This article is by Craig Thomler, the managing director of digital democracy company Delib Australia and New Zealand. Thomler is one of Australia’s foremost experts on eGovernment and Government 2.0 issues. It first appeared on Thomler’s popular blog, eGov AU, and is replicated here with his permission.
analysis We recently saw a change in the federal government in Australia, with a corresponding reorganisation of agency priorities and structures. Some departments ceased to exist (such as Department of Regional Australia), others split (DEEWR into two departments, Education and Employment) and still others had parts ‘broken off’ and moved elsewhere (Health and Ageing, which lost Ageing to the (renamed) Department of Social Services).
This isn’t a new phenomenon, nor is it limited to changes in government – departments and agencies are often reorganised and reconfigured to serve the priorities of the government of the day and, where possible, create efficiencies – saving money and time. These adjustments can result in the movement of tens, hundreds or even thousands of staff between agencies and regular restructures inside agencies that result in changing reporting lines and processes.
While these reorganisations and restructures – Machinery of Government changes (or MOGs) as they are known – often look good on paper, in reality it can take time for efficiencies to be realised (if they are actually being measured).
Firstly there’s the human factor – changing the priorities and allegiances of staff takes time and empathy, particularly when public servants are committed and passionate about their jobs. They may need to change their location, workplace behaviours and/or learn a new set of processes (if changing agency) while dealing with new personalities and IT systems.
There’s the structural factor – when restructured, merged or demerged public sector organisations need to revisit their priorities and reallocate their resources appropriately. This can extend to creating, closing down or handing over functions, dealing with legal requirements or documenting procedures that an agency now has to follow or another agency has taken over.
Finally there’s the IT factor – bringing together or separating the IT systems used by staff to enable them to do their work.
In my view the IT component has become the hardest to resolve smoothly and cost-effectively due to how government agencies have structured their systems. Every agency and department has made different IT choices – Lotus Notes here, Microsoft Outlet there, different desktop environments, back-end systems (HR and Finance for example), different web management systems, different security frameworks, programming environments and outsourced IT partners.
This means that moving even a small group of people from one department to another can be a major IT undertaking. Their personal records, information and archival records about the programs they work on, their desktop systems, emails, files and more must be moved from one secure environment to another, not to mention decoupling any websites they manage from one department’s web content management system and mirroring or recreating the environment for another agency.
On top of this are the many IT services people are now using – from social media accounts in Facebook and Twitter, to their email list subscriptions (which break when their emails change) and more.
On top of this are the impacts of IT service changes on individuals. Anyone who has worked in a Lotus Notes environment for email, compared to, for example, Microsoft Outlook, appreciates how different these email clients are and how profoundly the differences impact on workplace behaviour and communication. Switching between systems can be enormously difficult for an individual, let alone an organisation, risking the loss of substantial corporate knowledge – historical conversations and contacts – alongside the frustrations of adapting to how different systems work.
Similarly websites aren’t websites. While the quaint notion persists that ‘a website’ is a discreet entity which can easily be moved from server to server, organisation to organisation, most ‘websites’ today are better described as interactive front-ends for sophisticated web content management systems. These web content management systems may be used to manage dozens or even hundreds of ‘websites’ in the same system, storing content and data in integrated tables at the back-end.
This makes it tricky to identify where one website ends and another begins (particularly when content, templates and functionality is shared). Moving a website between agencies isn’t as simple as moving some HTML pages from one server to another (or reallocating a server to a new department) – it isn’t even as easy as copying some data tables and files out of a content management system. There’s enormous complexity involved in identifying what is shared (and so must be cloned) and ensuring that the website retains all the content and functionality required as it moves.
Changing IT systems can be enormously complex when an organisation is left unchanged, let alone when when teams are changing agencies or where agencies merge. In fact I’ve seen it take three or more years to bring people onto an email system or delink a website from a previous agency.
As government increasingly digitalises – and reflecting on the current government’s goal to have all government services delivered online by 2017 – the cost, complexity and time involved to complete these MOG changes will only increase. This risks crippling some areas of government or restricting the ability of the government of the day to adjust departments to meet their policy objectives – in other words allowing the (IT) tail to wag the (efficient and effective government) dog.
This isn’t a far future issue either – I am aware of instances over the past five years where government policy has had to be modified to fit the limitations of agency IT systems – or where services have been delivered by agencies other than the ones responsible, or simply not delivered due to agency IT restrictions, costs or issues.
