Good Governance: effective use of IT

Written evidence submitted by Alpine Resourcing (IT 67)

Summary of findings

The paper highlights–

· New challenges to successful delivery highlighting areas where current practice and capability are under particular strain

· The increased need to tackle issues which to date have been intractable

The paper concludes that greater emphasis will be required on team-based constructs (real and virtual), explicitly providing skill mixes which are designed to encourage collaborative working at all stages of the lifecycle, and bringing to bear:

· an understanding of government and its workings

· the capacity, credibility and willingness to inject real rigour at the formative stage of programmes

· the discipline to articulate clear outcomes

· the ability to calibrate risk and willingness to take balanced decisions

· understanding of the potential and shortcomings of technology

· relationship and alliance building

· an experienced insight into the factors influencing success and failure in public sector IT

· a willingness to embrace the recommendation in Martha Lane Fox’s report on DirectGov to exploit the Internet to shift the lead in the design of services from policy and legal teams to the end users

· a systematic approach to project review and applying lessons in real time. OGC reviews, properly applied, were a potent weapon which seem to have been abandoned

· numerous examples exist where poorly performing programmes that exhibit all the characteristics detailed above have been recovered when properly skilled individuals or teams have been brought in to rescue them.

Our perspective

Our network of Associates has experience of Government IT projects which is both broad and deep, ranging from policy initiation at the highest level, through procurement and supplier management, to programme execution and operational delivery. Through independent or Governmental assurance processes (such as OGC’s Gateway reviews) Associates have gained first-hand exposure to several hundred projects and programmes in a wide range of Departments, and have developed deep insight into the root causes behind both failures and successes (of which there are many).

Our approach

There is much which can be said about each of the subjects set out in the Issues and Questions paper, but in the limited space available, it seems to be more appropriate to set out, in the first instance, where we believe there will be new challenges to overcome, and to use this analysis to highlight areas where current practice and capability will be under particular strain. There will be an increased need to tackle some issues which have so far proven resistant to significant improvement, and a need to deploy some new skills and capabilities. By contrast there may be little point in continuing to invest in forms and mechanisms of control which are likely to become less relevant in the future.

The different challenge ahead

Two of the posed questions:

What role should IT play in a ‘ post-bureaucratic age ’?

and

How will public sector IT adapt to the new ‘age of austerity’?

point to quite marked changes in the way programmes are conceived and developed (assuming that the principles behind the two ‘ages’ are taken seriously and are applied persistently). What is less obvious is that these changes are complementary, and that some of the solutions to the cost reduction agenda are entirely consistent with those required for the devolution agenda. There is the basis here for a consistent strategy.

Sustained and significant cost pressure on projects should drive improvements in a number of areas:

- Greater focus on tangible benefits, and significantly higher ‘rate of return’ expectations in business cases. In general, the quality of project justification documents is below the standard one would hope for, with options analysis in particular being limited in both scope and depth.

Reductions in the complexity and comprehensiveness of solutions proposed. Complexity has long been recognised as a driver of cost (and delay) but there are few if any mechanisms in place to establish evidence-based, risk-weighted, approaches to problems. ContactPoint (with 90+%

- redundancy designed in to its database); e-Borders, and the CRB operation are obvious examples of the instinctive desire to provide comprehensive solutions without clear and objective cost-benefit, or cost- risk, underpinnings. It has to be recognised that this is an issue for Ministers and policy makers as much as for IT delivery teams: sensitivity around hard cases in the particular drives up cost and risk across the board. This leads in practice to ‘management by trump card’ and the inhibiting of effective challenge.

- Exploiting capability which exists rather than building anew. Strategies based on loose-coupled interoperability across existing platforms, rather than tight integration on standardised environments, are more likely to be cost and time effective. The role model needs to be based more on the approach taken to ‘Wiring up Youth Justice’ and less on grand Departmental architectures.

At the same time, the policy drive towards more local engagement; the devolution of decision making and the opening up of information sources to allow better informed client / citizen choice implies:

- Greater flexibility and variance in the way solutions are implemented locally (ie the emphasis from the centre will increasingly be on outcomes rather than process);

- Fewer cost barriers to entry (expensive security options such as GSI will remain a part of, but cannot be the only way of, gaining deep connectivity across Government services and information);

- Greater emphasis on applications and information services which meet a defined need, and less on heavyweight infrastructure.

The challenges to existing programme management mechanisms are evident:

- The ‘single line of sight’ on which so many of today’s control and reporting processes are predicated will not be possible;

Command structures based on an implicit hierarchy will need to be supplemented, and in many instances replaced by, collaboration frameworks built on more explicit recognition of participants’ different agendas, constraints and success criteria.

