Phil Windley pointed to an interesting article in Governing: Common Code.
In the technology world, it was the equivalent of bumming a cigarette off a friend. Missouri had acquired its system several years ago, in a typical tech deal that took a year to develop and cost a couple of million dollars. Kansas didn’t need all the same bells and whistles. But the basic process for managing grants in Kansas was identical. With the software code in hand — public software is in the public domain — all Kansas had to do was customize it. In all, Kansas is paying only $250,000 for the system, which will launch in August after just a few months of development time. “Missouri’s model did the exact same things we needed,” says Judi Miller, coordinator of state and federal programs at the Kansas Department of Education. “Why reinvent the wheel?”
Read the article, then read Windley's commentary on the article.
Posted by Karl
August 25, 2003 09:46 AM