The WPPN06/21 procurement policy note covering carbon reduction plans was mentioned as the most visible contribution that procurement can make in this area, however from the interviews it’s clear that digital professionals need support putting sustainability at the heart of their procurement activity.
Some talked about their perceived challenges with assessing suppliers - “What would I put in a a spec to say to an to a supplier we're only gonna go with you if you do XY and Z? What are those things and how would I measure them? How would I able to take them to task to say actually yes. you’ve met that because it might sound quite nebulous.” (Digital and technology lead in Local Authority).
“If it's a good practice that we could similarly refer to that says well actually if you're writing a spec for software or hardware, these are the things you should be trying to reflect in a tender, that saves us all scratching around.” (Digital and technology leads in Health and Care).
Others talked about proxy measures they are planning to use - “Our next steps will be things like just asking within procurement have they gotten environmental strategy? What are they doing about accreditations and things like that? Some of it might not be assessment criteria, but it might be performance criteria for the contract” (Digital and technology leads in Health and Care).
Building a procurement capability that supports the digital mindset, understands user need, build vs buy, reduces waste and duplication, is digital first
I referred to digital public goods quite a bit, which I see as vital ingredients for reducing unnecessary expenditure on digital service components, and thereby ensuring wasteful duplication is reduced and social value for money is improved.
This should be part of a broader set of decision making dimensions than what is typically a false binary choice of wholesale 'build' versus 'buy'; the primary dimensions in my view should be 'reuse' (open source digital and technology components) and 'consume' (open data) first, which should then inform what is built or bought second.
Furthermore, 'build' and 'buy' decisions must be based on a clear understanding of the digital, data and technology capabilities that are required (value-chain 'Wardley' mapping is a useful tool for this, which is also referred to in ), and what already exists either in one's own organisation or elsewhere, and in the market (i.e. don't build something that is a mature commodity cloud service, e.g. a CMS, compute and storage, etc).
You may be interested to read more on digital public goods, for example:
Despite acknowledging the need to be building sustainability into procurement of digital, some participants also spoke about their frustrations with procurement more widely - “To do a procurement exercise is like pulling teeth. I'd rather stick pins in my eyeballs than go through it very often because the amount of hoops you've got to jump through. So if you then because we've got the security bits, we've got these bits, we've got those bits and we can't be an expert in everything. So if we now have to do a sustainability bit that we then gotta get their evidence, it's another another hoop to jump through” (Digital and technology lead in a Local Authority).
“Don't make it another check box exercise. There's enough of those already. And when you're trying to do the right thing and you've got another set of things to tick against, it's just soul destroying.” (Digital and technology lead in a Local Authority).