Balancing agility and efficiency: Open architecture and platforms in government

The drive for public sector organisations to become more citizen-centred with increased flexibility in delivery models must be balanced with the architectural discipline to re-use, share, and consume commoncomponents wherever possible. This as called an open architecture approach.

The application of open, platform-based thinking to the public sector provides a powerful means of underpinning the technological aspects of a modern, digital public service. Service providers adoption of open architectures standardised ways of doing things enables them to take greater advantage of consumption models of downstream service delivery. Such models are usually both cheaper and more flexible, and involve the assembly of user-centred services from increasingly standard components across a common platform based on commonly shared open standards:

A platform is a set of common components, assembly methods or technologies that serve as building blocks for a portfolio of products or services. Platform innovation involves exploiting the power of commonality - using modularity to create a diverse set of derivative offerings more quickly and cheaply than if they were stand-alone items.

Platforms exist in a variety of industries and the notion of a platform has been used in a range of contexts and there has been a typology of platforms proposed.

First, internal platforms, conceived as a set of subsystems and interfaces internal to the organisation that have been intentionally planned and developed to form a common structure from which a stream of derivative products can be efficiently developed and produced for example, Sonys Walkman, HPs modular printer components, Rolls-Royces family of engines - saving fixed costs, benefiting from component re-use, and enabling flexibility.

Second, supply-chain platforms that seek to replicate these benefits across interfaces among different organisations within a supply chain - most notably, the automotive industry. For example, the Renault-Nissan alliance developed a common platform for the Renault Clio and the Nissan Micra.

Third, industry platforms - products, services or technologies that are developed by one or several firms, and which serve as foundations upon which other firms can build complementary products, services or technologies, such as Apples iPad and iPhone, the internet, payment cards, fuel cell automotive technology, and some genomic technologies.

Encouraging new thinking and overcoming entrenched cultural barriers to the emergence and adoption of open platforms within the UK public sector remains a significant challenge. As an illustration of how difficult this can be, consider the differences between the two depictions below of the open stack, developed by one of the authors in 2011 to explain the architectural and cultural change needed to bring about the open platform dynamic. It shows that there are various interrelated aspects that the public sector needs to address simultaneously:

Figure 1 (A and B): open stack: a mix of behaviours underpinned by technology

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Balancing agility and efficiency: Open architecture and platforms in government