Note that this isn’t an issue with agency IT teams. These groups are doing their best to meet government requirements within the resources they have, however they are trapped between the cost of maintaining ageing legacy systems – which cannot be switched off and they don’t have the budget to substantially replace them – and keeping up with new technological developments, the increasing thirst for IT-enabled services and gadgets.
They’re doing this in an environment where IT spending in government is flat or declining and agencies are attempting to save money around the edges, without being granted the capital amounts they need to invest in ‘root and branch’ efficiencies by rebuilding systems from the ground up.
So what needs to be done to rethink government IT to support the changing needs of government?
It needs to start with the recognition at political levels that without IT we would not have a functioning government. That IT is fundamental to enabling government to manage a nation as large and complex as Australia – our tax system, health system, social security and defence would all cease to function without the sophisticated IT systems we have in place.
Australia’s Prime Minister is also Australia’s Chief Technology Officer – almost every decision he makes has an impact on how the government designs, operates or modifies the IT systems that allow Australia to function as a nation. While IT considerations shouldn’t drive national decisions, they need to be considered and adequately resourced in order for the Australia government to achieve its potential, realise efficiencies and deliver the services it provides to citizens.
Beyond this realisation, the importance of IT needs to be top-of-mind for Secretaries, or their equivalents, and their ‘C’ level team. They need to be sufficiently IT-savvy to understand the consequences of decisions that affect IT systems and appreciate the cost and complexity of meeting the priorities of government.
Once IT’s importance is clearly recognised at a political and public sector leadership level, government needs to be clear on what it requires from IT and CIOs need to be clear on the consequences and trade-offs in those decisions.
Government systems could be redesigned from the ground-up to make it easy to reorganise, merge and demerge departments – either using common IT platforms and services for staff (such as an APS-wide email system, standard web content management platform, single HR of financial systems), or by only selecting vendors whose systems allow easy and standard ways to export and import data – so that a person’s email system can be rapidly and easily moved from one agency to another, or the HR information of two departments can be consolidated in a merger at low cost. User Interfaces should be largely standardised – so that email works the same way from any computer in any agency in government – and as much code as possible should be reused between agencies to minimise the customisation that results in even similar systems drifting apart over time.
The use of these approaches would significantly cut the cost of MOGs, as well as free up departmental IT to focus on improvements, rather than meeting the minimum requirements, a major efficiency saving over time.
Unfortunately I don’t think we’re, as yet, in a position for this type of significant rethink of whole of government IT to take place. For the most part government still functions, is reasonably efficient and is managing to keep all the lights on (even if juggling the balls is getting progressively harder).
It took the complete collapse of the Queensland Health payroll project to get the government there to act to rethink their systems, and it is likely to take a similar collapse – of our Medicare, Centrelink or tax system – for similar rethinking to occur federally. However I would not like to be a member of the government in power when (not if) this occurs.
‘…Every agency and department has made different IT choices…’
No, the problem is worse, most ‘agencies’ haven’t made any ‘choices’ at all.
Agencies have not made conscious decisions about their IT environments – the sad truth is that they have been lumbered with the consequences of the particular foibles, predilections and preferences of individual local IT managers/CIOs.
This is because most senior public servants are IT illiterates. They do not have the knowledge or experience to make IT choices. Instead, they rely on the advice given to them by their IT professionals, and that advice is essentially religious in nature. That is, it is not based on analysis, fact or evidence, it is based on faith and familiarity, and habit and custom. We have all seen the typical flame wars on forums discussing tech – geeks go ’round and ’round in ever diminishing spirals arguing the arcane benefits of one tech thing vs. another, and the rest of us, not so technically inclined, do not drop in, we tune out. The net effect (pun intended) is that the conversation about tech choices is left to the techies, but unfortunately, the consequences of those decisions are felt by all.
These sorts of essentially meaningless tech arguments do not represent decision-making at its best. Good decision-making is based on understanding options, appreciating consequences, anticipating risks, etc. Decisions on tech should be taken in context, and not just based on which shiny tech thing is preferred this week by your local IT manager.
For the world to be put right, this abrogation of decision-making by senior managers needs to stop.
