Lessons learned from a Greek open source project

The Greek open source project LGAF did not get further than the pilot phase, even after six years. Prime reasons are a tender procedure in which the project was granted to a company without extensive experience in managing open source projects, the general immaturity of the Greek open source market and a failing funding system. What lessons can be learned? What recommendations can be made for the future?

What LGAF can teach us

Technical excellence and superb software features are not enough to make an open source project successful. This general rule certainly applies to the Local Government Application Framework (LGAF), an open source platform that should have offered Greek citizens and small and medium-sized enterprises access to e-government services.

The development of LGAF started in 2007, when the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (Kede) wrote a tender for the development of an open-source platform for electronic services to Greek citizens and SMEs.

Kede hoped the platform would become a reference for other interoperability projects. To increase the rentability of ongoing and future IT investments, Kede is working towards establishing interoperability standards within local administrations, said OpenGov Group co-ordinator Theodoros Karounos in 2009 at a presentation about LGAF.

The project should have finished in 2013, when LGAF would have been made available to all Greek municipalities at no cost. However, as of 2013 this is not the case. LGAF is still in the development phase, says subcontractor Petros Kavassalis, who works as a researcher at the the Atlantis Group at the Computer Technology Institute (CTI).

What factors caused this? What lessons can be learned? What recommendations can be made for the future? Those three questions are the main subject of this case study.

LGAF IN RETROSPECT

Responsibility

The LGAF project has been the responsibility of PETA (an abbreviation of the Greek words for Information – Training – Local Development). PETA is a Greek company providing consultancy services to local, regional and central government authorities. PETA’s main shareholder is Kede, which is also LGAF’s contracting authority.

PETA supported Kede in implementing LGAF, says Evi Tsiligianni of PETA. It provided the necessary scientific, organisational and technical support. It supervised LGAF’s head contractor SingularLogic. It also financially monitored and managed the project.

Tender

The tender was an open international competition, says Tsiligianni. The contract, worth 1,577,463.72 euro (including VAT at 19%) was signed on 30 July 2007.

IT consortium

LGAF was awarded to SingularLogic, a large Greek systems integrator. The company had extensive IT experience in the field of local government, but did not have a tradition of running open source projects. The company outsourced the project to five subcontractors:

• BetaCONCEPT, a specialist in semantic and data technologies;
• ERP specialist Hilon Informatics;
• the Atlantis Group at the Computer Technology Institute (CTI), a specialist in business process management (BPM);
• International Software Techniques (IST), a specialist in business services; and
• the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). ICCS was responsible for identity management within LGAF.

These five subcontractors had different roles: BetaCONCEPT undertook the implementation of the enterprise content management system, says project manager Elias Giannitsios of SingularLogic. Hilon Informatics deployed the applications and supported the enterprise content. The Atlantis Group was responsible for business process management. IST implemented the enterprise service bus. The ICCS of NTUA created the system’s identity management systems.

Funding

The project was funded by the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) 2007–2013. This is a structural fund of the European Union. Structural and cohesion funds are financial tools which aim to reduce regional disparities in terms of income, wealth and opportunities. Within this framework, each member state develops its own National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF).

The detailed management of programmes which receive support from the structural funds is also the responsibility of the member states. For every programme, they designate a managing authority at national, regional or other level to inform potential beneficiaries, select the projects and generally monitor implementation.

A visionary project

With LGAF, Greek citizens and SMEs would be able to handle all kind of administrative affairs online: pay taxes and fines, modify public administration records, and purchase permits and licenses. The system would also inform subscribers through mail and SMS about municipal news, for instance about public health, social care and cultural activities.

LGAF was a visionary project, says subcontractor Gregory Chomatas of BetaCONCEPT. The goal was to create an open infrastructure to which all municipality software suppliers could add services using the same standardised components and APIs (application programming interfaces).

The project was very promising, agrees Panayiotis Kranidiotis of Hilon Informatics, a subcontractor who was responsible for the implementation of the system in eight Greek municipalities from 2009 onwards. When the project started in 2007 its technical design was advanced, Kranidiotis says.

