Digital Inclusion

Today Prime Minister Brown announced that all the UK government transactions and business was moving on-line i.e. child benefit, VAT, school reports, crime maps, student loans, job seekers allowance, working tax credits, employer tax returns etc. This programme of activity is meant to bring efficiency savings of £400m and will be in place in five years time.

How does Gordon know? Can we as taxpayers inspect any functional requirements, examine the business case maybe, or peruse the plans outlining which service will come on line when. It must be that the estimate of the financial benefits, and the cost (which was not revealed) do have some foundation in analysis, but we have no way of knowing.

This is all the work of Martha Lane Fox, who recently joined the government as Champion of Digital Inclusion, so all this maybe a bit last minute. On Martha's site however she does provide a link to this report from PricewaterhouseCoopers where at least the thinking behind the initiative has been shared. However we look forward to more digital inclusion .

(NB we like the way thae PricewaterhouseCoopers use logic chains to map the benefits: Input > Activity > Output > Outcome > Impact)

IT Should Lead Business Change

Thanks to Girls Guide to bringing to our attention this book IT-Enabled Change by Sharm Manwari. We haven't read the book because it costs £21.82 even from Amazon, so this is not a review of a book we have not read.

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We don't know what's in this book, but last year about this time, we wrote a piece about business change and the role of IT. The article was Business Change - Some Questions? and was written in response to a Harvard Business Review article that reported on research across US corporations. The research investigated which of the levers of business change i.e people, process or IT, really distinguished successful businesses.

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The answer in a nutshell was that companies with a higher than average spend on IT, were more successful than those with much less spend. However this was not because of technology spend per se, but because these companies combined IT spend with enabling processes.

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A word from the report's author: Harvard Business School Professor McAfee:

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'Enterprise software like ERP and CRM systems, coupled with cheap networks, is allowing companies to replicate their unique business processes quickly, widely, and faithfully, in the same way that a digital photo can be endlessly reproduced.'

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Too often IT departments are the boiler room of any organisation, keeping vital hardware, systems, and networks running, but CIOs should rethink their role and look to become the engineers of change.

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Business processes too often have no specific owner within an organisation, and exist as weird threads between different functional stove pipes. Processes have all the characteristics of networks, and over the next few years as processes become increasingly automated, IT will have the opportunity to take control of business processes as well as IT.

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Then with both levers of change firmly in their hands, CIOs will be in a much stronger position to work with talented people and lead business change within their organisation.

Pigs Cannot Fly

Research has confirmed that pigs cannot fly, that alcoholics evidently enjoy a drink, and that IT projects that are linked to business strategy are more likely to succeed.

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That is according to research in Canada, not pigs flying but IT projects not succeeding unless linked to business strategy.

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Lets' assume most of us believe that this is bleedin' obvious , then what is really surprising from this research, is that 17% of respondents thought that the IT projects for which they were responsible, added little or no strategic value to their organisation.

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So does that mean that around one in five IT projects are not worthwhile, and does that mean that pigs can fly?

A Sense of Urgency About Change

You would think that the Harvard Business School would have more sophisticated facilities, than the cramped studio and camcorder which seems to have been used in this interview, but the content, which is only ten minutes long is interesting. It is about the need for urgency when implementing change.

Here John Kotter talks about how important it is to bring the outside, into the inside of organisations to fuel their sense of urgency about change. Too often he explains that the calm interior of the organisation does not reflect the challenge and conflict of the market place. It is analogous to a shell landing on the British generals in WW1, who drank claret and studied their maps in luxurious chateaux while the Battle of the Somme raged fifty miles away.

Delivering a Project is Not the End

Too many programme managers concentrate on delivering projects to time and budget rather than ensuring their projects deliver the benefits that were promised. This is because too many change initiatives do not have any benefits management.

Benefits management is about ensuring that the key benefits of any change are properly identified, e.g. increased efficiency or more effective service delivery, and that these benefits are made to come alive in the business. Benefits management should ensure that the programme can define exactly what each benefit will deliver in a way that can be measured, and that every benefit can be mapped to a planned outcome, and every outcome linked to a project deliverable. Furthermore every benefit should also be assigned to an owner who will be responsible and accountable for its eventual realisation.

Too often programme managers set their sights on an end date and project delivery, but that is just the start of delivering the benefits. To paraphrase the great man, delivering the programme is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.

