InnerSource and Collaboration in Public Administrations
A public administration organization is struggling with siloed development practices and inefficient resource utilization. Many projects are developed independently, leading to redundant efforts, inconsistent quality, and difficulties in maintaining and upgrading systems.
The problem to solve is how to foster a more collaborative and efficient development ecosystem within the public administration and between this and its suppliers. The aim is to promote code sharing, reuse, and knowledge transfer to reduce costs, improve quality, and accelerate development.
Public administrations are typically slow making decisions, but when a decision is made, this stays for longer time. Decisions are conservative as they have to serve citizens, and they usually base most of the development effort in outsourced partners.
The proposed context is the relationship between a public administration, all its suppliers, and the process to build a trusted collaboration environment. There are not official channels to accelerate certain developments while the backlog keeps growing over time, even when suppliers are willing to advance in some of those tasks.
- Siloed Development: Teams often work in isolation, unaware of each other's work or potential synergies. This leads to redundant efforts, inconsistent code quality, and difficulties in maintaining and upgrading systems.
- Lack of Standardization: There's a lack of standardized development practices, tools, and methodologies across teams. This results in inconsistent code quality, increased maintenance costs, and difficulties in onboarding new team members.
- Limited Code Sharing: Code sharing is often restricted due to concerns about intellectual property, security, and organizational silos. This limits the potential for collaboration and knowledge sharing.
- Bureaucratic Hurdles: Complex approval processes, bureaucratic red tape, and rigid organizational structures hinder innovation and slow down development cycles.
- Insufficient Incentives: There's a lack of incentives to encourage developers to contribute to shared projects and collaborate with others.
- Cultural Resistance to Change: Some individuals may resist changes to traditional development practices and may be hesitant to adopt new approaches like InnerSource.
To address these challenges, the organization may explore the adoption of InnerSource practices.
Key elements of the proposed InnerSource approach include:
- Shared Repositories: Establishing a central repository for code, documentation, and other artifacts.
- Collaborative Development: Encouraging collaboration between teams and suppliers.
- Transparent Processes: Implementing transparent processes for code review, testing, and deployment.
- Incentives: Providing incentives to motivate developers to contribute to shared projects.
- Clear Roles and Responsibilities: Defining roles and responsibilities for different stakeholders, such as project owners, developers, and reviewers.
- Overcoming Legal and Organizational Hurdles: Addressing legal and organizational challenges, such as intellectual property rights and procurement regulations.
- Suppliers would start working in a more collaborative way as the legal framework has evolved and allow them to work accordingly.
- At the same time, the centralized assets would help to have visibility on the next steps and given the existence of a public backlog, this would allow to accelerate certain areas of interest for the public administration and the several suppliers.
Initial
- Eva María Iglesias, Balidea
- Pablo Paz-Trelles, Xunta de Galicia
- Jesús Rey, Altia
- Javier, Altia
- Pablo Sanxiao, OSPO Xunta de Galicia
- Daniel Izquierdo, Bitergia