LGAF can be seen as a laboratory for open-source technologies that support scalable and evolutionary government IT deployment, said Kavassalis in 2012 on JOINUP. The most innovative aspect of the project is the combined use of business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Thanks to the use of an SOA the functionality of legacy applications is re-used, while users can access them via flexible and user-friendly composite applications.

Chomatas: LGAF presented a new vision about how to manage documents and website content within municipalities. Within LGAF, municipal documents – structured and unstructured – would be stored in semantic content repositories that would expose the content and its inter-relations as linked data. Legacy applications as well as new web-based and mobile applications could access and search the content repositories through secure public APIs.

According to Chomatas, content and document management was until then one of the most problematic areas in Greek administrations. Every single municipality website, portal or back office program created its own ‘data silo’ with little possibility to extract information from it or connect to it in order to produce new services.

LGAF gives easy access to electronic services through different web interfaces like web services, RESTful APIs and GWT, says Elias Giannitsios of SingularLogic.

Enhancing public service levels

LGAF should have offered Greek citizens and SMEs access to e-government services.

Georgos Oikonomidis, head of the IT department of the municipality of Larissa, says: The main reason the municipality of Larissa has been interested in the project is that we want to offer citizens more electronic services. We already offer pure information on our site and through portals. But we would like to enhance our service levels. We would like to give citizens the possibility to change their data, file a report, and pay taxes or fines through the web, from a distance. So they do not need to come to the city hall any more to bring papers and make hard copies.

Local business will profit most from LGAF, said Kavassalis in 2012 on JOINUP. In Greece, enterprises have to pay taxes every one or two months to the local municipality. LGAF therefore identified the population of certified accountants operating in the 50 largest Greek cities as one of the prime targets for marketing the project. The population of municipal employees is the second critical target group.

Technically advanced architecture

The core components of Local Government Application Framework (LGAF) are:

• Enterprise content management system (E-CMS)
• Business process management system (BPMS)
• Identity management system (IMS)
• Services portal
• Enterprise service bus (ESB)
• Gateway to legacy applications
• E-payments tool (open source)
• Messaging gateway for SMS, e-mail etc.

The technology stack consists of:

• Enterprise content management system (Astroboa) and business process management system (Intalio|BPMS):
• Interfaces: GWT-based interface for process participants (all interactions through a single user interface)
• Enterprise service bus (at the frontier): Mule ESB
• Enterprise service bus (at the municipality level): Mule ESB (could be anything else)
• Data transfer inside and outside LGAF infrastructure: web services (SOAP services)
• Data modelling: XML schemas.

More information can be found here (in Greek).

Lesser dependence on specific software companies

The open architecture of LGAF gives municipalities access to data within proprietary software systems. This enables them to create web services based on these data.

I’m strongly behind the open architecture of LGAF, because it makes the municipality of Larissa less dependent on specific software companies, says Oikonomidis. For the municipality of Larissa it is a happy coincidence that SingularLogic is the head contractor of LGAF, because we already use SingularLogic software for many tasks like finance and the public registry. It is proprietary software, but through LGAF we can get access to the data within these systems and create web services based on them.

Participating municipalities

Between 2007 and 2009 16 Greek organisations and municipalities participated in LGAF:

• Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (Kede)
• Local Union of Municipalities of Imathia
• Municipality of Ithaka
• Municipality of Panorama (Thessaloniki)
• Municipality of Kastellorizo
• Municipality of Neo Ionia (Athens)
• Municipality of Orestiada
• Municipality of Konitsa
• Municipality of Larissa
• Municipality of Parelion (Kerkyras)
• Municipality of Chios
• Municipality of Keratsini
• Municipality of Chalkida
• Municipality of Tamineon Evias
• Municipality of Parou
• Municipality of Xilokastrou

Development phase

The development of LGAF started from 2009 on, says Oikonomidis. First our IT department spoke with all municipal employees within the specific service departments to find and define the procedures that were in place. We translated these procedures into software specifications for the new electronic services. Then we started to cooperate with the developers. We discussed how we could transform the software specifications into real services.

We also worked together with programmers from SingularLogic, Oikonomidis adds. They created an interface to exchange data with the enterprise service bus within LGAF for the creation of web services.

