[woodson]

> I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites

It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them.

[rcbdev]

...and the BRZ doesn't outsource most stuff? Just like the Magistrate's Dept. 1 (Vienna Digital) for state-level IT in the federal capitol? Or IT-Kommunal for municipal IT all over Austria?

As far as I'm concerned, all of these public sector ICT divisions are just a pile of contracts.

[woodson]

Yes of course. From the outside, I can’t tell to what extent and whether it’s being done sensibly, but there are projects where they are likely better off contracting them out, and others where there are benefits of keeping things in-house (e.g., involving subject matter experts with long involvement in some niche government area). My point was that such an organization already exists.

[rcbdev]

At the time of writing, the BRZ has spent over 2.1 billion euros in public procurement contracts above the award threshhold. [1] This is not accounting for personell costs of their 1800 in-house employees.

[1] https://offenevergaben.at/auftraggeber/8983