Open Strategy - strategic planning tool under trial by Food Futures

Open Strategy is designed to enable ‘multiple stakeholder groups’ (lots of people) to work together and add their projects and organisations into a constantly evolving online system, in order to ‘liberate collective wisdom’ by creating an integrated strategy. The online system can theoretically:

Map who is doing what and where;
Identify gaps and / or duplications in service provision;
Help transform great ideas and intentions, into real benefit for local people, by making projects outcome focussed;
Reduce endless meetings; and
Cut through jargon, by creating a common vocabulary for system recipients.

Manchester Food Futures is currently embarked on a four-month trial of the system. During the Food and Wellbeing meeting, I invited participants to involve their organisations in the trial. Although most people present at the meeting could see benefits to using the system, certain criticisms were raised:

The Open Strategies software, and the vocabulary used by its developer, Open Strategies Ltd, is extremely inaccessible – this is the opinion of Edward Kane from People First, who has a learning disability and has expert knowledge about information accessibility.
The software, and the support services from Open Strategy, are extremely expensive – they are asking for £2,000 per month … £24k / year. This blows a huge hole in the Food Futures programme budget which is around £100k / year.
Jackie Kilbane (Health and Wellbeing Network) has expressed an opinion about Open Strategy saying that it is a ‘nice package’ but concerned that it is a red herring, on the basis that all the ideas and values packaged up in Open Strategies, are already out there, and that with appropriate effort, a similar result could be achieved at a much lower cost.

The jury is still out as far as I am concerned. I am interested in the Open Strategy system getting a fair trial, in order to see what happens, and to see how users like it.

I am encouraging community and voluntary sector organisations to become involved in the trial, in order that they may feedback to me their own thoughts about the system. As a representative of the Health and Wellbeing Network on the Food Futures board, I will be required at the end of the trial, to make a decision on whether I think Food Futures should invest £24K per year in this system or not. If other community and voluntary sector organisations participate in the trial, I will be in a better position to make a decision that is representative of the sector, rather than a decision that is based just on my own thoughts and impressions. I feel a certain amount of weight and responsibility, to make the right decision, given the amount of money that is at stake.

Action: I have been asked to ascertain from Food Futures, what exactly they are seeking to gain from using Open Strategy, for example: a more robust outcomes framework?; a better LSP?; etc. Knowing this will enable other members of the Food and Wellbeing group to provide better advice about whether Food Futures should continue to use Open Strategy after the trial period.