Six municipalities stop participating

After 2009 the projects seems to lose momentum. Panayiotis Kranidiotis of Hilon Informatics: Nine municipalities stopped participating in the project. Seven municipalities remained to participate in LGAF between 2009 and 2012:

• Municipality of Larissa
• Municipality of Kerkyra
• Municipality of Chios
• Municipality of Keratsini
• Municipality of Chalkida
• Municipality of Kymi
• Municipality of Ithaki

Halted pilot phase

From late July 2012 these seven remaining participating municipalities should have been part of an extensive pilot phase, as noted in a JOINUP article. However, this pilot phase did not start. Six more municipalities stopped participating in the project.

Only one municipality, Larissa, now remains. According to the first plans LGAF should have been installed in 16 municipalities, says IT department head Georgos Oikonomidis. But now only our municipality of Larissa will be involved. In mid-May 2013 we will become the first municipality to have LGAF installed.

What happened? What causes lay behind the extensive delays and shrinkage of the promising LGAF project?

LESSONS LEARNED

A main contractor without a tradition of open source

LGAF was awarded to SingularLogic. This large IT company hired several subcontractors to run the project. SingularLogic is a well respected systems integrator, but the company did not have a tradition of open source projects, says subcontractor Panayiotis Kranidiotis of Hilon Informatics. Oikonomidis adds: SingularLogic is a privately owned company that makes proprietary software.

SingularLogic has extensive experience in local government, says project manager Elias Giannitsios. Many municipalities are our clients. That is why we applied for LGAF. When asked about experience in open source, Giannitsios replies: No, we do not have a long tradition in implementing open source projects. From this perspective for us the tender was a bet that had to be won.

Kranidiotis: SingularLogic outsourced the project to smaller companies which did have experience and knowledge about open source projects. Giannitsios: For two main reasons we turned to external partnerships for the implementation of the project. First, we needed partners who had experience in the specific applications that were used in the project and could apply this directly. Second, the main speciality of our company is integration. This requires from us that we are open to collaboration and seek innovation.

Managing an open source project is not very easy for a traditional consultancy and service company, says subcontractor Gregory Chomatas of BetaCONCEPT. SingularLogic had a streamlined process to run large, traditional projects, with technologies from companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Oracle. But they did not have a lot experience in open source technology, nor in the management of open source projects.

Giannitsios agrees only partly: The management of every project follows certain general standards and methods that are not affected by the scope of the project. In this sense there was no difference from other projects we implement. However, the complexity of the project, the existence of a large number of subcontractors and the breadth of services provided by the project created the need for careful time, cost and quality management.

According to Chomatas, open source projects have to be managed in a more agile way than traditional projects: To develop LGAF complex state-of-the-art technology had to be combined. That is not simple; it is quite knowledge-intensive. You have to innovate continuously. Open source does not mean that you get something free and can immediately install it. It means you have to read and understand the code and find out how you can adapt it to the current needs.

On paper, SingularLogic was project leader of LGAF. Oikonomidis: Although SingularLogic was the contractor for LGAF, the work has been mainly done by several subcontractors that specialise in open source software.

One of the negative results has been that no open source community has formed around LGAF. As Kranidiotis says: There is no open source community that can proceed with the project after 2013.

Lack of an open source business model

After 2013 there will be no companies with a business interest in LGAF.

SingularLogic did not adapt its traditional business strategy, says Kranidiotis. To make an open source project successful in a business sense over the long term you have to focus on service delivery and maintenance. But for LGAF no business plan has been formulated for the period after 2013, when the NSRF subsidy ends.

Lack of an ecosystem

LGAF lacked an ecosystem of municipality software into which it could blend seamlessly, says Kranidiotis. Such an ecosystem is necessary to maintain the existing platform efficiently.

There are about five Greek companies that create municipality software, says Kranidiotis. Only one of them is slightly open to open source software. Whenever an e-government services platform like LGAF gets new features, they should be debugged within the existing software environment. This requires cooperation from the suppliers of the software.

