Written by Paul Brown | Last updated 17.11.2025 | 12 minute read
Open standards have moved from being an abstract principle in IT policy papers to a practical, strategic tool for transforming how the UK public sector designs, buys, and runs technology. For central government departments, local authorities, arm’s-length bodies and regulators, the question is no longer whether to adopt open standards, but how to do so in a way that is secure, sustainable and delivers value for money. At the same time, GovTech consultancies have become an important bridge between policy ambitions and operational reality.
This article explores the role open standards play in modernising UK government IT, why they matter politically and economically, and how GovTech consultancies can help organisations implement them in a pragmatic, risk-aware way. It aims to be useful whether you are a digital leader, CIO, enterprise architect, or programme manager grappling with legacy estates and complex supplier landscapes.
Open standards are often talked about in the same breath as “open source” or “open data”, but they are not the same thing. Open standards are publicly available technical specifications that anyone can implement, with governance and licensing terms that prevent unfair control by a single vendor. In practice, they define how systems talk to one another, how data is structured, and how services can interoperate securely and reliably.
For UK government organisations, the appeal of open standards is both strategic and economic. Strategically, they reduce dependence on proprietary interfaces and closed ecosystems that can slow policy delivery and make it difficult to react to new ministerial priorities, regulatory changes or crisis situations. Economically, they increase competition in the supplier market, making it easier to break large, monolithic contracts into modular services and invite a wider range of vendors to participate.
Open standards also align closely with the UK government’s wider agenda around transparency, accountability and citizen-centred services. When systems interoperate more easily, data moves more smoothly between departments and agencies, enabling more coherent experiences for residents and businesses. Citizens are less likely to be asked for the same information multiple times, and frontline staff spend less time re-keying data or wrestling with inconsistent records.
There is also a resilience dimension. In a world of cyber threats, geopolitical uncertainty and fragile supply chains, relying on proprietary protocols controlled by a small number of global technology vendors carries risk. Open standards allow government to design architectures where components can be swapped, upgraded or re-hosted without major rewrites. This can be the difference between a service that adapts to change and one that becomes a critical liability.
When people speak about open standards in UK government, they often mean more than just technical specifications. In practice, open standards are part of a wider ecosystem of guidance, patterns and reference architectures, many of which are curated or influenced by central digital and technology bodies. Understanding this landscape is essential for any organisation planning serious modernisation.
At a technical level, open standards describe interfaces, data formats and security protocols. Common examples in government estates include HTTP and RESTful APIs for service integration, JSON and XML for structured data interchange, and OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect for authentication and authorisation flows. These technologies may be ubiquitous, but their disciplined, consistent use in government contexts is what enables reusable components and cross-department platforms.
Beyond these general standards sit sector-specific and domain-specific standards. In local government, for example, you may see efforts to standardise case management and permit systems around common data models so that different councils can adopt shared components. In health and social care, standards for information sharing underpin multi-agency safeguarding, discharge planning and integrated care models. For justice and policing, secure messaging and evidence-handling standards are crucial for maintaining chain of custody and legal admissibility.
Open standards in UK government are also increasingly tied to architectural approaches such as API-first, event-driven integration and domain-driven design. Rather than building bespoke point-to-point integrations, organisations are encouraged to expose clearly documented interfaces, with versioning strategies and governance that support reuse. This can be particularly powerful for departments that need to provide platforms used by local authorities, agencies or third-party providers.
In practical terms, organisations often find themselves working with a combination of:
The challenge is not simply to select a list of standards and publish them on an intranet. Real value comes when these standards are embedded into procurement frameworks, solution design, development practices and operational tooling. This is precisely where GovTech consultancies can help government organisations move from policy statements to consistent implementation.
Adopting open standards in a government context is rarely a purely technical exercise. It affects vendor relationships, commercial models, operating structures, risk and assurance processes, and even organisational culture. GovTech consultancies, with their mix of public sector domain knowledge and modern engineering expertise, are well placed to sit at this intersection.
One of the most important contributions a GovTech consultancy can make is to translate high-level policy intent into workable architectures and roadmaps. Many departments already have documents stating that systems “should use open standards wherever possible”. The difficulty lies in interpreting what that means in the context of a complex legacy estate, an evolving security posture, and live statutory obligations. Consultants can help define a pragmatic target architecture and prioritised migration path that balances ambition with operational reality.
GovTech consultancies also bring an external vantage point on how other public sector organisations have implemented similar standards. They can draw on real-world case studies from other departments, regulators or local authorities to show what has worked, what has failed, and what has proven surprisingly difficult in practice. This comparative insight can save years of trial and error and help avoid repeating mistakes already made elsewhere in the public sector.
Another key role lies in commercial and supplier strategy. Government buyers may routinely specify open standards requirements in tenders, but suppliers often respond with partial implementations, proprietary extensions, or tightly coupled integrations that create hidden lock-in. Consultancies can help shape procurement language, evaluation criteria and contract structures that genuinely enforce open standards and avoid loopholes. They can also assist with supplier due diligence and design reviews to ensure proposed solutions are genuinely interoperable.
In addition, many GovTech consultancies provide hands-on delivery capability, not just advisory services. They can embed multi-disciplinary teams alongside civil servants and in-house technologists, bringing in architects, developers, DevOps specialists, business analysts and user researchers who are comfortable working in an open-standards-first ecosystem. This is particularly valuable for departments or councils that have limited internal engineering capacity or are still transitioning away from completely outsourced models.
