Yes. That's great. I like placing this in an international context, because it has been interesting to see that the Anglo-Saxon cluster of governments, I'd say, has had a very similar trajectory at various stages of development in tackling the procurement issue.
I mentioned that the U.K. has done well in addressing these problems head on. We can definitely look to that jurisdiction. We can also look more broadly to countries that are now identified as having leading digital government services. This includes Ukraine, Finland, Singapore and Estonia, not countries that we have historically always looked to for practices around public sector governance. These jurisdictions are frankly nailing it when it comes to working with vendors. They all tell a very similar story about how they're managing that.
One, they're aggressively building their in-house IT expertise—to build in-house when it makes sense; to be better shoppers, as we've already described; to oversee and manage; and to ensure that when they work with vendors, those vendors want to send their A-team: We're going to be working with very talented technologists in government. I think this can be done through a mix of hiring and interchanges but also through training.
The other piece that I mentioned already comes up in interviews I've done with public servants globally on how they are managing vendors in their digital government efforts. They do often point to traditional public administration values and ethics. They have a culture of good governance. They're aware of the risks of conflict of interest, of cronyism and of revolving doors when they bring in technologists for, say, short-term stints working in government. They manage that by turning to classic tools of good public administration. They focus a lot on building kind of freeing internal rules, as we've already discussed, so that the public service can work in these modern ways themselves but also so that vendors can apply those methods when they work with the public sector.
Then there's a really big emphasis on modernizing procurement rules through such things as modular contracting, spend controls, stronger information disclosure and reporting, and prioritizing open source. There are also some really interesting ways of thinking about procurement as a policy tool. In certain jurisdictions, state IT procurement is tied to national economic development. This comes up a lot when you speak to Estonians or Finns. In Ukraine, for example, there's a real emphasis on the state trying to build an ecosystem of local vendors, having this economic growth opportunity attached to it and also making a more competitive marketplace that can bid for government work.