Porridge Best Served Cold

"Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court and it is now my duty to pass sentence. You are an habitual criminal who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard and presumably accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner. I therefore feel constrained to sentence you to the maximum term allowed for these offences. You will go to prison for five years"

Norman played by Ronnie Barker in that glorious seventies sitcom always managed to come out the winner against a bungling prison system. So how he would have chuckled at the mess that the Ministry of Justice has made of building a system to track offenders through the courts and into prison, (i.e. a system to know where prisoners are!). The result has ended up as a 'shambles' according to a Public Accounts Committee Report which was published a few days ago.

It is not as though the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) have not seen numerous examples of vast amounts of government money wasted on computer projects, but this sorry tale is enough to turn any old lags head. The system was supposed to provide full tracking of offenders from the courts, through prison, release and probation, but project costs trebled to £700m and the project became “out of control” and three years late.

The usual culprits of poor project management were lined up in an identity parade back in May, when the reasons for project failure were examined by the PAC.

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The evidence was overwhelming:

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Firstly, it appears that the Project Board only met once every two months. Furthermore the Board did not manage the project, because it accepted the programme team's assurances that the project was being delivered to time and budget. There was a prevalent culture within the Department of just passing on good news.

Secondly, accurate reports to ministers on any problems were not produced. A senior member of the committee, said it was "incredible that for three years nobody senior knew what was being delivered for the money spent". The PAC were told that people had asked questions but were told that "actually the programme was all going well".

Thirdly, the senior responsible owner (SRO) of the project had never run an IT project before. MPs on the committee were unable to ascertain why she had been appointed SRO.

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The case against the Ministry of Justice therefore revolves around project governance, and particularly the role of the SRO and the Project Board. Neither party is there to manage the project, but what they must do is ensure that the project is being managed. In this case it clearly was not. Their role is to impose accountability, and assurance around delivery.

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The dilemma is how can a Project Board know when an experienced programme manager and smooth talking supplier (in this case EDS) are being economical with the truth.

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The answer is to put people on the Project Board who know about projects and know about IT. People who can ask the difficult questions and understand the answers and ask the questions again until they are satisfied with the response. Such skills and experience are difficult to find in most organisations, because it calls for that rarest of individuals. Someone who understands IT, but also understands business.

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Indeed what is required is a character like Fletch who understands computer systems as well as he understood the prison system.

Bad Business Cases Cost Lives

A business case is meant to be a rational unbiased appraisal of a business change. It carefully weighs the balance of business benefits against the cost. It may appear a dry and fusty financial document, but the dull exterior can often hide the passion and emotion that contributed to it.

Resource in any organisation is carefully rationed, so a successful business case sign off, can mean that you win and someone else loses, and winning and losing is the body politic of any organisation. Winning is career enhancing, losing is not.

In our MOD case study there are not only ambitious individuals climbing the greasy pole, but there is fierce inter-service rivalry. Cash spent on a new Trident submarine for the Navy, can mean less helicopters in Afghanistan for the RAF, but failing to have adequate scrutiny of any of the projects means that the MOD becomes overstretched and fails to deliver :

This overheating arises from a mixture of incentives within the Ministry of Defence. In particular, the Armed Forces, competing for scarce funding, quite naturally seek to secure the largest share of resources for their own needs, and have a systematic incentive to underestimate the likely cost of equipment.

Unfortunately the current system is not able to flush out at an early stage the real costs of this equipment, nor does it make effective prioritisation or rationalisation decisions. As the MoD almost never cancels an equipment order, the process of over-ordering and under-costing is not constrained by fear on the part of those ordering equipment that the programme will be lost.

Equipment plan construction is dominated by a “bottom up” aggregation process, which makes it hard for “top down” strategic guidance to control the balance of investment. Effective forums do not currently exist to allow top down guidance to control the evolution of the equipment programme.

These forces and incentives create an over-large equipment programme, which contains within it a significant underestimate of the likely out-turn, making the programme even less affordable than it appears at any given moment in time. When this over-large and inflating programme meets the hard cash planning totals that the MoD can spend each year, the Department is left with no choice but to slow down its rate of spend on programmes across the board.

The result is that programmes take significantly longer than originally estimated, because the Department cannot afford to build them at the originally planned rate.

All this would be bad enough in any organisation, but cost cutting in the MOD can cost lives, as the report by Charles Haddon-Cave QC into the death of 14 service personnel who died in 2006, when a Nimrod crashed in Afghanistan, so clearly demonstrates. Unfortunately it does not stop there, as this excellent article from the Independent illustrates.