As a general rule, legacy lock-in and monolithic IT can stifle innovation and make change harder. You're tied to the road map of one supplier to deliver a whole service, to which you're just a single customer often amongst hundreds. Sometimes this isn't all bad, particularly for a general function such as as finance or HR where there are many mature products on the market, but not often. One alternative is to build your own services from the ground up. For example around 10 years ago we created our own fault reporting service in C# .NET through which between 60% and 70% of requests for service about the roads and countryside are now raised. Since then products such as Fix My Street have evolved and we were one of the first councils in the UK to create an Open311 Service . The problem with building your own service from scratch is it takes time and resource. Just adding a couple new fields can take days of coding, testing and deploying. So if old-school IT is infl...
Local Government, Digital.