I was delighted to see today that we released a case study that detailled the deployment of an eGovernment gateway in the Czech Republic that has made extensive reuse of the code that we developed for the UK Government Gateway solution.  You can get the case study here.

Ironically I was having a discussion with some colleagues today about the % reuse that a developer will achieve with any particular pre-written application...I would be interested to hear your views on this.  I don't know for sure how much of the UK Gateway code was reused for the Czechs (I must check!) however I was arguing that depending on how commoditized a particular component is, the more likely it is to be reused.  If you think about a spreadsheet, people are quite happy to use the existing formulae that come out-of-the-box, but how they might go about solving a particular problem when using these 'commodity' formulae may be very different from one person to the next.  Likewise when I used to do some work with vbScripts, I used to reuse connection strings and methods that I found on the web, but I rarely reused an entire script that I might have found in its entirety...my needs were unique.

One of my colleagues, Alan Grose, has done lots of workshops with different governments around the world, architecting eGovernment solutions; he uses the UK Gateway solution as an example.  His feedback was that once he gets onto the 3rd or 4th slide of his 100 slide architectural presentation the response is typically "you guys get it, now how can you help me address my particular scenario, which, by the way, is very different to Country X".

A lot of governments want to see more reuse, and less wheel reinvention, but the savings realized can be a very grey area.  What the SSN Program has made us realize to date is that most countries which participate tend to share more thoughts/ideas/documents/project plans that actual code...this is not through any kind of stubborn pride, more that they just want to be satisified that they know a solution has been built to accurately reflect their needs.  In the next few months I am going to test this further...I will report back here.