new online Community of Practice. 

See you online!