TroubleShooter » Perspective

Cost of Government IT is a smoke-screen

Colin Beveridge — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:46:41 +0000

Media flurry about Government IT is simply an unhelpful smokescreen, the focus on high unit costs and poor procurement disguises fundamental issues: policy and lack of effective systems strategy.

The cost of Government IT is not just about poor procurement, or even poor in-house IT skills (which I dispute).

In my view, the fundamental problem is twofold.Firstly there is an outdated focus on IT; secondly political policy is intrinsically dynamic and this characteristic is frustrated by the lack of a proper Systems strategy for effective policy implementation.

Until these two factors are addressed, the Cinderella of Government IT will always be accompanied by two ugly sisters: unexpected cost and disappointment.

The Public Accounts Committee of the UK Parliament has recently drawn attention to the sorry state of Government IT. This is long overdue awareness, for those of us who have been shouting about the issues for many, many years.

The Trillion Dollar Bonfire burns unabated – and occasionally a few wisps of smoke cloud the media horizon!

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Shotgun Wedding strategy for Government IT

Colin Beveridge — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 11:19:12 +0000

According to Tony Collins, the UK Government CIO Council will be asked, by the Cabinet Office, to approve an interim ICT strategy that looks fundamentally flawed before the ink is dry: a shotgun wedding strategy.

Tony’s article sets out a new IT supplier strategy, based on flexible very short term contracts designed to give public sector CIOs the option of changing suppliers at the drop of a hat.

I look forward to seeing more details of the strategy. However, my initial reaction to the description in Tony’s article, is that there are serious flaws associated with the concept of letting short-term/ instant monthly contracts on a per user/month basis.

This would be fundamentally flawed because of the practical issues of chopping and changing services, with large volumes of data involved, let alone any contingent security concerns.

But we must realise that there would be substantial cost and unnecessary risk involved in such flipping.

Of course, the idea of switching suppliers for poor service is attractive but some performance issues do need time to resolve and the potential discontinuity of service would open the door to diminished accountability when problems arise, possibly on both sides.

It always takes two to tango so I am very concerned that this new Government strategy does not reflect the necessary bi-lateral commitment to mutually beneficial outcomes. The threat of losing a contract within weeks is not conducive to effective resourcing of essential IT services by the providers.

I am not endorsing poor service, or long lock-ins either. But taxpayers and IT pros deserve better and properly joined-up-management, especially in straitened times like these.

Working with a gun against your head is not a recipé for effective partnership.

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TroubleShooter Case Study – Santa goes online

Colin Beveridge — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:40:34 +0000

Troubleshooting assignments are quite often fairly hush-hush but there are some that I don’t talk about because nobody would believe me if I did. For example, Santa’s ERP implementation.

Everyone here at the North Pole is very, very excited by this and we confidently expect to be handling most “Dear Father Christmas” mail online by 2015. The Venture Capitalists are all over this one like a bad rash.

Forget FaceBook and Twitter, this one will be really humungous.

Sure we have had some teething problems. You would expect it with any major implementation. Apparently the ERP system wasn’t designed for five hundred million transactions for a single night and even minor upgrades are a nightmare.

That’s the trouble when you go 24×7 – no maintenance window you see – in the old days, with the manual system, we could always catch up with the paperwork in January and February. These days it just has to be done in real time.

Which is probably why Santa’s last performance review was a bit dicey, because some of the institutional shareholders got wind of the e-business problems.

It’s amazing how many IT projects get clearer focus when the share price starts to be affected.

That’s where I came in – to make sure that everything would be “business as usual” on Christmas Eve. Thanks Santa.

Fair enough, we Interims do sell ourselves on our trouble-shooting skills so no time for whingeing; get on with the job, first task: assess the situation and prioritise the “must-do-nows.”

Easier said than done when you are trying to decide the relative importance of the GPS Reindeer Guidance System and the Order Entry Chimney Interface.

Now I’m a reasonable man, but I’d really like to get my hands on the salesman who sold the CRM system to Santa.

Our marketing elves have been tearing their hair out for the past nine months trying to update the Customer database. Apparently the system won’t accept “no longer believes” as a valid reason for losing a customer – so we just don’t know how to manage the customer update process for thousands and thousands of kids.

It doesn’t help either, if your customer is still expecting the full mince-pie and sherry treatment, when these days we can only deliver the “no-frills” (dump-it-and-go) service.

Thankfully, I got here just in time to stop the new website going live prematurely. It was supposed to be a “limited” pilot – just a few pages of html, nothing behind it, you know the sort of thing.

Too true, I know the sort of thing. The me-too dot com disaster sort of thing.

It’s all very well being all gung-ho about e-business but it takes more than a few fancy web pages to make a business.

If traditional retailing is all about location, location, location; e-business is all about fulfilment, fulfilment, fulfilment – we ignore this rule at our peril.

Yes, it is easy to get “something” up and running on the web very quickly these days. But if you haven’t got rock-solid fulfilment processes in place, you are going to repent at leisure as your business fails.

Unfortunately though, it’s not just the challenge of integrating our legacy and e-systems that’s keeping me awake at nights.

We have serious problems with the Data Protection people because it seems that every time some innocent in Europe sends us an e-mail, or tosses their Christmas wishlist up the chimney, we are deemed to be exporting personal data outside of the European Union.

This is a nightmare, as most of this data is unsolicited in the first place. I have tried to explain this to Brussels but they just don’t want to understand and there is no such thing as Safe Harbor in this neck of the tundra.

The internal inquiry into the leaking of millions of Christmas gift lists, by a disgruntled Elf DBA, has not helped our public relations at a sensitive time.

So, as Christmas Eve draws closer, my sleep becomes more and more restless… during the long winter nights I have desperately tried to remember the original head-hunter’s call…I could have sworn he said something about lapdancers, but I suppose it must have been Laplanders… Better get my hearing checked before I am dropped in it again.

Mind you every assignment has its lighter moments and this is no exception. On a clear day we can see Sarah Palin’s backyard from here and Santa always takes great comfort from the probability that more people believe in him…

Merry Christmas everyone and if you don’t get the presents you hope for, please don’t blame me. You should call our Customer Service Centre – it’s open 48 hours a day, just holler up the nearest chimney.

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Speaking out for joined-up-management

Colin Beveridge — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:57:52 +0000

This topic is all about ambition and opportunity. We often hear about ‘joined up thinking.’ But nobody seems to be doing anything about making sure that we have properly joined-up-management for a joined-up-world.

This was my theme for my plenary session at the ICTWM conference in November 2010 where I gave a quick insight into how this could be the biggest opportunity yet for IT.

You can see the recording of my presentation below.

In the interests of doing things differently, I used the Pecha Kucha approach to present 20 slides in 400 seconds:

My presentation is the ‘ice-breaker’ that sets out an alternative future for IT that could add significant value for ALL concerned: practitioners, providers and stakeholders alike.

Please use the form below if you would like to contact Colin Beveridge and discuss your opportunities for improving properly joined-up-management:

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