The CSG Intergovernmental Software Collaborative

About Us

The CSG Intergovernmental Software Collaborative project provides educational and direct technical assistance to states and state supporting organizations interested in leveraging intergovernmental partnerships to meet their public policy goals through information technology.

The The CSG Intergovernmental Software Collaborative project originated with the Beeck Center at Georgetown University

Project Services

A primary objective for CSG is to enable states to work together on software. When state government stakeholders discover ways to work together effectively to create software tools for their collective benefit, they are more likely to look for more opportunities for collaboration. By learning to collaborate through our work, CSG hopes to normalize this type of collaboration.

CSG also seeks to deliver better public policy outcomes for the public by investing in a resilient digital infrastructure and user-centric technology tools. Technology must be an enabler of public policy initiatives, rather than an obstacle to them. Modernization efforts for long-standing programs and services too often stall out and public services suffer because of hard-to-use and complicated-to-replace technology systems, while broadly supported new policies and programs often fail to pass because of the feared cost of the underlying technology. By showing state stakeholders how to create and maintain resilient digital infrastructure, technology can be a medium that facilitates change instead of limiting the scope of what’s possible.

Engaging more states to reform software procurement and delivery practices and participate in a state software collaborative will lead to better and faster service to the public. It could reasonably save states billions of dollars in a decade.

To accomplish its goals, CSG is providing states and state-supporting organizations the following assistance:

Background

The Current State of State Information Technology Systems

State, local, and educational departments spend approximately $59 billion a year on information technology projects. IT systems empower states to deliver on their missions, which extend to everything from monitoring and managing transportation systems, issuing healthcare worker licenses, and managing retirement systems.

With so many state funds and mission critical initiatives tied to information technology, the success or failure of those systems can have outsized impacts on state budgets, government efficiency, and ultimately, public trust. Despite the high amounts of investment, government systems are commonly derided as out of date and unequipped in meeting user needs. Additionally, only 13% of large government software projects are considered successful.

How states succeed relies on many factors – including the very fundamental structure of their information technology procurement approach.

States commonly provide the same general services to the public, but they rarely hold the legal rights to the software underlying those services. The result is that when a state manages to build software that works well, they cannot easily share that software with other states. Some software sharing is done on an ad-hoc basis, but governance structures are difficult to set up and are reinvented each time. The most common way that software is “shared” is when the vendor that built it then sells it to other agencies as “commercial, off-the-shelf” software that still requires extensive customization. The result is that states end up with several sub-optimal outcomes: 1) they don’t own the software needed to carry out their mission; 2) they’ve committed to a customized system that can’t be easily or automatically updated; and 3) they lose the ability to benefit from competition among vendors for better price and service terms.

States’ overly complex procurement processes result in insurmountable barriers for new software providers and insufficient competition. To date, the federal government, which funds a substantial portion of state technology modernization efforts, has been slow to intervene or create better incentives.

The CSG Intergovernmental Software Collaboratives as Multi-State Solution

Through intergovernmental software collaboratives, states may jointly leverage and benefit from their investments through partnerships centered on open-source systems.

Intergovernmental software collaboratives can yield better outcomes, more government efficiency, and higher cost savings for all parties involved because of the underlying coordination of resources and efforts. An open-source system allows for newly developed code by any one or more states to be easily shared with the other states. For example, if a state has a need for a new feature and the budget to do so, they are empowered through the governance structure of a collaborative to simultaneously share the investment for the mutual benefit of other states who might be able to use it for their own needs.

Software collaboratives are not a new concept, with documented collaboratives going back to the 1960s. One modern day example of a software collaborative is through the Federation of Tax Administrators – a group that assists states in applying emerging technologies to tax administration as well as to simplify the administration of current taxes on a multistate basis.

Software collaboratives are at present not a well-known concept and therefore limited in use. To reduce this barrier and facilitate state and state-supporting organizations’ software development capacity, The Council of State Governments, through its National Center for Interstate Compacts, is providing educational and hands-on technical assistance for the development and sharing of software collaboratives.