Low degree of automation within municipalities

Greek communities were not ready for LGAF, says Kranidiotis. They have a very low degree of automation, so a lot of procedures are still still totally dependent on paperwork. That is why officials had to alter their daily routines and workflow radically for the project. That hindered the acceptance of LGAF significantly.

Low level of technical awareness of public officials

Another problem according to Chomatas is that Greek public officials in general lack sufficient business as well as technical knowledge to develop a smart IT strategy for the long term.

Chomatas says: At the start of the project the client, Kede, used some external advisors who had a brilliant vision. That is why LGAF had a visionary design. But they did not take the necessary steps to guarantee that this innovative open architecture received the support of all the parties involved. The implementation of an open architecture like LGAF requires a paradigm shift in the thinking of the suppliers of the existing software ecosystem. You need their cooperation to deploy the system. Kede, however, did not communicate the general principles behind LGAF to municipalities and suppliers of legacy software. It did not explain properly that the goal of LGAF was to create an open infrastructure to which all municipality software suppliers could add services using a set of standardised components and APIs. This lack of communication was not due to unwillingness. It was mainly caused by a lack of a strategy for adoption, as well as lack of technical awareness within Kede and the participating municipalities.

Chomatas is currently investigating the business opportunities in Ireland for small and technically advanced open source companies like BetaCONCEPT. He notices a large difference between attitudes to open source technology in Ireland and Greece: In Ireland the technical awareness of public officials is incredibly high. You can communicate with them about technical concepts, even if they do not have a technical background or function. Two days ago I spoke with a general manager of a local Irish government body. He was considering a semantic platform. He did not have a technical background, but he understood terms like ‘resource description framework’ and the importance of APIs. Even if your responsibility covers only the business side of IT implementation, you have to know some technical vocabulary.

Chomatas: If you do not have basic knowledge about creating IT products, how can you explain to municipalities what the vision of a project like LGAF is?

Lack of information campaign

According to Chomatas the participating municipalities were never informed in detail about the vision of the project. This made them hesitant to cooperate.

Chomatas: They were expecting not an open platform, but another portal. They did not want that. Several companies had created portals for them in previous years, and not all of these were perceived as useful. Because of that, right from the start municipalities were not willing to participate in LGAF. Nobody properly communicated to them that LGAF was not another portal, but an open platform that would be a great investment in the future.

This issue is also mentioned in the OSEPA report Open Source software usage by European Public Administrations: Raising awareness among staff and users of the new FOSS solutions is critically important to minimise resistance and increase the probability of successful uptake. People usually want to understand why changes are necessary or beneficial. Convincing them with solid technical and organisational efficiency arguments tends to curb resistance. The awareness raising campaign needs to be carefully planned out so as to promote the transition and highlight its benefits both for the organization and for the users themselves.

Law that demands a written signature

The legal system in Greece was not ready for the project, says Kranidiotis. Under Greek law documents are only valid if they are signed. That is why every document had to be printed and signed manually, even within the LGAF project. That caused a lot of extra work, and hindered the acceptance of LGAF significantly.

Immature open source market

The open source market in Greece is very immature, says Kranidiotis. Many Greek companies use open source software, but few create code.

A lot of people think that open source software has only one advantage: that it is free, says Chomatas. But to implement an open source e-government platform you have to invest a lot of effort and money.

Chomatas: Lots of individual Greeks sympathise with open source technologies and lots of companies use them, but all taken together this does not constitute a thriving open source ecosystem. Only very small open source knowledge islands exist. They cannot create a difference.

An innovative project like LGAF needs technical experts at all levels: BPM, notification gateways, electronic payment, virtualisation, says Kranidiotis.

Kavassalis: There are many Microsoft Certified Professionals. But for most developers it is not obvious how to move to open source technologies.

Open source business models – in which profit is made not by selling software licenses, but through service delivery and maintenance – are not adopted by many Greek companies, according to Kavassalis: Before they invest in a project, Greek companies in general request a clear definition of their property rights. Without such a guarantee they refuse to enter a project. Open source can deal with that through commercial open source models. However, this culture does not exist in Greece yet.

Failed funding

LGAF is still in the development phase, says Kavassalis. The main reason for this is financial. The project is funded by NSRF. This organisation suffers long delays in payment, and there are billions of euros which are not entering the production cycle. Up till now only half of the LGAF budget has been paid.