The decisions on tech need to be made by people who have overall responsibility for running organisations, not just the techies. This means that our senior public servants have to stop using tired excuses like ‘I am not very technical’ – because if you are running a contemporary multi-million dollar organisation, you have to be technically literate.
Like the man said, even the Prime Minister has to be technical nowadays. If this seems a bit hard to swallow, and you want to retort with, ‘no, technies need to learn to speak the language that the business understands’, imagine a senior manager saying, ‘…yeah, that HR stuff, I don’t get it, I get someone else to sort that stuff out for me. I don’t let anyone talk to me in specific terms about my HR responsibilities, they have to speak the language of the business, I don’t want to listen to some ‘technical’ mumbo-jumbo about OH&S legislation…’.
We wouldn’t let people get away with professing that sort of ignorance, would we? We expect our managers to be skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable across all areas that they are responsible for – they need to be financially literate, understand workplace (HR) issues, the particular business that they are in, and yes, they also now need to understand technology.
You are a manager and you don’t like IT? (pun also intended) get over it, or get another job, because if you are going to manage anything at all, you need to be able to manage IT.
This is sooo true BK. For a Secretary or Deputy Secretary to say “I don’t understand how to manage the way we use technology in this agency” in 2014 is akin to them saying “I don’t know how to do my job”. Would they say “I don’t know how to manage people or how to manage money”? Most policy or service delivery initiatives these days will inevitably have a significant technology element … but many executives seem nonetheless to still make it a badge of pride to say “I’m a technology Luddite” … to absolve themselves of accountability perhaps?
+1 Mr BK, in particular your comment on managers/senior public servants claiming to be IT illiterate.
One of the fundamental flaws of Federal Government IT is that each department, that is over 100 of them decide on how to individually operate their own IT infrastructure. With no consideration for shared IT services and each department, if it chooses, has their own CIO/CTO.
IT services should be consolidated into the primary portfolio agencies, of which there are about 20. 20 CIO’s and CTO’s is a much more manageable number and more cost effective than over 100.
It all goes in cycles. Eg it is significant to note that QH Payroll as a case study in project failure occurred at a time of such consolidation etc. The cycle is shifting back the other way now for QH. Each hospital and health services network is re-growing the IT shops of the prior age – but this time with full on CIO titles and SES level appointments responsible to the hospital exec and board. Queensland Health IT as a central IT shop is a dead man walking.
One benefit is that you get to see more vendors /products operating in the same environment. This keeps competition keen whenever new contracts are signed. The downside is it makes consolidated control, management, and analysis more difficult. Unfortunately, those latter too have been missing in QH for years.
Quick riddle – how do you spot the difference between a manager from QH headquarters and an on-site hospital manager.
ANSWER 1: Look at the one with all the HP and IBM* people in their personal entourage.
ANSWER 2: look at which is stressed out of their brain from using the product.
*IBM may not be there at the moment but there will be other brand reps wining and dining their sales.
Ah yes the shared services model. That’s been working so well across Australian government hasn’t it…
Happy New Year readers … A good piece to get the whole-of-government IT strategy juices flowing Craig,
What, however, to do? I’ve pondered this for the past decade and the only solution is actually to remove as many elements of the generic applications and infrastructure environment as possible from the hands of individual agencies. This is really the only long term sustainable way to protect agencies against both the ad hoc decisions of their own executives and the organizational whimsey restructuring of their governments.
Think PLATFORM. If many agencies used a common platform then it would improve service integration, reduce costs and make MoG changes less inefficient. Yay! Sounds easy if you say it quickly.
But how? Shared services? Fail (defeated by budget and organizational realities). Outsourcing? Fail (just moves the same problem to a different and even less sustainable place). Open source & standards? Fail. (defeated by commercial and organizational realities). Strong-CIO-to-disciple-the-naughty-children-agencies? Fail (defeated by leadership and organizational realities).
Hmmm. What governments need is access to a high quality, robust and secure IT platform that provides ‘good enough’ standardized applications on an arms-length basis … and is protected from interference by its individual customers.
This is what cloud services are all about. A cloud service is simply a shared services that actually works because it is engineered and operated to provide an efficient service on an arms-length basis to a large and diverse group of customers. “Cloudy is as cloudy does” – this is a perfect fit to the organizational realities of government … particularly at state and local government levels. Wake up! Enough with the amateur-hour IT already … wave the surrender flag and just become an intelligent consumer of a robust industrialized shared service.
