Every once in a while a news item emerges that comments, in one way or another, on the perennial issue of failure and cost in big public sector IT procurement projects. I will, as the occasion demands, trot out my standard explanations as to why this will continue to happen. Well the season is upon us again today with another such report appearing this time it being “IT giants ‘ripping off Whitehall’, say MPs”
Well I thought I would reflect on a couple of ways that Social Media mindset would help address some of the issues.
Let’s revisit some of the common problems.
Specification
Often specifications are generated through either top down processes, using procedures or manuals to define requirements, or the application of what I would call the binary capture method – that is to say the requirements capture process relies on the use cases resolving around one single approved method of doing things. This simply won’t work in a Social Media world! Apart from being bound to a Taylorist management model that treats folks like machines, it is dictated by the rigidity of the product sets generally deployed. We have touched in this blog in the past how social media tools are very tolerant of ambiguity, are narrative based and emergent. As such they are the most magnificent mechanisms for rich, meaningful specification capture. This is then an opportunity to get the functional requirement closer to need but it is challenged by the ongoing issues of problem number two which is …….
Product set
Many of the usual suspects (by this I mean the typical consultancy groups who vie for the business of IT delivery to public sector bodies) are wedded to big vendor product sets. Why is this a problem? Well the “solutions” they specify are often very rigid, because you will have a big deployment that is trying to be all things to all men/women and is in fact not leader in the field of any of the functional pieces. Similarly big deployment rely on being in place for a long time to see a return and of course the deployment takes so long the “solution” will not keep pace with technology, business and behavioural change so by the time the project is delivered the product set is out of date and doesn’t do what is needed any more.
So what different about the soil media mindset approach? Well it is founded in constant change and development. Tools change and evolve all the time. People pick and chose to find what suits them. There is close relationship to an environment of open api’s product integration, and building value from integrating diverse products and highly iterative development. By approaching a business need from the perspective that there are many ways to complete a process, and we all have our preferred way of doing it, and by adopting a mixed product set made up of smaller applications you get greater efficiency and more flexibility – and so quicker ROI. This, by the way, explains the picture with this post – it’s the old saying if the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.
Iteration
Ah yes iteration. Incremental progress is bound into the social media way – big Line of Business applications don’t like that model. Clunky periodic big hit upgrades are probably the worst way to enhance functionality in software – but it is the only way for the big systems.
Procurement
Leaving aside allegations of cartels and the idea that these organisations see public sector money as easy picking we have to ask why it is the usual suspects do it all? Simple – procurement in the public sector is a shambles with models that are designed to only let the usual suspects in. Blogged on this before in other places but what has it to do with Social media mindset – well quite a lot actually. We regularly talk about one of the key factors in the engagement model of Social Media is the concept of low barriers to entry and how actors see themselves in a different light as a result. We also talk about the tolerance of what I will loosely call the creative destruction model, that is to say the idea that organisations can quite legitimately have a shorter life span, are generally smaller and will partner with other in a much more collaborative way than would have been possible before.
We are increasingly seeing groups coalesce into cooperative vehicles to bid for larger pieces of work, and if the public sector procurement models were more tolerant of this and recognised if they want innovation (particularly in technology) they often need to look at very young firms then there would be a chance to find more flexible, innovative cost effective solutions, and not rely on the men in suits, heavy on process, hand in glove with corporate vendors.
I believe it is changing, gradually, but often the public sector is slowest to change or even recognise the opportunity. But I genuinely hope that with a bit more adoption of a social media mindset in this area we might stop reading about multi-million pound IT failures in the public sector. Well here’s hoping anyway.
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