According to a report, Danish Government IT projects could make substantial savings if they developed and re-used system elements as open source, it was announced on 27 April 2011.

The report was commissioned by the National IT and Telecom Agency (IT- og Telestyrelsen, in Danish) and was conducted by a consultancy company. Based on data from 12 authorities, it identifies five system categories where there is great potential to develop and share general system components as open source, so they can be re-used in other projects.

Under the premise that government institutions are required to recycle such components, the analysis identified an annual potential saving of between DKK78-97 million (€10.5-13 million approximately) if it is scaled up to include all government IT developments. These savings were derived solely from the development and re-use of key system elements; the potential of re-using large system complexes and existing complete open source solutions was not investigated.

If there are ‘open source building blocks’ already in place, it becomes easier to develop IT projects in smaller iterations, which could reduce the risks involved. As well as describing the potential of open source, the report also analysed the potential of implementing government IT projects in more flexible approaches. It concluded that savings of a further DKK97-122 million (€13-16.4 million approximately) could be made in this way.

The identified potential savings support the principles of software acquisitions, as presented in the Danish Government's Software Strategy in 2003. The software strategy has subsequently been developed as six principles for the use of open source in government in ‘Open Source Software in the Public Sector’, published by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (Ministeriet for Videnskab, Teknologi og Udvikling, in Danish) in 2008. It identified potential savings that can be derived directly from several of these principles, and two principles, ‘Competition’ and ‘Control and Autonomy’, could eventually also offer additional benefits.

In government IT projects, there is already some experience of re-using open source components developed by other public authorities. Examples include that both the finance system Navision Stat and the purchasing and invoice managing system IndFak re-use open source components from the e-business framework NemHandel, and that the map-viewing application VisKort re-uses components from the Nature Agency (Naturstyrelsen, in Danish) and the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), among others.

Further information:

•    Original news article - National IT and Telecom Agency (in Danish)
•    Danish Government's Software Strategy - National IT and Telecom Agency (in Danish)
•    ‘Open Source Software in the Public Sector’ - National IT and Telecom Agency (in Danish)