We need to move our thinking forward to an entirely new model … which requires some ‘out of the box’ thinking. What if all commodity-like applications were sourced by agencies as public cloud services and all other applications ran on public or private IaaS arrangements?
This could – in theory – solve many of the problems Craig refers to through a mix of common applications, API-enabled interoperability and shared platforms. Common applications would evolve by Darwinian forces – guided by astute leadership and accelerated by information sharing, collaboration between agencies and a pragmatic approach to standards.
Am I dreaming? Maybe … but I just don’t see any other way that this can work. The key problem is organizational whimsey. Agencies are inherently unstable constructs, so we need an approach that insulates the IT platforms from the agencies. One of the criticisms often made of cloud services by government IT folks is that they can’t be customized to meet unique agency requirements. EXACTLY! This is the whole point! Standardized. Functional. Iteratively evolving. Shared. Arms-length. Reliable. Secure.
How to move in this direction? Just get started … I discuss this in an Ovum StraightTalk comment last week: http://ovum.com/2014/01/09/cloud-services-will-kill-big-bad-whole-of-government-it-projects/
Big bad mad experimental whole-of-government IT projects to consolidate, rationalize and standardize agency IT environments are dead. Long live the new logic of cloud services: find solutions that work well in individual agencies and then adopt them more broadly across multiple agencies. Simple.
What a waste of an article. The author shows their ignorance of the significant challenges of enterprise IT by simplifying them to “email, files, websites and mailing lists.” This stuff pales in comparison to disentangling the massive ERP and bespoke mainframe systems still being used by our major agencies.
And no, there will never be “one technology to rule them all” or “one platform” – simply because there are humans involved, and they are fallible, biased, self-serving and don’t make decisions based on sense.
And I’m not even feeling pessimistic today. But I am annoyed enough that I am wasting time writing this comment.
I agree. It may possible to align some back office services given some of the new capability that is emerging but it is more of a challenge to sort out the ‘front office’ services a you mention.
Even the back office will be a challenge as there is no over aching vision to address all the Agency silos.
The first thing to grasp is that government is a single organisation albeit a complex one. The thing that differentiates the various Agencies from each other is their ‘front office’ service. Whether that is taxation, welfare, etc. Given this as you move from the front office to the back office you move from heterogeneity to homogeneity of information services delivery.
Furthermore, governments in the main use an incremental budgeting and rarely revisit programs. Does it make sense to approve a program just because you did so the previous 10 years? There is a need to reset and re baseline in terms of what government does. This is to justify its programs, resources and therefore the impact on associated assets, people, etc, and also the information systems that are being utilised. Without understanding this it is difficult to envisage the fundamental redesign of government from an organisation and operational perspective. This drives ICT change – not the other way around.
The history of technology is known in terms of the emergence of client server based information services that served to reinforce the siloed nature of Agencies across government. Additionally, many of us will be aware of the history of government information services delivery in terms of the oscillation from a consolidation of services (shared services) to allowing each Agency to do their own thing.
Shared services based on ERP’s were never going to work due to many insurmountable limitations (I could never understand the fixation of using a system designed for manufacturing). However, the good thing is the capability information services themselves are changing such that we are now able to envisage services that multiple organisations and thousands of users can access from a single instance – multi tenancy is becoming the standard which is also changing the cost dynamics of information services delivery.
Given this it is possible to envisage a revolution in and a very different way of organising information services delivery across government as a whole. This would be driven by a ‘corporate’ operational view of government. Starting with the back office it is possible to have a environment where there is a single highly distributed service via a ‘private cloud’ – Government wide email service, project services, procurement service, whole of government staff directory, single GL and one GL definition for the whole of government, single HR and payroll service, etc.
The limitations are now less the technology but more an understanding and a willingness to drive change to realise the many benefits that can be identified – cost reduction, increased quality through process alignment, etc. As I wrote above the ICT piece will always be impossible to resolve unless it is driven from a corporate business model and organisational design/modelling perspective.
As a starting point a government needs to invest in creating a whole-of-government view of the current state of its ICT. It then becomes easy to standardise ICT definitions across multiple Agencies and then identify redundant and duplicated systems against a corporate or whole of government vision. The realignment of the underlying systems would not then be based on a blind man with a white stick approach and an Agency specific agenda but on the needs, benefits, cost reductions that would be realised from implementing a whole-of-government corporate solution. I see many opportunities to eliminate massive costs across all tiers of government on a rolling business benefits basis.