Where government organisations are at the start of their journey, GovTech partners can help establish foundational elements such as:
By combining strategic advice with practical delivery support, GovTech consultancies become catalysts for change rather than just external reviewers. They help departments move beyond slideware and workshops into genuine, working interoperability across their estates.
Turning the principle of open standards into lived reality across multiple programmes and suppliers can feel overwhelming. The sheer diversity of legacy systems, contracts and regulatory requirements can tempt organisations to treat open standards as a “nice to have” rather than a core requirement. A structured, incremental approach can make the task manageable and less risky.
A helpful starting point is to view open standards not as a separate workstream, but as an integral part of governance and delivery. That means embedding them into the artefacts and decision points teams already use: business cases, architectural decision records, sprint reviews, service assessments and contract management meetings. When open standards are treated as optional guidance, they are easily compromised under time pressure. When they are coded into the normal rhythms of delivery, they become much harder to ignore.
One practical tactic is to develop a small set of “non-negotiables” for open standards in your organisation. These should be simple, testable statements that apply to all new and significantly changed systems. For example, you might mandate that all new integrations must be API-based rather than file transfers, that APIs must use specific security protocols, and that core entities (such as citizen, case, payment or asset) must follow defined data models. GovTech consultants can help design these non-negotiables so that they are ambitious but realistic.
To make progress tangible, many organisations find it useful to focus on a handful of high-impact domains or services where open standards can quickly unlock value. For example, you might start with payments, notifications, identity, casework or data-sharing across a cluster of related services. By getting a small number of priority domains right, you build confidence, create reusable patterns and gather evidence for wider rollout.
Within this structured approach, GovTech consultancies can guide government teams through a series of practical activities, such as:
For teams on the ground, success depends on making open standards feel like an enabler, not a bureaucratic burden. That means providing practical support, not just rules. GovTech consultancies can help by co-creating developer-friendly resources such as API style guides, reusable code libraries, sample integration stubs and automated test suites that validate conformance to agreed schemas and protocols.
Another important step is to invest in observability and monitoring. Once interfaces follow consistent standards, it becomes much easier to instrument them, track performance, identify breaking changes and understand dependency chains. Over time, this operational insight feeds back into better architecture decisions and more robust services.
Ultimately, implementing open standards is a long-term journey rather than a one-off project. Departments and councils should expect to iterate on their standards, retire those that prove unwieldy, and incorporate new ones as technology evolves. GovTech consultancies can provide continuity across leadership changes and spending reviews, helping preserve institutional memory and keep the standards ecosystem coherent as programmes start and finish.
Technology, procurement and policy decisions are important, but sustainable open standards adoption in UK government ultimately depends on culture. If open standards are seen as “someone else’s job” – perhaps belonging only to architects or central digital teams – their effect will be limited. The goal is to make open standards a shared concern for everyone involved in designing, buying, building and operating services.
One aspect of this cultural shift is storytelling. Civil servants and delivery teams need compelling narratives and concrete examples that show how open standards have made a difference to citizens, service staff or programme outcomes. This might be a case where a department avoided a costly rewrite by swapping out one vendor’s component for another, or where agreed data standards allowed different agencies to collaborate on a complex case without constant manual reconciliation. GovTech consultancies can help uncover and articulate these stories, turning abstract principles into relatable, human outcomes.
Another cultural element is the way organisations handle compromise and exception. There will always be situations where a particular standard cannot be followed exactly – perhaps due to regulatory constraints, legacy constraints or supplier limitations. The key is to treat these as explicit exceptions, documented and reviewed, rather than quiet workarounds. When exceptions are transparent and time-bound, they can be managed sensibly. When they are hidden, they erode trust in the standards regime and set precedents that are hard to reverse.
Open standards culture is also tied to skills and capability. Designers, product managers, analysts and policy officials may not need to know the technical detail of a protocol, but they should be able to ask informed questions about interoperability, data portability and lock-in. GovTech consultancies can support this through tailored training, coaching and the creation of simple checklists or playbooks that non-technical colleagues can use when commissioning or reviewing services.
The broader public sector landscape offers an opportunity for collaboration and shared learning. Local authorities, regulators, agencies and central departments often face similar challenges and would benefit from reusing each other’s standards, patterns and components. GovTech consultancies that work across these boundaries can act as connectors, helping spread good practice and avoid fragmentation into multiple, incompatible “standards” that differ only slightly from one organisation to another.
Finally, leadership commitment is essential. Senior responsible owners, chief digital and information officers, finance directors and commercial leads all need to back the move towards open standards, not merely in speeches but in the decisions they make about funding, timelines and risk tolerance. GovTech consultancies can provide evidence and analysis that supports those leadership decisions, demonstrating the long-term value and resilience benefits of open standards compared with short-term expediency.
Implementing open standards in UK government IT is not a purely technical exercise, nor is it a passing trend. It is a strategic shift in how public services are conceived, built and sustained. Done well, it unlocks competition, reduces dependency on single suppliers, improves resilience and enables more coherent experiences for citizens and businesses. Done poorly, it becomes just another layer of policy paperwork, disconnected from the systems that actually run the country’s essential services.
GovTech consultancies sit in a pivotal position in this transformation. They can interpret policy into actionable roadmaps, bring lessons from across the public sector, shape procurement and commercial strategies, and provide hands-on delivery capability that embeds open standards into the fabric of everyday work. As the UK government continues its journey towards more modular, interoperable and data-informed services, the collaboration between public sector organisations and GovTech partners will be a decisive factor in turning open standards from aspiration into reality.
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