Idaho’s state government was facing a problem.

In 2018, its 86 state agencies were operating with a mix of outdated, mismatched business systems that ran internal processes like payroll and human resources. Some of the programs dated back to the 1980s, and many were written in programming languages they don’t teach in engineering schools anymore.

The state made a clear choice — one many other state and city governments have made in recent years: It overhauled its entire IT suite with one cloud-based software.

But since the $121 million project, called Luma, rolled out in July 2023, things have not gone as planned.

Luma has created procedural and data errors and caused “disruptions in day-to-day processes and [is] impacting overall productivity,” said an audit that was provided to legislators in June.

Five months into its launch last year, the Luma project was still receiving criticism from employees, organizations that work with the state’s government agencies and from top state legislators.

Speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives Mike Moyle said in a November 2023 Legislative Council meeting that the state might want to come up with an exit plan for the platform — “No offense, this thing is a joke and it’s not working,” he told legislators.

Idaho’s Luma project is just one of many government IT overhauls that hasn’t gone as smoothly as city and state officials may have aimed for.

As few as 13% of large government IT projects succeed, a field guide by the U.S. General Services Administration’s 18F team said. The group of designers, software engineers, strategists and product managers work within the GSA to help government agencies buy and build tech products.

State projects, the org’s report says, can face the most challenges because state departments often don’t have sufficient knowledge about modern software development and their procurement procedures can be outdated for what’s needed to properly vet huge software solutions.

“Every year, the federal government matches billions of dollars in funding to state and local governments to maintain and modernize IT systems used to implement federal programs such as Medicaid, child welfare benefits, housing, and unemployment insurance,” 18F’s State Software Budgeting Handbook said. “Efforts to modernize those legacy systems fail at an alarmingly high rate and at great cost to the federal budget.”

Switzerland has recently enacted a law requiring its government to use open-source software (OSS) and disclose the source code of any software developed by or for the public sector. According to ZDNet, this “public body, public code” approach makes government operations more transparent while increasing security and efficiency. Such a move would likely fail in the U.S. but is becoming increasingly common throughout Europe.

According to Switzerland’s new “Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfillment of Government Tasks” (EMBAG), government agencies must use open-source software throughout the public sector.

It’s not an entirely new move for Switzerland. In 2011, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court published its court application, Open Justitia, using an OSS license. It was unpopular with legal software company Weblaw, and more than a decade of political and legal battles followed.

The new law allows the codifies allowing Switzerland to release its software under OSS licenses. Not just that; it requires the source code be released that way “unless the rights of third parties or security-related reasons would exclude or restrict this.”

In addition to mandating the OSS code, EMBAG also requires Swiss government agencies to release non-personal and non-security-sensitive government data to the public. Calling this Open Government Data, this aspect of the new law contributes to a dual “open by default” approach that should allow for easier reuse of software and data while also making governance more transparent.

Other nations throughout Europe have made similar moves. France’s version of the U.S. FBI, known as the National Gendarmerie, uses Linux on most PCs. Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, recently migrated 30,000 computers from Microsoft products to Linux and LibreOffice.

The European Union has also worked for years to help OSS become more secure through the Free and Open Source Software Auditing (FOSSA) project. At the same time, there could be some cause for concern about the future of OSS in Europe — there are concerns the European Commission might cut funding for an essential source of financing for OSS projects.

In the U.S., however, there’s much less support for OSS. The U.S. government does offer some support for open-source, but it’s much more constrained. For example, the Federal Source Code Policy requires government agencies to release at least 20% of their new custom-developed code as OSS. Also, the General Services Administration (GSA) requires its organizations to account for and publish any of their open-source code.

The critical difference, though, is that no laws in the U.S. mandate the use of open-source software like Switzerland’s. If Switzerland’s new openness works well, it could be a model for further change throughout the rest of Europe and the United States.

Free Microsoft Office licences negotiated by the Scottish government for school pupils are set to end at the start of August, according to the Scottish Herald. The newspaper reported that the free A1 Plus licence will no longer be available to students.

Glow, Scotland’s digital environment to support learning, has posted a notice stating that Microsoft is implementing licence changes, which means that users will no longer be able to download the desktop applications through their Glow account from 1 August 2024. The Glow website states that users will also not be able to activate products such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint desktop apps using their Glow M365 credentials.