There are a number of ways of doing this with each of the homogenous services. For instance the formation of cross government ‘horizontal’ teams that focus on developing and then owning each service – HR/Payroll. Procurement, Project services, etc. It is accepted that it is human nature for people to believe that the way they do things and their processes are ‘SUDs’ – Special, Unique and Different. They are not as processes can be rapidly resolved to what would be a government wide best practice for what are generic services. Only then you would look to put in place a supporting information service.
Again the resolution of multiple Web sites to a single website via web services is less of an issue than suggested. I would refer to establishment of the business model, design and whole-of-government ICT view as outlined above which drives how and what government does/delivers. The OASIS initiative and the UK.Gov site illustrates that the online experience for a citizen can be greatly enhanced. New technologies are now emerging that will go beyond what the UK government has done and create a one-to-one and 2-way dynamic relationship between government and its citizens/residents.
Using the massively limited Social Media offerings – Facebook, Twitter, etc, for government has the potential to become an information disaster and a threat to Citizen and Resident information security. This is in terms of breaching the various data and information statutes that have been put in place to protect OUR data/information that may be resold and its location cannot be verified. In the case of social media governments should be looking to form their own secure domain that citizens and residents can interact in an environment of trust. This would be fully in alignment with a whole-of-government strategy to enhance information stewardship and protect information.
Of course many vendors would not like to see this ‘Cloud’ cross government information service model emerge as they will be unable divide and sell into multiple agencies via their brochureware and endless promises of ‘it will work one day’. The relationship will fundamentally change from one with multiple touch points to potentially a single commercial touch point for each service. For instance if I am running a single ‘private cloud’ procurement service why would I need tens and tens of separate instances of procurement software? I would not, as I would draw upon one service. Also Agency budget holders would not like their ‘authority’ diminished as a result of losing control of their ICT budgets and staff. The tax payer should not be funding a dying ICT business model? Given its spend it should be creating a new vision in line with the potential of new technologies.
The challenges are human as the article points to. Someone at the top has to own the new vision (a corporate government business model) and then promote and support the implementation of that vision over a sustained period of time. Here is another issue. The electoral cycle is short so that it would be hard to maintain a program of true reform unless there was cross party agreement to maintain the reform. I see this as show stopper in Australia along with the siloed nature of government and its many tiers of government.
The notion of redesigning processes is a good one and then having new a new information service support these processes. There are many examples emerging that illustrate the potential of collaboration and the cloud. One US State uses a single cloud service for its payroll/HR/finance across all of its Agencies. A European Government has saved over a billion pounds by implementing a whole of public sector procurement solution. That nation uses a single ‘private cloud’ procurement service across 120 entities and over hundred thousand staff and over one hundred thousand suppliers. This has not only transformed procurement capability from a human skills and quality perspective but it has also eliminated hundreds of millions of pounds of duplicated procurement software and ICT support costs. A MOG is simply a reconfiguration of the organisations in the system over a weekend. In the US over 60 Universities collaborated and built an Open Source cloud based back office solution that they now all share and update as a collective venture. This means the services will always be current and they have eliminated millions of dollars of costs related to maintaining ill suited ERP solutions and have distributed the costs of operation across the community.
The whole ICT sector could do with a revolution like the one that manufacturing went through from batch to continuous production. Humans do the design and machines output the product (this will happen as labour is always substituted for capital). I have seen the generation of complete applications from a design specification with zero human programming effort. Changing this type of application is a change of the design and a regeneration of the complete application – takes a few hours. All you would do is maintain a single specification file and not millions of lines of code. The implications for the development of sophisticated utilities with long run interlinking processes are significant across government – we could revolutionise the tax process and many other processes. The block is the very costly body shop and licence software selling model.
Congratulations Craig and Steve Hodgkinson
Steve commented,”
“But how? Shared services?
1.Fail (defeated by budget and organizational realities).
2. Outsourcing? Fail (just moves the same problem to a different and even less sustainable place).
3. Open source & standards? Fail. (defeated by commercial and organisational realities).
4. Strong-CIO-to-disciple-the-naughty-children-agencies? Fail (defeated by leadership and organisational realities).”
I do understand something of State Government. Certainly One is true.