The successful programme manager in this new age will have skills geared towards alliance and relationship building, not just driving milestones in a plan; the technology manager will have skills centred on pragmatic ‘good enough’ solutions using proven and available components not just implementing a ring fenced elegant architecture; the procurement manager will seek partners whose comparative performance can be measured on the ground rather than in a price schedule.

These skills exist in Government; but not in large numbers and in many instances they are disadvantaged by existing selection, appraisal and reward mechanisms (both formal and informal) which continue to value the ‘strong deliverer’ over the ‘collegiate enabler’; the individual over the team.

We see a significant risk here: attempting to use traditional command and control techniques to initiatives which by their nature need to be flexible and engaging is likely to lead to very significant problems.

In a number of areas the challenge remains the same.

Notwithstanding the novel features of the IT landscape in future, some of the underlying causes of failure in the old model will continue to be relevant. The fact that successive reviews have drawn similar conclusions about the causes of failures despite several years’ worth of investments in processes and skills training suggests that real underlying causes have not been fully analysed and addressed. We believe there are a range of alternative factors which, if misunderstood or incorrectly managed, can lead to failure. These are not easily discussable and that in itself lies at the heart of the problem. They include:

1. Project duration can exceed Ministerial and senior management tenure.

2. The adoption of big, high-risk, projects is incentivised by Departmental behaviours and norms (much kudos attaches to the large project) but execution is not so incentivised (competing priorities ensure that incentives are not aligned within a Department). More generally, there are no consistent rules of engagement between all participants in the delivery chain for a programme. Processes assume a commonality of interest which does not and cannot exist and although initiatives such as the Joint Statement of Intent have attempted to address part of this problem, it remains an issue.

3. Expectations are mismanaged from the outset because both Ministers and Civil Servants have become inured to a gap between presentation and reality.

4. Informed challenge is, in practice, neither welcomed nor acted upon.

5. Projects are required to make estimates, and contractors to offer prices, over timescales and uncertainties which are beyond the capability of current estimating tools and processes.

6. Aspiration is allowed to trump experience.

7. Inadequate use is made of data to underpin initial analysis. Customer behaviour in particular is poorly understood, whether it be about what is important in choice terms (in permissive regimes), or about differentiating between effective deterrence and detection (in compliance regimes).

Established policies carry momentum long after they have become overtaken by new circumstances and can therefore serve to inhibit effective action in a changed environment. (The great weight of current Government IT thinking is based on concepts of centralisation, standardisation, integration and economies of scale. These tend to be accepted as self-evidently good things, but they have not necessarily delivered what was expected of them, nor will all of them translate into the new age without some modification).

What stands out is that IT itself is rarely the issue. Many problems implant before any IT programme is underway. The challenge for the future is to ensure that programmes from the outset attempt to do the right things; at achievable scale and, critically, meet with customer expectations. In our experience, every large scale project which runs into difficulty knows, well before failure occurs, that excessive risks are being taken. One of the characteristics which distinguishes those projects which manage to stage a recovery from those which run into the sand is the willingness of the wider management environment to make the problems discussable so as to define the problem accurately, and the ability to inject the right skills into the mix so as to construct effective solutions. Indeed numerous examples exist where poorly performing programmes that exhibit all the characteristics detailed above have been recovered when properly skilled individuals or teams have been brought in to rescue them. (This is consistent with the recommendation in Martha Lane Fox’s report on DirectGov that SWAT teams be used to support and challenge departmental teams.)

We believe that these factors are endemic across the public sector and it is supplier base. A failure to understand these factors and how they can be addressed will almost certainly ensure that future IT programmes, no matter what governance arrangements are used, will fail to deliver the benefits needed within reasonable timescales and affordable costs.

Summary

The nature of the coming challenge means that existing approaches to the definition and delivery of change through projects and programmes will need extensive modification. In particular, greater emphasis will be required on team-based constructs (real and virtual), explicitly providing skill mixes which are designed to encourage collaborative working at all stages of the lifecycle, and bringing to bear:

- an understanding of government and its workings

- the capacity, credibility and willingness to inject real rigour at the formative stage of programmes

- the discipline to articulate clear outcomes

- the ability to calibrate risk and willingness to take balanced decisions

- understanding of the potential and shortcomings of technology

- relationship and alliance building

- an experienced insight into the factors influencing success and failure in public sector IT

- a willingness to embrace the recommendation in Martha Lane Fox’s re port on DirectGov to exploit the Internet to shift the lead in the design of services from policy and legal teams to the end users.

- a systematic approach to project review and applying lessons in real time. OGC reviews, properly applied, were a potent weapon which seem to have been abandoned.

numerous examples exist where poorly performing programmes that exhibit all the characteristics detailed above have been recovered when properly skilled individuals or teams have been brought in to rescue them.

May 2011