Case study: Department of Finance, Northern Ireland
State of Open: The UK in 2021
Phase Two: “UK Adoption”
Seamus LcLean, Head of Enterprise Digital Development
Synopsis
The Department of Finance of Northern Ireland aims to secure the most appropriate and effective use of resources and service for their community, part of this involving supporting and maintaining a broad range of software applications. As part of this, they promote the use of open source both within the Northern Ireland Civil Service and the wider public sector. One major benefit us using open source here, is that it allows them to test from the get go, therefore responding as early as possible to risk and security. Additionally, it allows them to check for vulnerabilities and quality issues and to fix them in real time. This reduces both the time it takes to deliver and also the cost.
7.2 Department of Finance, Northern Ireland: A public sector perspective into open source
In conversation with Seamus McLean, Head of Enterprise Digital Development
The Department of Finance (DoF) in the Devolved Northern Ireland Government, has the overall aim of securing the most appropriate and effective use of resources and service for the benefit of their community. Their digital team, led by Seamus McLean, consists of 65 people and is a subsection of the DoF Digital Shared Services group. The team supports and maintains a particularly broad range of software applications, currently managing and
supporting around 120 of them across different civil service departments using the .Net Core development framework. They also develop and support all of the Civil Service departments’ websites as well as the primary citizen-facing NIDirect site using the open source Drupal platform.
Open as a part of of the civil service’s toolkit
In line with the broader ethos of promoting open governance and sharing, there are concerted efforts to promote the use of open source internally within the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) and the wider public sector. The NICS has a blend of internal digital resources complemented by external contractor resources, but use of external resources has led to increased exposure to a diverse range of tools with new technologies and open
source often meeting the department’s needs best. As open source users rather than contributors in the past, Seamus explains there’s now a move towards contribution, using both the Gov.UK PaaS platform and increasingly making use of GitHub repositories to share code.
The sophistication of open tools: testing as you code and fagging security issues
Testing is fundamental to everything the department does, and many of their chosen products are open, allowing them to respond early to risk and security. Seamus speaks of “shifting left”, “Our aim is to shift the quality and testing process as far to the left to the earliest part of the process of development. You don’t leave it to the very end to test…you try to find out the security issues and the defects right at the very beginning so you can rectify those things at the earliest possible stage.”
Open source software also allows the group to check for vulnerabilities and quality issues and to fix them in real time. Reducing the time from development to delivery is also reducing cost. “It’s not just about providing the tools,” Seamus explains, “resources like the OWASP Top 10 security checks are also telling you what the most critical issues that you should be looking for are. It doesn’t get any better than that really.”
Moving Forward
Open source is intrinsically linked with most of the department’s activities and whilst they don’t have an explicit Open agenda or a dedicated team, “open source has become a fundamental part of how we behave and how we work.”