The delay in the project’s funding caused delays in the implementation of the project in Greek municipalities, confirms Evi Tsiligianni of PETA.

LGAF has been funded by a European structural fund, says Georgos Oikonomidis of the municipality of Larissa. Like many projects funded in this way, LGAF received too little financing from the beginning from NSRF. Because of that, not all features could be delivered after the first funding phase. And because the requirements could not be met completely, the NSRF inspection committee did not approve LGAF to be financed in retrospect.

We started extensive discussions to find a solution. Another argument that NSRF used to withdraw the promised subsidy was that they had already funded similar projects. All these discussions to define LGAF precisely and clarify the difference between LGAF and apparently similar projects took several months. In the end the project team received only part of the promised funding. Months and years passed while we searched for supplementary additional financing. But after many years we are finally implementing LGAF now.

Projects of the size and complexity of LGAF require better planning on the part of the state, says Elias Giannitsios of SingularLogic. The government should provide a secure and stable funding environment for development.

The issue is essentially a policy fail, says Kavassalis. The government wanted to promote open source, but did not take care to create an appropriate policy. In the mean time, companies invested in open source by participating in projects like LGAF. The resulting funding inconsistencies made these investments very risky.

Delays and problems in paying subcontractors

The main contractor of LGAF chose to outsource the project to a network of small companies, says Kavassalis. However, because the financial flow did not proceed in an orderly way, these firms suffered a lot from the resulting payment delays.

This is confirmed by Kranidiotis: Since 2011 the head contractor has been waiting for funds that have already been granted by NSRF. Subcontractors in many cases received no payment, or only part-payment. Only a small part of my invoices have been paid. Because of this I had to make employees redundant.

BetaCONCEPT, too, has been paid only partly and after long delays. This had drastic consequences for the company. Chomatas says: LGAF was a very large project for a small company like us. In 2012 I was forced to make all my people redundant and close the company.

Chomatas made a radical decision: I concluded that small and technically advanced open source companies have little chance to create a substantial business in Greece. So I have moved the company to Ireland, which has a thriving entrepreneurial environment combined with a mature IT industry and a great open source community that is embraced by significant companies like Google, Engine Yard, 10Gen and Basho.

Economic crisis in Greece

The salaries of municipal officials have fallen significantly since 2011, says Kranidiotis. Often there are also delays in the payment of salaries.

Years of profligate state spending and poor fiscal management have left Greece dependent on international rescue loans from other European countries and the International Monetary Fund since May 2010, wrote Elena Becatoros on ekathimerini.com in March 2013. In return for its bailout billions, the country pledged to reform its moribund economy, pushing through waves of austerity measures that slashed pensions and salaries, hiked taxes and left the country mired in a recession so deep and prolonged it has essentially turned into a depression.

Kranidiotis: As a result, officials in general are quite discouraged. It was difficult to keep them motivated for projects like LGAF. They are bothered by much more immediate problems: they lack sufficient income to support their families.

Elena Becatoros continued: More than 26 percent of the workforce is out of a job, and youth unemployment hovers close to a staggering 60 percent. With nearly 1,000 people losing their jobs each day, hundreds of thousands of those still employed don’t get regular pay.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Tender procedures should favour companies with extensive experience in open source

LGAF was awarded to SingularLogic, a large IT company which specialises in integration. It had extensive IT experience in local government, but did not have a tradition of open source projects. Managing an open source project is not easy for a traditional consultancy and service company that does not have a lot of experience in open source technology or the management of open source projects. One of the results was that no open source community has been formed around LGAF. This will hinder further adaptation of LGAF, even if the pilot in Larissa in May 2013 is successful.

To discourage contractors without extensive experience in managing open source projects, public tenders should favour IT suppliers whose business models are based on service delivery and maintenance of open source software. This gives them the motivation to continue project support after the initial coding, implementation and pilot phases. Ideally, IT suppliers would also aim to use new government projects to add the final polish to their experience with municipal open source projects. This would foster the use of open source software within government bodies to an even greater degree. Tenders should explicitly ask applicants to prove they have experience with open source projects, says Kranidiotis. They should also ask for an open source policy: what business models do these companies use?

