Spotting snake oil: How to become a better buyer

5 August 2024 | The 21st edition of The Apolitical View by Apolitical CEO and Co-Founder Robyn Scott. Subcribe to the newsletter

In this week's edition:

• Becoming a better buyer in the age of AI
• The limits of data
• Where did all the public toilets go?

As government budgets are under pressure almost everywhere, getting procurement right is crucial. It is especially high stakes when purchasing large, long-term technology solutions with a big impact on public services. The integration of AI into so many of these tech solutions is increasing both the opportunities and risks — and making good procurement harder than ever.

If public servants ever feel they don’t wield real power, it’s worth remembering how colossal global public procurement spending is. Open Contracting estimates that global annual spend by governments on goods, services and works is US$13 trillion. They also note that only 3% of that spend is published openly — I’d recommend their sobering infographic setting this out, and applaud the government of Colombia for being one of the most transparent in the world on government contracts. In these colossal numbers are colossal opportunities. If just 1% of this $13 trillion was spent 50% better, it would unlock $65 billion each year.

Recent history is littered with technology procurement catastrophes to learn from. The USA’s botched rollout of the HealthCare.Gov website is the stuff of lore, covered so well in Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America. Following a recent enquiry into the eye-poppingly expensively ArriveCAN app for digital immigration and customs declarations, Canada’s Auditor General recommended that the government “should ensure that potential bidders are not involved in developing or preparing any part of a request for proposal and should put in place controls that will prevent this from occurring.” The Phoenix payroll system scandal is also enough to make any Canadian public servant wince. South Africa’s SAP system rollout at the government energy utility Eskom has also made headlines. The UK Post Office is still reckoning with the harm to people’s lives caused by the Horizon scandal.

A new and unavoidable spending spree is fast approaching: AI for public services. With tight spending constraints a reality for many governments, and AI vendors promising huge efficiencies, it’s essential that buyers in government are discerning. Friend and advisor to Apolitical Aaron Maniam (a former senior Singaporean civil servant now at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology Policy) explores the idea of needing to become better buyers of AI in our new report Building the AI-Ready Government: An Essential Action Plan for Leaders, out this week:

“One of my favourite phrases is that governments need to not just be good at finding vendors, they also need to be good buyers. This is a key skill. Governments need some of their staff to have technical literacy in engineering, programming and coding.” Maniam highlights that “these technically literate people are the ones who will ask the right questions about what to do, what to outsource and how to evaluate proposals from possible vendors.”

Public servants need to know what good looks like for the technology they’re acquiring. They also need to know what snake oil looks like. Training can help make the difference between the two clearer, which is why bolstering human capability around procuring (and of course using) technology is as important as the technology itself.

Robyn Scott

Apolitical CEO & Co-Founder

In the diary

__Tue 13 Aug | Bridging the Gap: Elected Officials & Public Servants __

In a record-breaking year of elections, effective collaboration between politicians and public servants is a critical skill. Our sister organisation, The Apolitical Foundation, will explore how these groups can better understand and support each other in the third event of their Election Series.

Recommendations

I enjoyed this excellent piece by C. Thi Nguyen on The Limits of Data — so much so that I read it twice and shared it with the whole Apolitical team.

And finally...

It’s not uncommon to find yourself stranded in the middle of a bustling city with no clue where the nearest toilet is. The solution shouldn't be to buy the smallest thing at the nearest coffee shop just to get a code which grants you access to their restroom. But New York City is using open data to solve this problem. Anyone can now access a city-maintained Google Maps layer showing all free, public restrooms. It’s a fantastic example of how opening up government data can make a real difference, no matter the scale of the problem. If you have any other examples of how open data can solve citizen problems, please share them in the Open Data in Government Community of Practice.

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