Tunbridge Wells Borough Council

Procuring systems is expensive. It’s expensive because each service is usually responsible for buying its own system.

If you took all of the systems we use across all of the services in MKIP (Tunbridge Wells, Maidstone and Swale) and put them in a pot, you’d find duplication everywhere. 5 payment providers, 12 forms packages, 3 mobile working solutions, 6 email providers, 3 document management systems, the list goes on. We’re paying over and over again for the same functionality.

What if we broke down all of our services into pieces. Lego bricks. One Lego brick for forms, another for payments, another for managing documents and so on.

We’d save significant sums of money on system contracts and avoid being locked-in to a supplier. If our payment Lego brick is too expensive, we can swap it for another. We replace one piece and leave the rest of the ecosystem untouched.

We’re proposing a Discovery project to investigate whether the commonalities across services from a user needs and systems perspective. The output of this discovery work will be a theoretical model and an action plan for how government as a platform can be implemented across local government (and any small-to-medium service-based business).