BBC News has revealed that the British Government has spent, or proposed to spend, somewhere between £10,000 and £40,000 on developing phone applications. One of the apps, a job seeker’s tool, has been downloaded 50,000 times and a Motoring Masterclass application proposed by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency sounds genuinely unique and useful in that it calculates fuel efficiency, tracks the proximity of a highway rescue organisation, and can be used as an emergency hazard light – so what’s the fuss?
Well, the new Coalition Government has recently launched a public spending review, with spending on the digital propositions of many Government departments coming under the the microscope. There are, a review by the Central Office of Information has revealed, 820 Government websites which cost £94 million to design and build between 2009 and today and a further £32 million in staffing costs.
When asked by the Daily Telegraph for comment on the app spending disclosure, I pointed out that £10,000 to £40,000 seems a reasonable budget for the work, depending on the complexity of the app and resource required to implement it. I also warned that, where Government departments are planning such applications in future, they should ensure that they aren’t simply duplicating functionality that’s already available in free or paid for apps, and that there is a genuine need for such an app in the first place.
I also said, although it wasn’t included in the article, that Government departments would be wise to seek out, and make their data available, to partners who want to create applications that use that data. This way, rather than paying for design and development, useful applications would still come to market, but tax payer funding would be replaced by market economics – those who build and release the app being free to seek reward for their efforts by selling it.
The failure, if there is one, in the Government apps already created is that they don’t appear to be underpinned by a clear strategy that aligns business drivers with end user requirements. Third party application developers, driven by the chance to make a profit rather than a desire to simply do something “cutting edge”, seem more likely, in many instances, to create genuinely useful apps that make clever use of Government data. There’s no reason, by the way, that businesses and other organisations can’t benefit from freeing up some of their data for use by third parties – in the UK, Tesco (our largest retailer), The Guardian and the BBC are all experimenting with doing exactly that.
Image credit: Cristiano Betta
