One neat trick for buying software that isn’t trash

My job is working with state and local agencies on the budgeting for, procurement of, and oversight of the major software projects that undergird every agency. I have lots to say about how to get that right, but it can really all be boiled down to one piece of advice: hire people who understand how technology works.

By hiring coders, designers, user researchers, product owners, etc., agencies can stop getting ripped off (and stop publishing RFPs in which they absolutely demand to be ripped off).

The mission of nearly every government agency is intermediated by software. If the software fails, the agency fails in their mission. If a state unemployment department’s UI system goes down, there’s really no sense in which they’re an unemployment department. If a state Medicaid agency’s Medicaid Management Information System is broken, there’s really no sense in which they provide Medicaid coverage.

And yet state agencies outsource this work. The thinking is that they’re not in the business of software, they’re in the business of unemployment insurance or health insurance or whatever. Anything to do with the software is seen as the domain of software vendors, up to and including the oversight of how and what those vendors are doing. But the software is the UI and the health insurance.

I’ve spent the past decade on helping with this problem in a bunch of ways, but all of the solutions I propose are inferior to simply hiring software developers. These are the people who can evaluating agencies’ existing software, understand the needs of the users, perform market research, test software, help prepare solicitations, evaluate proposals, and oversee the work of vendors. Heck, with enough software developers, the agency can even write software themselves, instead of outsourcing it.

So, sure, you can get better vendors to bid, do a better job of checking vendors’ references, and do a better job preparing to outsource, but better than all of those is simply hiring people who understand how software is made.

Waldo Jaquith is a government delivery manager at U.S. Digital Response, a nonprofit that helps state and local governments improve their services. This piece was originally published on his blog.