Custom local government software is so over

For most of the tech era, software sold to large organizations–particularly local government software–has been of the custom variety. Case in point: In the time I’ve spent working in Govtech, I have yet to discover a local government that either recycled software produced by a separate government, or made its own solution available to others. It just doesn’t happen. Everything gets built from the ground up, and as a result, the solutions that get built for each individual entity are so tightly molded around a single use-case that they couldn’t share them even if they wanted to. Fortunately, that’s starting to change.

I took my first programming class during my junior year high school, and I can remember using the word “algorithm” at the dinner table shortly after completing one of my early course projects. “I got my algorithm working!” I proclaimed.

Silence.

Before that moment, I’d never really considered that the word algorithm wasn’t as colloquial as it seemed. Granted, I’d never heard it myself before they started using it in class, but as with most vocabulary one picks up in primary education, I just sort of assumed it was a word that adults knew–one that’s acquired with age.

Nope. My parents stared at me blankly. They had no idea what an algorithm was, and as I would later find out, neither did most people their age. And in my opinion, this is a large part of the reason local government software has historically been designed in such a highly tailored, non-reusable way: it shields the end user from the complexity of what the industry has decided they don’t understand.

Permitting software, for example, has been around for a long time. When a government needs a permitting solution, they reach out to vendors who developed their sales strategies in a vastly different era, and who make assumptions about the people they’re likely to be working with–that they’ll probably be checked-out boomers with big budgets and very little understanding of how technology works. And perhaps there was a time when those assumptions would have been closer to correct–but it hardly matters. That era is over.

People like my parents aren’t afraid of technology like they were a decade ago. Not only have governments experienced an influx of millennial employees, but thanks to things like smart phones, even those who grew up without technology have largely become comfortable with it.

It’s 2016. We know a lot of people that work in government. And you know what? They don’t need to be babysat.

Say goodbye to the era of exorbitantly expensive custom government software. Gone are the days of relying on contractors to configure the systems that run government processes they barely understand. And gone are the days of getting locked into hardcoded software that makes it all but impossible to iterate and innovate.

At CityGrows, we’ve built a single, standardized software platform designed for today’s local government employee. We believe that just because someone doesn’t know how to code, that doesn’t mean they don’t understand the philosophies of a software oriented world, and it certainly doesn’t mean they should be forever dependent on a software developer to implement their ideas. By giving our users full control over their configurations, we’ve all but eliminated the need for custom process management software. We’ve bumped implementation times from months to minutes, and we’ve dropped the cost from hundreds of thousands to zero.

In order to truly excel in today’s rapidly evolving world, governments need direct access to and full control over the tools they need to design their own systems. They need to be able to tweak and modify their processes as they see fit. They need to be able to avoid reinventing the wheel– copying and adapting existing processes that work well for other governments, and in turn, sharing what works well for them. And most importantly, they need to be able to experiment and take risks.

We’ve created those tools. And we think they can handle the responsibility.

Stephen Corwin is the founder of CityGrows, a GovTech company based in Los Angeles. Send him a tweet, or subscribe.