The Cabinet Office has been working hard to level the playing field for open source software, agile development and lean software. This picks a number of quotes illustrating the success of these ideas outside the public sector, and hopes to explain why enterprises involved with government needs to start paying attention.

2. Working software over comprehensive documentation

3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

5. higher reliability ,

6. more flexibility ,

7. lower cost ,

8. and an end to predatory vendor lock-in .” The Open Source Initiative

9. Public Procurement Is Changing “ Government will apply agile methods to ICT procurement and delivery to reduce the risk of project failure. Agile methods allow projects to respond to changing requirements and ensure that the solutions meet business requirements.” Government ICT Strategy The Cabinet Office , 2011 “ The Government ICT Strategy states that 'Where appropriate, Government will procure open source solutions .' To support this, Action 3 of the Strategy says that 'To create a level playing field for the use of innovative ICT solutions, the Government will publish a toolkit for procurers on best practice for evaluating the use of open source solutions.'” The Cabinet Office , 2011

10. Agile @ Salesforce.com “ With revenues of more than $450 million and 2,000 employees in 2006, Salesforce.com had noticed the frequency of its releases had dwindled from four a year to one a year. Customers were getting less and waiting longer to get it; something needed to be done. The company decided to transition to Scrum. During the first year of making the switch , Salesforce.com released 94% more features, delivering 38% more features per developer, and delivered over 500% more value to its customers” Mike Cohn, Succeeding With Agile

11. Open Source @ Yahoo “ One of Yahoo's Hadoop clusters sorted 1 terabyte of data in 209 seconds , which beat the previous record of 297 seconds in the annual general purpose (daytona) terabyte sort benchmark. The sort benchmark, which was created in 1998 by Jim Gray, specifies the input data (10 billion 100 byte records), which must be completely sorted and written to disk. This is the first time that either a Java or an open source program has won. Yahoo is both the largest user of Hadoop with 13,000+ nodes running hundreds of thousands of jobs a month and the largest contributor, although non-Yahoo usage and contributions are increasing rapidly .” Ajay Anand, Yahoo Developer Network

12. Going Lean “Several changes, or cultural shifts , are required to use Scrum. The first is to forget predictive , waterfall thinking . The second is to realize that self-management is a much better practice for productivity and creativity . The third is to understand that cross-functional teams produce more robust products. All of these changes are extremely difficult” Ken Schwaber

13. Going Lean “ The company's failure was the result of thinking that the implications of adopting Scrum would be restricted to only the development organization. The executives who initiated this transition thought that educating and supporting developers would be sufficient . They failed to consider how Scrum would touch the work of salespeople , the marketing group, and even the finance department. Without changes to these areas organisational gravity pulled the company back to where it had started.” Mike Cohn, Succeeding With Agile

14. Going Lean “Even in 2006, IBM had seen enough evidence that agile approaches to development could bear substantial fruit... The trouble was, the take-up rate for additional agile projects within IBM could have been impeded by myriad factors: organizational barriers , comfort with existing established approaches , process inflexibility , and a lack of broad experience with lean and agile methods, to name a few.” Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Leading Lean Software Development

15. Succeeding With Agile by Mike Cohn Leading Lean Software Development By Mary and Tom Poppendieck @itstechupnorth itstechupnorth.me.uk robertburrelldonkin.name Government ICT Strategy, The Cabinet Office