2 days with Chris Potts – Good Bye to IT as we know it!

(Breaking down the wall around IT !)

This week I spent 2 exciting days at one of Chris Potts' seminars on Corporate (IT) Strategy.

It certainly was an eye-opener for me, having lived through all stages of IT since the 360 mainframe.

A few years ago when Enterprise Architecture became the hot topic, we all agreed, that one of the fundamental problems of this world was to align business and business strategy with IT and IT strategy – but all this is nonsense, according to Chris Potts. 'You shouldn't have an IT Budget' was one of initial remarks. But after 2 days I am convinced he's right and that this new approach leads to complete different and much more meaningful business decisions, investments and methods of managing complex portfolio of projects – including projects heavily relying on IT and technology.

However, Chris' point of view is completely different from Nicholas Carr's 'IT Doesn't Matter' kind of approach trying to persuade business managers to spend less on IT, to follow in stead of leading at the 'bleeding edge'. Chris' point is straight forward: As you cannot do anything business wise without deploying 'some' IT and some technology in it's broadest sense, than there is simply no reason in treating IT 'projects' and IT spending as if it is an animal of it's own. What is even worse is, that this tradition has been thriving on the 'IT specialists' that have kept the WE and THEM paradigm in what Chris Pott calls the second generation II era. Fueled by crisis and downturn, the 2. G people are 'cutting down on IT spending' instead of asking the obvious question: What Value do we get for it? Which are the key business investment areas we should be concentrating on and first at this point maybe wonder of technology could be deployed in these areas in a smarter way than to day.

So it is not about cost, it's about value. (Even accountants are beginning to admit this!) IT in itself creates no value – as if we didn't know it, the sinister implication is that the public sector's (IT) projects being launched these days are all being selected according to the strict EU tendering rules focusing on minimizing cost and securing 'delivery' – meaning fulfillment of a development/deployment contract at a specific point in time at a spefic cost – but where is the value of the project?

Chris' observation not only leads to the clear conclusion that the perceived outcome in terms of value of a project not only should be the guiding principle, but that the whole accounting process around project selection and project management is completely wrong:

Any project – and public sector projects in particular – should be selected according to their contribution to value – maybe cost reduction is one of them, but in that case total operational costs. Also transparency could be a very interesting value of a public project as could citizen participation and take-up of eGovernment projects. So the estimated impact on all essential types of value is absolutely meaningful, but ONLY if the project management is measured on how the value of the project is created AFTER it's fulfillment. We are deploying 2. generation project managers maybe skilled in PRINCE 2 to deliver 4. generation solutions deploying web 2.0 technologies and aiming at involving citizens – but we are not measuring it.

One of the latest scandals in Denmark is the project dealing with electronic bonds and real estate registration. According to CSC's project manager 'The IT project is a success – we have a service level of 99.5% availability and we have had that for months!' - but reality is that now it takes anything from 4 to 8 months to register a sale of a real estate. Again – the tendering rules selected the winner of the development project, but didn't in any way measure, secure or include the total costs of the process, let alone found it necessary to manage that real value was actually achieved.

(See this blog: (In Danish) http://it-bizzen.blogspot.com/2007/11/csc-forsinker-hurtig-tinglysning-it.html )

So Chris Potts lesson is that you need to go to the thirds generation thinking: focus on the value people are getting from projects involving IT and employ BUSINESS experts to ensure this – not nerds, npår technical people – not even 'Enterprise Architects' still stuck in the THEM/US thinking.

But Nirvana only comes if you forget IT completely – drop the idea of a specific IT budget, think in terms of business organization and embed the investment and management issues of IT in the proper context.

In summary: From Chris we learned how to make an overall Corporate strategy in one page – with a clear strategic objective, with max 10 basic principles and/our beliefs and max 10 core tactics.

I can clearly recommend this seminar and the thinking behind it to any 2. generation frustrated IT manager or to any forward thinking CEO. If you happen to be employed by the Public Sector, I have to warn you, though: Your politicians are all 2. G, the rules are from last century and the narrow budget thinking is killing many bright ideas. But if you don't try, we might face 'civil unrest' – when the new generations used to web 2.0 technologies demand a decent way of thinking what value the Government is really bringing to the table!