The fiasco that shared services became in Victoria was the result of budget mismanagement driven by a central agency (DTF) with its own agenda and a gross understatement of the level of funding required.
Here are some examples of the flaws in the Victoria Government. For instance post CenITex there is a reasonable Central Melbourne network. There is an Identity Management System that can function provided Departments are not allowed to modify it for their own ends.
Money was wasted by an ambitious programme to bring about a single desktop which in hindsight was not something Department’s wanted nor could afford. No one in the Central Agency had budgeted nor sought agreement from the Departments.
The network was adequate in the CBD but totally inadequate in regional areas where much of the Victorian Governments business was done. State wide security was started but still had a way to go.
If that is true: what hope that Two will sort out the issues.
The main problem is that despite all the fine words in the Victorian Strategy there has been little done to understand, how in an outsourced model fundng will work. Because there should be no desire to go back to the failed funding outsourcing model that existed prior to CenITex. We must assume the only answer is the “cloud”. No one seems to have explained how funding is moved from capital to operational expenditure which by definition is how the cloud works. What effect does this have on departmental budgets?
Three is a good example: to move Victorian Department of Transport off the Notes world would cost millions if not billions. So much their data is tied up in coded databases that would require extensive rewrites. They are just on example of many: how could you outsource their systems easily?
Is open source a reality? The answer must be no; because of the requirement to port systems that through no one’s fault have grown like topsy over a number of decades.
Finally Four, any change must provide an answer to the demand for strong leadership a question that has failed so many times. If Governments both federal and state treat information technology as an irritation that gets in the way of policy then it is doomed to fail.
So what is information technology to government? It surely is the increasingly major delivery vehicle for policy. You still have Courts, Police and Social Welfare with well-intentioned staff but none of these agencies can deliver services without the aid of complex delivery systems and certainly not without huge increases in numbers in the absence of good information technology.
So politicians’ bite the bullet stop wasting our money and invest in the best delivery systems available to you. Treat information technology like the valuable asset it is and make as Craig’s article suggests it a strategic and important part of Government. Politicians do not need to be experts in information technology but they do know how to direct the strategies that underpin them.
Congratulations Craig and Steve Hodgkinson
Steve commented,”
“But how? Shared services?
1.Fail (defeated by budget and organizational realities).
2. Outsourcing? Fail (just moves the same problem to a different and even less sustainable place).
3. Open source & standards? Fail. (defeated by commercial and organisational realities).
4. Strong-CIO-to-disciple-the-naughty-children-agencies? Fail (defeated by leadership and organisational realities).”
I do understand something of State Government. Certainly One is true.
The fiasco that shared services became in Victoria was the result of budget mismanagement driven by a central agency (DTF) with its own agenda and a gross understatement of the level of funding required.
Here are some examples of the flaws in the Victoria Government. For instance post CenITex there is a reasonable Central Melbourne network. There is an Identity Management System that can function provided Departments are not allowed to modify it for their own ends.
Money was wasted by an ambitious programme to bring about a single desktop which in hindsight was not something Department’s wanted nor could afford. No one in the Central Agency had budgeted nor sought agreement from the Departments.
The network was adequate in the CBD but totally inadequate in regional areas where much of the Victorian Governments business was done. State wide security was started but still had a way to go.
If that is true: what hope that Two will sort out the issues.
The main problem is that despite all the fine words in the Victorian Strategy there has been little done to understand, how in an outsourced model fundng will work. Because there should be no desire to go back to the failed funding outsourcing model that existed prior to CenITex. We must assume the only answer is the “cloud”. No one seems to have explained how funding is moved from capital to operational expenditure which by definition is how the cloud works. What effect does this have on departmental budgets?
Three is a good example: to move Victorian Department of Transport off the Notes world would cost millions if not billions. So much their data is tied up in coded databases that would require extensive rewrites. They are just on example of many: how could you outsource their systems easily?
Is open source a reality? The answer must be no; because of the requirement to port systems that through no one’s fault have grown like topsy over a number of decades.
Finally Four, any change must provide an answer to the demand for strong leadership a question that has failed so many times. If Governments both federal and state treat information technology as an irritation that gets in the way of policy then it is doomed to fail.
So what is information technology to government? It surely is the increasingly major delivery vehicle for policy. You still have Courts, Police and Social Welfare with well-intentioned staff but none of these agencies can deliver services without the aid of complex delivery systems and certainly not without huge increases in numbers in the absence of good information technology.