Glow effectively provides a portal for teachers and school children that gives access to the Microsoft and Google productivity suites to support collaboration in education. In August 2023, Microsoft said it would no longer offer the free A1 education licence, which was set up in 2015. At the time, Microsoft said A1 was aimed at easing the provisioning burden for IT of moving users to the cloud.

“While the intent was to help schools with their transition, it also introduced a level of complexity leading to compliance issues for our customers, with many inadvertently becoming noncompliant,” Microsoft said.

The company said that its Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 licences are easier to assign, both addressing customer requirements and the need for a transitional programme.

With all existing Office 365 A1 Plus licences expiring on 1 August 2024, schools offering the A1 Plus licence will only have access to the online version of the Microsoft 365 product suite for free.

Responses on X (formerly Twitter) to the Scottish Herald article suggest that teachers have not been informed of the changes, and that the online version of the Microsoft suite can be a hindrance when teaching some subjects.

One X user wrote: “Whilst I appreciate many colleagues are frustrated that the online versions aren’t as good/more fiddly, there are subjects that cannot complete necessary coursework without the full version.” Subjects impacted include admin & IT, computer science and maths.

Although the article looked at the situation in Scotland, the changes being made by Microsoft on August 1st affects schools across the UK. But framework agreements are in place in Wales and England that offer schools volume licensing discounts.

In 2019, the Welsh government signed a four-year, £1.2m deal with Microsoft, covering the full desktop version of Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus, which includes a Welsh language interface and proofing tools, along with additional security features.

In 2024, Jisc, the UK’s digital, data and technology agency that focuses on tertiary education, research and innovation, signed a Enrolment for Education Solutions (EES) framework agreement with Microsoft, covering schools further education and higher education institutes.

If online access to the Microsoft productivity is not suitable, schools across the UK that have not yet purchased either A3 or the more expensive A5 licence will need to do so before the new year starts in September.

Looking at costs published by educational software providers on the web, the A3 licence, which provides access to the desktop versions of the Microsoft suite and security features, costs £2.50 per pupil and £2.85 per teacher. One user on the EduGeek forum said: “We recently had to purchase 250 A3 licences at over £2,500 per annum. But what can you do?”

Those schools that have an existing Open Value Subscription (OVS) three-year rental agreement with Microsoft or the ESS commitment-based Microsoft Volume Licensing agreement may find they are entitled to receive the full Microsoft Office suite for free.

The IRS runs 363 in-person Taxpayer Assistance Centers to help people fill out their taxes or get legal advice.

But the process for changing or cancelling an appointment at one of the centers creates a “burden” for taxpayers because many IRS customer service agents don’t have access to the software that lets them view or change in-person appointments.

There’s a baffling reason for that: the agency pays for 2,500 software licenses each year so agents can edit appointments, but auditors found 768 licenses not even being used.

Each license costs $56 annually, so that’s $43,000 spent last year on the unused licenses.

When customers call the IRS to edit or cancel an appointment, they are instructed to hang up and call a different “Appointment Telephone Line” number.

Agents were not allowed to transfer calls directly to the Appointment Telephone Line, though managers could not explain to auditors why this policy is in place. It was changed last December.

Even some agents working the Appointment Telephone Line don’t have access to the correct software. They’re forced to transfer calls to yet another IRS agent who can finally provide assistance. There were 144,005 transferred calls in fiscal year 2023, according to the audit report.

Last year 75,000 people did not show up to scheduled in-person appointments at Taxpayer Assistance Centers, which auditors said is likely because they got frustrated with customer service and gave up on cancelling their appointment.

The $43,000 the IRS spent on its unused software licenses is just a tiny fraction of the agency’s total budget, but it’s representative of much larger issues with tax simplicity and transparency.

Despite the push toward digital transformation, a 2024 survey on IT trends in the public sector shows many government IT operations still rely on manual processes to manage and support their applications and technology infrastructure.

The top takeaways from the survey show:

To address this challenge, many organizations (58 percent) are either adopting automated workflow processes now or plan to in the next 12 to 18 months.

One of the easiest ways to introduce automation is by investing in an IT Service Management (ITSM) tool with automation and integration capabilities.