We all know that scope creep, lack of resources and change are the three greatest enemies of cost-effective IT development projects. In the commercial sector we move heaven and earth to avoid these risks – and yet they seem to be endemic to the management culture within public sector computing.
Whereas, for a start, in the private sector, the key business drivers for IT are all about sustaining and developing the profitability of the venture – so everything is geared towards balancing costs with benefits.
So, generally speaking new technology investment in the commercial world depends on the existence of a viable business case. Delivering the anticipated benefits is how we measure our success.
But when we look at the public sector situation, we find that the key drivers for IT are all about enabling policy initiatives – and, more often than not, “the policy initiatives” are subject to arbitrary change, or cancellation. Sometimes at very short notice, because Government policy, as opposed to legislation, is subject to the trials and tribulations of the Political world so what seems to be a very good Ministerial idea one year, may well become completely undesirable the next.
That’s the way that “democratic” politicians have to operate and the possible reason why so many public sector computing initiatives are inherently susceptible to failure from the outset.
And, of course, we are not just dealing with a single, mega-sized IT division – the problem is compounded many-fold by the existence of myriad Government departments, each with their own agenda and policies.
Is it any wonder then, that we get so many high profile public IT fiascos?
In fact, the more I look at this problem, the more that I feel that we are lucky to get any working IT at all from the public sector; given their highly complex organisations which are constantly pounded by unremitting tidal waves of Political policy.
And, it’s not going to get any better – unless we can persuade our Political masters to change their ways, radically, by applying the same rigour and quality of thought to their political strategy management, as their counterparts in industry.
At the moment, it seems like this fundamental problem is not properly recognised by the Government – they simply lay any fault firmly at the door of those poor souls tasked with implementing their polymorphic policies, without understanding their own contribution.
Instead of understanding that the complexity and cost of public sector computing are direct functions of the Political agenda, the only “solution” so far to rising IT costs has been to outsource more and more Government IT to third-party providers, in the hope that the cost of public sector computing can be contained, or reduced.
But what we really need is at least a root and branch overhaul of the structure of public sector IT so that it can handle the impact of policy change.
Or better still, to move beyond the IT-centric perspective and introduce properly joined-up-management for a joined-up-world.
Until we take these basic steps, I can’t think of a worse possible scenario for IT governance – we might just as well print Government IT Change Requests on pads made from Million Pound notes.
90% of this article was written and published in November 2002
You may also like to read:
Quite simply, Twitter is a great example of a genuinely emergent, multi-purposed System that has developed exponentially, due to the ingenuity of subscribers and regardless of the apparent absence of any coherent commercial strategy.
I began thinking about organizational scars when I saw a so-called 