So politicians’ bite the bullet stop wasting our money and invest in the best delivery systems available to you. Treat information technology like the valuable asset it is and make as Craig’s article suggests it a strategic and important part of Government. Politicians do not need to be experts in information technology but they do know how to direct the strategies that underpin them.
One of the major issue and one that certainly CenItex had was in treating this thing called Government as a single entity rather than an amorphous blob.
Government goes from True Science, Medical , Accounting, Engineering etc etc . The issue comes when Smart IT people try and treat the IT issue as if they where dealing with Coles.
Gee. this thread reminds me of all the IT architecture and design discussions when in Gov and the 100s of pages of IT architecture done by very smart people – but at the end of the day the customer – the senior exec just wanted IT stuff that worked. And because he couldn’t understand the 100s of pages of IT architecture he made the very human decision of presuming it was useless.
YES gov IT is a broken model – but I am yet to really see anything that resolves this – including cloud services – or IT as a service – just look at QLD in its most recent news. A bright young guy gets promoted as mr Fix it – and he leaves before its found out he cannt.
fundamentally Gov IT is broken because most projects are IT projects – not business projects. Perhaps the author of this blog and Steve from Ovum should make comment about the growing debate re CIO/CDO/CMO.
It is interesting to note that the poster boy case study re Police and Social Media / Emergency Management in QLD and else where don’t involve IT departments but savvy business units accessing non departmental IT solutions/services.
Hi ex-gov, I think the discussion above illustrates the complexity of the issues nicely!
The guts of the problem is that (as much as we might wish it were so) technology is unlikely to drive a change in the core-business operating model of the public sector in our lifetimes.
The Westminster system of government creates a very devolved style of organization, with Ministers acting in an equivalent role to directors in a corporation … as part of a board (i.e. cabinet) … but there is no ‘head office’ in an operational sense … no ‘CEO’, no ‘COO’. To some degree the Secretary of the finance dept. acts like a CFO. Each dept/agency reports to one or a number of Ministers in an autonomous fashion … with some strategy coordination of outcomes and outputs at cabinet … but only weak operational-level coordination of inputs (such as ICT). This is just the reality of the government landscape.
The other reality is organizational whimsy. Even if the government decides to ‘centralize’ by creating mega-departments and shared service arrangements these will ultimately be unstable. They may work well for a period of time (or never work well) … but as surely as the sun rises in the east when the government changes they will likely kick the pendulum the other way again … break up the mega departments, devolve the shared services and reshuffle the agency deck. Centralization always creates tensions that boil over eventually when the organizational preferences are geared towards devolution. Ho hum … how tedious.
I’m not saying that this is right or wrong … I’m just describing the reality of the landscape as I see it. In the past I have described this as the “e-government Chimera” – the three headed beast created by conflicting pressures: (1) OUTCOMES (the pressure for joined-up government), (2) OUTPUTS (the pressure for clear accountability and autonomy over defined policy and service activities) and (3) INPUTS (the pressure for efficient use of money, people, facilities, assets, ICT etc.).
The three heads of the Chimera beast have to be kept in balance. The most powerful central agency (Finance) creates a primary focus on outputs and agency-by-agency accountability. So, e-government, ICT, or digital-government strategies that seek to achieve a better balance towards outcomes (more integrated services) or inputs (consolidated shared technology services) create a tension against the prevailing dominance of outputs. In the long run outputs have historically always won. Agency autonomy always wins because department secretaries and agency CEOs are accountable for delivery of their discrete outputs. The only caveat to this is mega-mega-departments (such as Centrelink and the federal DHS monolith) which create a certain sustainability just because of their organizational scale and inertia once they are established. Even these mega-departments, however, are usually cyclical … big is good -> big is bad -> small is better -> small is good -> small is bad -> big is better … etc.
So … given the reality of this whimsical organizational environment … any long term sustainable approach must be founded on the reality of agency autonomy and on meeting the needs of agency knowledge workers and front-line service delivery workers.
It is folly to believe that any magic new internal organization structure – like shared services – will solve the problem because it is unlikely to be sustainable. It can work, but it usually doesn’t due to human failings and organizational dynamics. These strategies, and the executives that drive them, are ‘swimming against the current’ … even a strong swimmer will eventually tire and give up … or drown. This is why outcomes or input focused executives, such as CIOs, usually have a short tenure. One hand clapping.
