> To do it in-house succesfully requires a level of healthy functioning [...] that few organizations have
I think it actually requires the organization to morph into being a tech company first. In order to have good software to run a City Council, it effectively requires the Council to become "a software-making organization that delivers council services". In order to have good software to run a bank, it requires the bank to become "a software-making organization that delivers banking services".
Unfortunately, it's both politically difficult (nobody goes into any type of non-IT activity because they want to work with software) and really challenging: not even IT organizations have figured out the best way to address problems like technical debt, language churn, documentation etc, and non-IT organizations face them just as much.
I mean, not only is it politically difficult, it's probably not appropriate for a City Government to organize itself primarily as a "software organization" -- that's not actually it's mission.
I don't actually want my city government to be a "software-making organization that delivers government services".
Every organization needs an ERP (maybe?), but not every organization that needs an ERP is or should be a software organization. Saying that in order to get a good ERP every organization has to transform itself into a software-centered organization... seems a bit much.
Its mission is to deliver council services, but if the best way to do that is through efficient IT (and in this day and age that's pretty undoubtedly the case, since most communications are pushed via websites, payments are made via automated systems, etc etc), then the organization should definitely pack the necessary skills and organizational tools to achieve efficient IT first and foremost.
> I don't actually want my city government to be a "software-making organization that delivers government services".
Let me understand this.
You want your city government to overcharge you on Council Tax because they didn't see the form you filed two months ago about being a single occupant.
You want your city government to miss your bin because they actually performed the collection one day earlier than usual and didn't alert you in some way.
You want your city government to be at the mercy of unfaithful civil servants who abscond with money by applying dodgy accounting.
You want your city government to dig themselves into massive financial holes because their planning and forecasting software is subpar.
You want your city government to be unable to analize expenses and contracts to identify where they're getting gouged.
You want your city government to ignore complaints about this or that item, since they can conveniently forget to file them when people call.
These (and more) are not hypotheticals - this is what goes on in many (most?) local authorities, today like yesterday, and it's all stuff that can be fixed with software by organizations with the right skills and attitudes; but they require putting software (and people who know how to make software) at the heart of "how we go about doing things".
I don't live in a country where it's called a "Council" and operates like a UK local Council, so my units of city government and their roles/functions might not be the same, and that may be a misconnect in this conversation.
But services provided by IT are only one part of what I expect my local municipal government to be able to do competently, and not necessarily the great part. While I would like the services provided by IT to be done competently (ideally beyond competently), it does not necessarily follow that they should be focused on to the exclusion or de-prioritization of things that are not IT, which it seems to me would be the consequence of the local municipal government reorganizing itself and considering itself as fundamentally and mainly a software engineering organization (or an IT organization in general, which is not necessarily the same thing either).
I think it actually requires the organization to morph into being a tech company first. In order to have good software to run a City Council, it effectively requires the Council to become "a software-making organization that delivers council services". In order to have good software to run a bank, it requires the bank to become "a software-making organization that delivers banking services".
Unfortunately, it's both politically difficult (nobody goes into any type of non-IT activity because they want to work with software) and really challenging: not even IT organizations have figured out the best way to address problems like technical debt, language churn, documentation etc, and non-IT organizations face them just as much.