ISSUE 2

Central IT Coordinating Agengies

	Environmental Drivers
	Technology Development
	Reaction to Drivers
	An Analysis of Roles
	A Country Experience

Understanding where we are on the socio-economic/political road-map leads us to an appreciation of what constitutes appropriate policy in our various areas of endeavour. For policy is encapsulated in a given time-frame; political and managerial skill lies in recognising when the environment has evolved sufficiently to call into question the existing order; when to dismantle established parameters and when to set up new ones.

A number of unfolding scenarios provide the backdrop to the development of IT policy and co-ordination in Government. In many countries, the emergence of market economies is accompanied by the globalisation of trade. Increasingly, countries have to strategise and act as a corporate business entity to maintain and improve their relative position in the competition between nations. As a consequence, the machinery of Government needs to provide an efficient environment for enterprise to operate and to interact with both local and external agencies. The whole range of institutional endeavour - governmental, NGO, educational institutions, et cetera – is caught up in an intensified dialogue driven by pressures for development and enabled by advances in Information and Communication Technologies.

Within the confines of Public Administration, social and fiscal measures are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex to administer. Other pressures result from political commitments to administrative reform, to do more with less, to cope with budget strictures and to meet the increasing aspirations of society. These aspirations manifest themselves in various forms, such as the demand for value for money, service-levels, citizen-charters and one-stop service points, implying an increasing integration of systems, procedures and data. Increasingly, citizens are demanding a single-window approach to interacting with Government and a bigger say in shaping the new order. And last but not least, a number of countries have articulated, within their national IT strategies, the need to harness all human resources in the collective national effort, including persons with disabilities. A maturing social conscience compels Governments - often the largest employer - to lead by example in such instances. And they are wise to do so; for there is a convergence of needs between the disabled and the aging (who constitute an increasing proportion of our populations).

This broad review of the environmental factors influencing IT policy in government would not be complete without at least a cursory look at developments within the IT sector itself.

Government computing throughout the sixties – and perhaps even the seventies – faithfully mimicked the procedures that had been overlaid by successive administrations over decades. These in turn, were a reflection of the established organisation structures and hierarchies, when interaction was essentially top-down. Third generation computing served to uphold all this, meeting the primary management concern which was procedural efficiency, coping with volume. Departmental boundaries were strengthened.

On-line computing began to change all that. The manual records that co-existed with centralised batch-computer systems began to disappear. More significantly, "distributed computing" emerged and the notion of information scattered in various departments being accessed by others who had a need and a right to know. At about the same time, the concept of information as a primary resource led to the growth of data-sharing and information-management. This treated data as a corporate resource, with the attendant need to eliminate redundancy and thus improve integrity. Methodologies have evolved for data and systems analysis, leading to computer applications that can better stand the test of time as Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) takes root and as advances in network and database technology enable the sharing of data across departments. New technologies have emerged such as intranets, workflow systems, e-mail, PC tools to manipulate corporate data and multimedia. As a result of these developments, it has become technically possible to think in terms of inter-agency and intra-agency sharing of data as well as an integration of services.

As a result of the socio-economic drivers and the technology-push outlined above, public sector agencies have tended to focus increasingly on core activities. Non-core activities are being outsourced, privatised or abolished altogether. We are seeing more delegation of authority and less concern with control; but more with monitoring performance objectives or results.

Central IT agencies too are impacted by these pressures and reacting similarly. Over time, "Big Brother" agencies and monopolistic service-provision lose credibility. There is less concern with the supply and management of the technology and more with co-ordination, facilitation and education at the policy level. Most important is the contexting of IT in the change process. This entails a more complex change-management; the level of intervention may be lower, but the scope is now wider.

In two recent surveys carried out amongst 22 and 33 countries respectively (available in full from COMNET-IT) a detailed analysis of the extent to which IT agencies may be guiding, rather than controlling, IT policy was explored. The results must be tempered with the state of management and IT policy maturity in the selected countries. The countries surveyed are largely western European countries, North American, Australia and a few far eastern states (such as Japan, Malaysia and South Korea). An implication drawn is whilst it may be perfectly acceptable to have strong central control and direction in the "blue-print setting" phase, policies are only valid in a given time-frame and maturity context. The road-map indicated by similar agencies is one towards commonly-perceived corporate objectives or interests; hence a more voluntary upholding of standards, guidelines and collaboration. As usual, there is no fixed formula.

Interestingly, there was a high degree of consensus on what constitutes appropriate functions for central IT agencies. These include involvement in:

A brief review of the experiences in the strategic adoption of IT within the Government of Malta follows for the period 1990 to early 1999.

In common with other countries, public service reform became an important issue towards the end of the eighties. Along with the setting up of a Public Service Reform Commission and an Operations Review of Government, a Strategic Plan for Information Systems was developed and endorsed by Cabinet in 1990. These developments led to the setting up of an agency to promote and facilitate reform, the Management Systems Unit (MSU). This was constituted as a government-owned company to give it the flexibility to act expeditiously and to retain staff on contract at close to market rates. Given the quantum leap that was required in upgrading systems and services in a relatively short time, this was seen as a cost-effective alternative to private-sector consultants.

Responsibility for IT policy, co-ordination, acquisition and infrastructure-management was assigned to this new agency. Thus, a holistic approach would be secured, integrating IT into a total change-process that upheld BPR, financial-delegation (leading to increased accountability) and Human Resource (HR) policy review. Accompanying this change was the perceived need to introduce business planning and to educate ministries to take ownership of IT initiatives as an integral component of delivering their socio-economic programmes.

The relatively late start in IT turned out to be an advantage to some extent in that there was no significant burden of legacy systems and a standard infrastructure was therefore easier to implement. This in turn facilitated the objective of data-sharing across ministries and made for more effective use of scarce skills.

Significant milestone changes along the way have been:

• Moving away from a central IT-budget (expended with MSU authority) to devolved Ministry budgets (after 6 years); initially, MSU held a monopoly even at this stage but, since recently, Ministries are free to seek alternatives; a "defacto" monopoly exists for the moment;
• Non-IT consultancy has been internalised within the Prime Ministry; low-level local operations (not the Government network management) have also been decentralised or may be contracted;
• A Central Information Management Unit has been set up for the development of policies designed to maximise data-sharing, Ministry information management, the adoption of standards, value for money audits and the promotion of Government on-line initiatives.

Some significant lessons have been learnt, and these include the following:

• A high-level, political commitment is crucial, if only to secure for IT an adequate proportion of the annual budget
• Long-term strategic development needs to be balanced by short-term gains
• Cheaper and wider availability of technology means more promotion and co-ordination, not control
• Technical standards sometimes need to be tempered by sectoral business needs
• Customers need to be protected from technical staff whose priorities will differ from the end user's
• Technicians can be conservative; tact is required to get skilled technicians to address new solutions
• Ministry planning, project ownership and support services do not keep pace with the relatively easier IT delivery
• HR and financial reform, as well as BPR, lag behind; this often invalidates original value for money objectives.
• IT budgets are part of the programme budget and should be approved against specific service-level improvements.