At first glance, OpenGov looks like any other software company. It was created in 2012 in San Francisco, raised $125 million from major venture capital investors like Founders Fund, Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen sits on its board alongside former Cisco CEO John Chambers. Building on its success, OpenGov has just been purchased for 1.8 billion by Cox Enterprises, a diversified family conglomerate in media and automobiles, with revenues of 22 billion and based in Atlanta.
Like the others ? Not quite. OpenGov’s co-founders met while working at California Common Sense, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the principle of sharing public data. They created OpenGov in order, in the long term, to offer a modern software suite to public actors, particularly local authorities.
It was, and still is, a crazy ambition as these players are used to ordering specific IT developments from the private sector, convinced that their needs are unique. These in-house tools are then hosted on their own servers. And each development requires new developments. OpenGov’s approach is to sell them all, on a subscription model, the same software for budgeting and financial planning, asset and debt management, purchasing and even permit and license management. .
The model, questioned at the start, has flourished, since OpenGov has 1,900 clients, local authorities, school districts or state agencies. For example, one of these latest initiatives is to facilitate the creation of a licensing procedure for the sale of marijuana, a substance legalized in a growing number of American states.
The cemetery of state software
It must be said that carrying out specific developments is a difficult exercise. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, only 22% of them achieve their objectives in the public sector by respecting the target timetable, compared to 30% in the private sector. Many attempts at transformation come up against IT tools.
One of the largest public projects of recent decades is India’s Aadhaar biometric identification system, which has given nearly 1.3 billion people, more than 99% of the country’s adult population, an individual number to 12 digits associated with biometric data. It was deployed by an association of local entrepreneurs before being taken over by the central government. In France, from Louvois to Chorus via Orbis or the National Payroll Office (ONP), the list of failures of state software is famous, the bill amounting to billions of euros.
Entire public policies are at a standstill due to ineffective tools. From January 1, 2022, all municipalities should have received planning authorization applications in electronic form, and those with more than 3,500 inhabitants should also have ensured their processing by the same means. To support this large-scale transformation, the State had to deploy a vast program to dematerialize the application of land law, says Démat. ADS. The State was not able to complete it on time. From now on, it is almost impossible to upgrade the tool to automatic instruction.
The interministerial Digital Directorate (Dinum) maintains an overview of the State’s major digital projects, those which exceed 9 million euros. At the last count, last June, the average calendar deviation rate was 24%, and the average budget deviation rate was 17%. However, the State has project monitoring capacities that are infinitely superior to those of local authorities or public agencies.
Cox’s investment in OpenGov, at an extraordinarily high price for a company with only $120 million in revenue, cannot be explained otherwise. Its founder, Democrat James M. Cox, ran for president in 1920 with a certain Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his vice-presidential candidate. But the group’s motivations are much broader than a family passion for public affairs.
Robin Rivaton is Managing Director of Stonal and member of the Scientific Council of the Foundation for Political Innovation (Fondapol)
.