(See also http://www.aeaassociation.org/ )

6th Eastern European eGovernment Days - Transfer East

This event is a joint initiative led by the Austrian Forum eGovernment/OCG and EPMA CZ.
http://www.epma.cz/6-sup-th-sup-eastern-european-egov-days-2008-in-prague.html.

The purpose of the seminar was originally to help speed up the IT development in Government in the Eastern European countries. but after just 6 years it becomes rather obvious that some of the 'new' EU countries are doing quite well and some have in fact made astonishing progress in some of the key areas, where the 'old' Europe may be bound by a lot of silo-thinking.

The individual presentations can be found by downloading the program in PDF-format from above homepage.

The 'pre conference' delt with 2 key areas: Customer centric service provisioning and 'advanced eGovernment Information Service Bus'. A number of interesting projects were presented, and although it was relatively deep technically oriented, it focused on different aspects of solutions and cross-country collaboration.

One of the most interesting presentations during the plenary sessions, was the one made by David Broster from EU, Head of the eGovernment Unit, DG INFSO.

http://www.epma.cz/Docs/EEEGD08/Plenary_II_Broster.pdf

He is very much concerned, as I am by the implications of web 2.0 in Government, and he is similarly very much up-to-date on IBM's collaborative tools, which he intends to pilot in EU.

I have had the pleasure to participate for the last 3 years as a speaker, this time on the topic of web 2.0 as an new emerging tool for Government. Together with my assistant, Michael Hvass, we presented the paper, that can be found at http://www.epma.cz/Docs/EEEGD08/pragmhvasssdo2008.pdf

Michael is a student at the Danish IT University and has been working together with me on eGovernment since last autumn. He has just started on final Masters' Thesis.

We followed a number of the many presentations, and our joint conclusion was that to our great surprise, nobody really mentioned SOA as an issue or a solution. In stead almost any presentation mentioned 'interoperability', 'breaking down silos', 'need for standards'. And also several presentations referred to the EU initiativeto create a pan-european interoperability framework. Even if EU as such cannot dictate national initiatives, the DGINFSO and IDA are very much focused on how the EIF, as it is called, can be applied. Instead of talking about 'Enterprise Architecture' or SOA, the EIF can be seen as a totality, encompassing both the structural aspects including the organisation of tasks, plus the need to have a common understanding on terminology, semantic aspects, as well as the common syntax.

See http://europa.eu.int/idabc/3761

More and more examples on application of this framework will in our opinion after a while put a pressure on national standards as it will be impossible to work with 2 sets of interoperability standards, one for Pan European areas and one for national.

The main original purpose on the Eastern European eGovernment Seminar, to transfer best applications from West to East is in fact an initiative led by the Danish Technology Institute. They have given out recently a handbook on G2B Practice Handbook: http://www.transfereast.net/

A relatively small number of advanced applications have been recommended as suitable to transfer; and I must say that during my 38 years in Government and eGovernment, I have only seen extremely few examples on succesful export of eGov applications - The Danish Central Persons Register was such an application 20 years ago. and if you look at the Technology Insitute's booklet, it is generic things like Digital Signature, the UK Knowledge Network , The Norwegian Bronnoysund register solution ALTINN (Everything In) - a joint forms entry and archiving solution (now under complete revamping), the Danish DOIP - eprocurement Marketplace, that really had a touch time getting off the ground as a market place, and then one of the only truly pan-european solutions, ETHICS - Electronic Tender Handling, Information and Communication Systems solution. ETHICS was originally developed in a cooperation between the IBM Business Partner Innovasion http://www.innovasion.dk/ and SKI, the Dansih public tendering organisation, but now ETHICS is owned 100% by Innovasion and IBM has a global marketing agreement with them. This has resulted in a lot of interest, and ETHICS is now covering all of Slovakia's public tebndering for central Government. http://www.epractice.eu/cases/ethics

So it will be exciting to see if this sucess now spreads to the neighbouring countries, Hungary, Czech republic, Austria, as the eeegiv seminar and the Danish Technology Institute is doing a great job of marketing our flagship procurement solution.