The chosen IT suppliers should also have extensive knowledge of open source ecosystems, licensing models, version management, and the formation and fostering of communities.

But how can a government body succeed in the specialised task of choosing IT companies with the right profile to perform open source projects? One answer can be seen in Sweden’s Öppna Programvaror 2010 (Open Source Software 2010). Within this framework the Swedish National Procurement Services department (NPS) contracted five suppliers to provide software and services. Public administrations can use the framework agreement to purchase IT services based on open source software from any of these five preselected IT companies and their subcontractors.

Being responsible for the coordination of procurement for the public sector, the NPS has to make sure that optimum conditions are created for the acquisition and use of IT. And not only for common features and solutions, but also for innovation and technology-neutral solutions in particular, writes Adrian Offerman in the JOINUP case study Public Open Source Software Procurement Models: The Next Generation.

Offerman adds: When calling for tender (in Swedish) […] these conditions were included in the requirements of the call:

• [...]
• demonstrable involvement in the open source community;
• active contributions to open source software;
• expertise in legal implications;
• experience in training of users and technical personnel.

This approach differs from the recommendations made in the European ‘Guideline on public procurement of Open Source Software’, writes Offerman. According to the NPS, the public administration’s use of free and open source has been increasing by some 15–20 percent per year because of the framework, as explained in a JOINUP news article by Gijs Hillenius about this Swedish Öppna programvaror 2010 framework.

Policies are needed to disseminate the principles of open source technology

Potentially, the use of open source software can have many advantages for public administrations: free re-use of software, less dependence on suppliers of proprietary software, and the freedom to customise existing software to local needs. However, open source projects are only viable in the long term if public administrations as well as IT suppliers are fully committed to see the potential of open source systems.

Suppliers of municipality software are currently not fully aware of the commercial potential of a local software ecosystem that is open to open source, says Kranidiotis.

We need a policy to disseminate the principles of open source technology, says Chomatas. We need evangelists and conferences.

Start small

In retrospect, LGAF was initially deployed on a scale that was too large, says Kranidiotis. It would have been wiser to start the project within only one municipality. Once this was successful it could have been copied to other municipalities. At the beginning of the project, in 2007, 16 municipalities were taking part. That is far too many.

Step-by-step deployment would have made the project easier to manage and would clearly have showcased the advantages of LGAF to other municipalities. By the end of May our municipality of Larissa hopes to have a working example of LGAF, says Oikonomidis. This will make it easier to convince other municipalities to implement this open architecture.

CONCLUSIONS

Greece’s LGAF open source project has only reached its pilot phase after six years. Prime reasons are a tender procedure in which the project was granted to a company without extensive experience in managing open source projects, the general immaturity of the Greek open source market, and a failing funding system.

LGAF was awarded to SingularLogic, a large IT company which specialises in integration. It had extensive IT experience in local government, but did not have a tradition of open source projects.Managing an open source project is not easy for a traditional consultancy and service company, says Chomatas. SingularLogic had a streamlined process to run large, traditional projects, with technologies from companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Oracle. But they did not have a lot experience in open source technology, nor in the management of open source projects.

Public tenders should favour IT suppliers that have extensive knowledge of open source ecosystems, licensing models, version management, and the formation and fostering of communities – as done, for instance, within the Swedish Öppna programvaror 2010 (Open Source Software 2010) scheme. Within this framework the Swedish National Procurement Services department (NPS) contracted five suppliers to provide software and services. Public administrations can use the framework agreement to purchase IT services based on open source software from any of these five preselected IT companies and their subcontractors.

Potentially, the use of open source software can have many advantages for public administrations: free re-use of software, less dependence on suppliers of proprietary software, and the freedom to customise existing software to local needs. However, open source projects are only viable in the long term if public administrations as well as IT suppliers are fully committed to see the potential of open source systems. Greece needs clear policies to disseminate the principles of open standards and open source technology among public officers and IT suppliers. As Gregory Chomatas of BetaCONCEPT says: If people get more aware, they will become more motivated to be involved.