Not every tender requires open standards

Source: Computable

It is mandatory, but the government does not always ask suppliers to use open standards. Last year, this was not mentioned in more than one in ten tenders. It is improving every year, according to the Open Standards Monitor 2019. State Secretary Raymond Knops (BZK) recently sent this to the House of Representatives.

The report shows that only six percent of tenders request all relevant standards. 83 percent of tenders request one or more of the relevant mandatory standards, but not all. Eleven percent did not request any open standards. Often, no explanation is given as to why this is missing. In recent years, the use of open standards by the government has been improving. In 2017, 69 percent of tenders requested such standards, in 2018 this was 79 percent and in 2019 this was 89 percent (83+6).

Governments are required to use the more than forty standards of the Standardisation Forum, to the extent that they are relevant. Standardisation reduces the chance of hacks and fraud and stimulates both interoperability and supplier independence and accessibility. If a government organisation wants to deviate from the standards when purchasing ICT for more than fifty thousand euros, this wish must be substantiated. This principle is called 'Apply or Explain'.

Praise for six governments

For the Monitor Open Standards the Standardization Forum examined 72 tenders. The researchers noticed that six organizations each in their tender all relevant open standards requested. This concerns the Netherlands Healthcare Institute, the province of Groningen, the municipality of Maastricht, the NWO foundation, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK) and the Ministry of General Affairs (AZ).

In addition to tenders, the standardisation forum also assessed several government facilities for the use of relevant open standards. Seven out of ten facilities measured met all mandatory standards. These include DigiD and Mijnoverheid. In other facilities, important standards were omitted.

Obliged

The Standardization Forum has a list of 45 open standards drawn up, which means that governments must apply them in principle to their ICT. This means that they must ask market parties in their tenders to deliver according to these standards. They may only deviate from this for compelling reasons.

The (for governments) mandatory open standards range from accessibility and security of websites and applications, via e-mail encryption, domain name security, information security and document formats to server connections and secured wifi networks. In addition, the forum recommends numerous other standards, without making them mandatory. For non-governmental organizations, all standards are recommended.

The Standardization Forum is an advisory committee with experts from various government organizations, the business community and science.