A CIO for the French Government

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French Minister of Budget François Baroin just launched the second phase of the “General Review of Public Policies” program, aiming to modernize the French administration and to cut public spending by €10 billion.

150 new measures [in French] have been adopted for the 2011-2013 period.* Most of these are set to enhance quality of service to the public. In addition to cutting 100,000 positions in the public sector, these measures encourage a massive use of the Internet to rationalize the public’s dealings with the administration, while reducing associated costs by €300 million.

In addition, after the United States and United Kingdom, France is the third country (to my knowledge) to be announcing the nomination of a “State CIO”, whose missions will be, among others, to optimize IT Support within the whole administration and to centralize public purchase (which should bring an additional €700 million in savings). If IT back office is said to be rationalized, enhancing Internet front-office and associated applications will also help to simplify legal declarations for both enterprises and private individuals.

This nomination and 150 measures are really good news for French citizens, as the State CIO will be instrumental to anchor IT at the center of the public services, with a lot of e-administration programs to be launched or enhanced.

This news is also great for the open source world: if I understand correctly, the French government is aiming to boost quality of service while reducing costs. And to succeed, I don’t see many other alternatives than relying on open source solutions! I cannot imagine a government – which is planning to cut costs – deciding to select expensive and inflexible systems offered by proprietary vendors.

For more than 5 years, companies such as Talend have helped hundreds of public sector organizations industrialize their IT projects, cutting costs and gaining agility. It seems that it was only a beginning.

Bertrand




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