The best approach is to focus on how to source and apply ICT capabilities in an efficient and sustainable manner AT THE AGENCY LEVEL. If a solution doesn’t make sense for an individual department secretary or agency CEO … or their CIO … then it doesn’t make sense … period.
BUT, of course, there is not enough money for each agency to run an autonomous ICT operation … and this would be both wasteful and lead to asset and information fragmentation. Some form of coordination and resource sharing is essential.
My view is that – given all the above – cloud services will evolve to become the most sustainable resource sharing model for the government sector – most particularly at state and local government level. [I realize that this may not seem obvious to all … and that there are many challenges to overcome etc. … but there are challenges ahead whichever path is taken].
If this is true then the focus should shift to how do we make this happen? How do we ensure that there are mature and trusted cloud services for a wide portfolio of applications available to agencies in Australia?
The answer is actually simple. Just get started. It is a dynamic competitive market. Agencies need to get their heads straight on the situation and then buy services that meet their current and evolving needs. Over time the cloud services market will mature, applications will emerge to satisfy jurisdiction-specific requirements, security and trust issues will be resolved … and we will be in a different world.
Agencies will be using the applications that THEY CHOOSE and these applications will be provided by large scale robust shared services organizations that are independent of government … and therefore (relatively) stable and sustainable (Good!).
Leadership will be needed to coordinate agency choices … but by-and-large common solutions will probably emerge well enough by a process of pragmatic collaboration, natural selection and de facto standardization. Once a cloud service is proven in one agency it will likely be adopted more widely by other agencies because they can see that it works. By definition, cloud services are scalable shared services, so many agencies can use them … across any jurisdiction … federal, state or local government.
Shared services in government are asserted to work in theory but seldom work in practice. Cloud services work in practice (try before you buy … “cloudy is as cloudy does”) … but are asserted not to work in theory. Hmmm … should we think about this?
If we stopped phafing around wasting time and money cycling back and forth between unsustainable ‘win-lose’ centralized and decentralized approaches to commodity applications and infrastructure we would actually have time and energy to focus on:
(1) ICT-enabled-service-innovation
(2) interoperability and process integration (think APIs)
(3) information management!!
CIO = Chief INFORMATION Officer … get it?
Am I mad??? Has the holiday season gone to my head??? ;-)
Steve,
Thanks – would love to see you write a piece on the CDO/CIO debate.
You make an interesting point – about the CIO and the I.
Put it down to one of those things about good in theory…
My experience is that most government CIOs are CIOs in name but are not actually CIOs at all. Much of the current generation of government CIOs are essentially ubber IT ops managers. There in lies the source of some of the issues. And hence the debate about CDO etc I suspect.
“Australia’s Prime Minister is also Australia’s Chief Technology Officer”
Good God, isn’t that a terrifying thought…
Steve and Ex Gov person
You are both correct. The direction must come from within the Business Units: economically the only way to provide Information Technology to wider government is through “cloud” services.
All I ask is that instead of playing around as has been the case recently with too little budget and a lack of understanding of the complexity of the challenge that someone plans and thinks a little more before they start.
1. Start with a small department as a trial
2. Recognise that the trial must grow and have a plan
3. Understand that supporting infrastructure outside the “cloud” that exists is probably inadequate (i.e. network, identity management et al)
4. Make certain that external Departments cannot interfere with the trial (get buy In from political leaders)
5. Ensure there is sufficient money for each stage of the plan.
6. Start
Steve you are not mad but if the Government Information Technology projects continue to fail us we all may end up that way. To quote JK Galbraith, “‘Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
– Letter to John F. Kennedy (1962-03-02), printed in Galbraith’s Ambassador’s Journal (1969)
Perhaps more people should read The New Industrial State and that Economics in Perspective for a discussion on the difficulty in a modern corporate world of getting cooperation in large organisations.
Finally the comments suggest the issue of Information Technology failure is only a public sector problem which is nonsense.
All the major banks and corporates are struggling with the transfer of Information Technology from the world of mainframes to less centralised models. They are just better at covering up their mistakes. The mistakes are less public unless things go wrong as they have sometimes spectacularly over the last 5 years or so.
Give some thoughts too hoow you need too form public perceptions of
your business.
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