Summary
Česko.Digital has been helping to improve digital know-how in government and non-profit organizations for the last two years. During that time we have received over 300 requests for help with various projects, giving us unique insight into the needs of the Czech public sector.
If we take a look at the more technical projects with higher impact, the single most requested project we have seen is “business process automation”, ie. various computer systems for customer relationship management, document management, data entry & collection, etc.
At the moment, these systems are often custom-built from the ground up. Usually they then fail to adapt to the changing environment (such as changing legislation or market conditions), so the client has to order a new one every few years. Since just a small part of these systems is particular for a given client, most of the work is needlessly repeated, leading to extra ineffectivity and cost.
Some of these problems can be overcome by systems such as SAP or SalesForce. These offer a common ground, a kind of “construction set” the client may use to build the wanted computer system with smaller effort and often zero programming. Many of these systems are also available as open-source software. Česko.Digital wants to adopt one of these open-source solutions, customize it for the Czech environment (for example by adding plugins to connect to the Czech government services) and support its deployment to non-profit and government agencies.
This will create a common digital infrastructure for everyone to build together, instead of everyone making costly investments into their own closed solutions. The project will have big systemic impact leading to environment where digitalization efforts are faster, cheaper and having less risk.
Social Lean Canvas
What is Česko.Digital
Many volunteers want to donate their time and expertise to help make Czechia a better place to live. NGOs and government institutions on the other hand have lots of projects to improve life in Czechia, but without the know-how and people to execute them.
Česko.Digital fills the void between these two parties. Our mission is to connect expert volunteers with high-impact projects and help organizations with their digital skills.
We offer a high street shop window full of opportunities, half-day to few-day long tasks. Volunteers, either in their free time or as a part of a corporate CSR program, walk by and pick whatever project or technology they love.
The primary role of Česko.Digital is to fill the shop window with detailed tasks from projects with substantial impact, so volunteers, often without solid context, can pick and deliver them effectively.
Finding Projects with Impact
We have over two years of experience helping NGOs and government institutions with digitalization. During this period we received over 300 requests for help with various projects, and it gave us valuable insights into the biggest pains in the public sector in Czechia.
We analyzed and aggregated all these requests and identified two key opportunities with massive impact on public organizations:
#1 “We need a website”
What most organizations want by far is a better website. It’s true that a thousand perfectly designed and delivered websites could significantly improve life in Czechia. But it’s also true that these can be delivered by many other players. We want to be the leader in driving technological change in our country, focusing on more demanding, higher-stake and higher-impact projects.
(But we’d like the thousand better websites to materialize, too, so we’re at least building a self-service knowledgebase to share our know-how. And sometimes make exceptions by delivering important high-impact projects like the Covid Portal.)
#2 “We have a LOT of processes, can you digitize them?”
The second most common request is from organizations looking to improve their information system, the core of their organization's infrastructure that manages and automates all their business processes.
The main problem of digital infrastructure is that each institution builds a custom system. They are usually very short-lived because legislation changes quickly, so the institutions are forced to spend a considerable amount of money every few years to build a new system.
This is the infrastructure equivalent of each institution creating local roads only they use. In contrast, we want to build a freeway that institutions can use and develop their own on-ramp.
For the problem of business process automation, the hypothetical freeway is an open-source alternative to enterprise systems like SAP or SalesForce with a no-code process automation builder. So it shifts the paradigm of software vendor’s hardcoding processes into their custom closed-source product to institutions sustainably building them directly on a modern platform.
What Project Needs to Succeed
1. Demand
Do we have something people want? We already know that we do – the ideas above were picked from the most-wanted list written by hundreds of public institutions. Using a good open-source CRM, information system or a project modelling tool we could solve a LOT of problems.
2. Continuity of Development
In order to trust a software solution in the ever-changing world of public services, the customer has to know the software will keep evolving. Making and keeping this promise is the primary responsibility of Česko.Digital.
We got an important insight into open source adoption from the director of the Technical Agency of Czech Republic (TACR). After founding the agency, one of the first steps was to procure a computer system for an internal service. There were many closed-source solutions and one open-source solution available at that time. TACR wanted to be a progressive organization, so they implemented the open-source version. After a year, the legislation requirements changed – but nobody updated their open-source solution, so they were forced to switch to one of the closed-source versions. Česko.Digital can help by maintaining open-source software solutions.
3. Local Requirements Support
All the big and robust open-source projects are developed globally. For successful adoption in the Czech environment, we have to implement relevant local requirements such as plugins to communicate with essential government services. (The computer system for TACR had to connect to 10 other government organizations’ APIs. They all had to be implemented and maintained as part of public procurement.)
We see this as an opportunity to build and maintain software libraries implementing public institutions’ APIs and making them universally available for other developers. It’s our core approach when building software – on the Cityvizor project, for example, we created a database of Czech municipalities and made it available as open-source.
4. Last-Mile Delivery
Successful software delivery doesn’t end by developing the software. At the end of the sales process, someone will have to visit on site, helping with implementation, training users and showing the in-house analysts how to build or update processes on the platform. We have massive know-how of last-mile software delivery into various institutions with our project Učíme online (“We teach online”). Our volunteers helped over 500 schools with the infrastructure for online classes during the pandemic.
For more prominent implementations like information systems for government institutions we can get commercial partners who use our open-source instead of custom closed-source solutions and join public procurement. This is standard practice in open-source development, and these commercial companies are motivated to give back to the project in the form of development or financial support.
Smaller organizations can use our “shop window of opportunities” to find volunteers to help them with adoption. It’s a working model even outside of Česko.Digital. For example, one Czech NGO uses volunteers to implement a free version of SalesForce into non-profit organizations.
What is our approach?
We’re going to build a small team of experts who will find the best existing open-source business process automation project, analyze how to adopt it quickly, and prepare detailed tasks for our “shop window”. In early iterations, we will prioritize the needs of early adopters who approached us with requests for help to improve their internal processes.
Financial proposal
The most significant expense is a team of specialists for the project management, technical, design and marketing analysis. Who will create detailed tasks for volunteers and who will help us to fill our “shop window”.
Building a Government Academy
One of the reasons we love the idea of an open-source project focusing on digital infrastructure is that we can show a working case study of government institutions cooperating with the NGO sector to deliver significant digital transformation steps.
We want to support the shift from closed-source vendors to vendors using big open-source solutions for the core of their products. It’d save organizations a tremendous amount of money during public procurements by making the software cheaper and reusable and removing vendor lock-in.
We plan to work with trusted technology partners to start a public debate, share best practices with organizations in Czechia. This cooperation movement within the public sector can be an excellent resource for sharing behind Czechia borders, as it is universally applicable to most countries.