For many organizations, including government, digital business is moving from an innovative trend to a core competency. According to Gartner’s 2016 CIO Agenda Survey, which included responses from 2,944 CIOs worldwide, leveraging digital technologies to transform traditional operational and service models has risen to the top of the business agenda for many elected leaders and public officials.
However, the attention of CIOs in government remains more on the tactical, such as reducing costs and improving digital channels to citizens. In this sense, digital government is currently being deployed as an extension of earlier e-government initiatives, which largely preserved existing operational or service models. Simply put, digital transformation is still at the embryonic stage of maturity in government.
Government digital transformation is inevitable, yet nurturing this process is no easy feat. There is a high risk to CIOs of not being able to keep up with — or even centrally coordinate and manage — IT innovations. If IT budget pressures increase and shadow IT grows unchecked, this risk will compound over the next five years.
Think beyond systems and embrace platforms
Businesses and government agencies are looking less like fixed "systems" and more like platforms operating within an ecosystem that often extends beyond the organizational boundaries. In government, the system business model’s function is to deliver value isolated to the citizens within allocated jurisdictions, budgets and risk tolerance. In contrast, a platform provides the business with a foundation where resources can come together — sometimes very quickly and temporarily, sometimes in a relatively fixed way — to create value that may extend beyond budget and jurisdictional boundaries.
In 2009, Tim O'Reilly began promoting Gov 2.0 or government as a platform (GaaP). Attributes of GaaP — such as openness (software, data, standards and so on), transparency, collaboration, co-creation of value, the pervasive use algorithms and APIs, a shared digital infrastructure, and modular and interoperable components — are actively being integrated into government agency operation models in the U.K., the U.S. and Australia.
With GaaP, government CIOs can position strategic IT investments to meet immediate tactical needs, while directing digital change by transitioning away from insular business systems to more-open government platforms.
Create “dedicated fund” to address priorities and overcome budget barriers
Business intelligence and analytics, as well as cloud, continue to remain the top areas of new technology spending in government. Infrastructure and data center spending also remain high on the list. In terms of budgets, almost 40% of government CIOs indicate their IT program budgets are growing, and 44% report unchanged IT budgets. However, stable or increasing budgets don’t mean cost reduction has become any less of a priority: renewed turbulence in economies is creating pressure for IT to immediately reduce or optimize costs. Therefore, it is vital that government CIOs align all IT investments to support a formally approved digital strategy and to tightly correlate them to delivering business value.
To address technology priorities and overcome funding barriers, government CIOs can create a budget-neutral "digital venture capital fund," a dedicated fund that extends existing digital funding. As business leaders seek money for digital initiatives, they may receive allocations from the fund. Once the initiative yields results, the fund is reimbursed.
Build up bimodal capabilities and lead digital change
Bimodal has been misinterpreted by many as simply the introduction of agile tools and methodologies such as Scrum; but it is more than that. The defining characteristic of bimodal is that an organization has two different approaches to IT running in parallel: one suitable for more-predictable work including operations and traditional development (i.e. Mode 1), and the other for exploratory work (i.e. Mode 2).
In the e-government era, most organizations adequately managed IT in Mode 1, bringing public services online using the same inflexible procurement, governance and project management practices they had always used. As a consequence, business units began to steadily bypass IT, choosing to go directly to the market for the services and solutions they needed. As digital disruptions sweep across industries including the public sector, government CIOs need to quickly adopt bimodal practices such as crowdsourcing, working with startups or small or mid-size businesses (SMBs), multidisciplinary teams, agile methodologies, bimodal subcultures and adaptive sourcing.
As the IT and digital business worlds evolve, strong and clear leadership remains critical to ensuring success. With an often unmatched enterprise perspective of the organization and deep knowledge of the data that fuels it, government CIOs are well-positioned to bridge operational silos and make connections that individual line-of-business managers often miss. When combined with their understanding of digital technologies and the broader market transformations that these technologies are producing, government CIOs have the opportunity to extend their influence well beyond the "IT box" on the agency's organization chart.
Government CIOs must avoid the temptation to think of digitalizing the business in a cold, clinical and seemingly logical way. Becoming more digital actually represents a continuum of personal risk for the CIO, and business risk for the entire enterprise. It may involve stepping into the unknown in order to explore the possible and create new value. In the risk-averse world of government, agency leaders and CIOs must actively decide how courageous they are willing to be, how much risk they are willing to take, and how they can best manage the risk.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Rick Howard
Quelle/Source: Enterprise Innovation, 22.03.2016
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