June 2, 2013
Virtual Government--Yes or Nonsense
The author sees government as menu-driven, like a videogame, by a "rotating dial," where you choose whatever government suites you best.
In this world of virtual government, people are seen turning to private sector alternatives to get capabilities, customer service, and prices that are better than the government's--in some cases, this may actually work, like with private insurance.
However, this article goes beyond this notion to where government is not tied to the physical boundaries of the real world, but rather to virtual jurisdictions, citizenship, and even values held or abrogated.
While I agree that raising the bar on government is a good thing--expect more for less--and partnering with the private sector can make government more efficient, the idea of wholesale shopping government around is quite ludicrous:
- Will we hire mercenaries instead of having an armed forces?
- Will we rely solely on CEOs to conduct our diplomacy?
- Will justice be doled out by vigilantes?
- Will private inspectors alone regulate food, drug, and the financial system?
While compared to an iPad wheel for making service selections, Government is not the same as a library of songs or movies that one scrolls through to pick and choose what one likes and dislikes.
Like the old joke about the difference between family and friends...you can choose your friends, but you can't just choose your family!
While government can provide services virtually, it cannot be a government entirely sliced up by choice--where you opt-in for what you like and opt-out for what you don't--if that were the case, we would all selfishly take and never contribute to the greater good.
For example, "Hey, I like social entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, but I don't particularly care for contributing to space exploration or research and development for certain diseases that I may not be genetically predisposed to."
There is a civic commons where we must share--the prime example is a fire department. If I choose not to contribute, then the fire department still has to come to put out the fire or else it can spread to others.
In the end, we are not just a collective of individuals, but a nation bound together by core values and beliefs, and shared interests and investments in the future--and where by sharing the risks and burdens, we fall or rise together.
Like anything that you are seriously apart of--family, religion, organizations, and work--we take the good and work on the bad, rather than just immaturely throwing it all or in innumerable parts away.
Yes, government should only do functions that are inherently governmental, and we should avail ourselves of all the talent and expertise in the private sector for the rest, but no, we should not wholly think that we can replace government with loose and shifting ties on the Internet and purely profit-driven private sector players.
If Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda serving as modern virtual governments are the best examples of what can be accomplished, then we should all be running (not walking) to good 'ol Democracy of the U.S. of A.
Virtual government as a way to provision services as well as competition and augmentation by the private sector is great, but becoming a stateless state will not solve the large and complex problems we must face, not alone, but together.
Even though bureaucratic waste and abuse is bad, the system of debate, negotiation, checks and balances, basic human rights, and voting is good, and we should not just throw out the precious baby with the dirty bathwater. ;-)
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
March 17, 2013
Is Bureaucracy Just Another Word For Governance?
The authors argue that bureaucratic rules and regulations serve important purposes in that while "less good stuff gets done--but it also puts a check on the kinds of initiatives that can lead to catastrophe."
And they give numerous examples of industries that perform sensitive functions that you would want to actually take some extra time to make sure they get it right.
A vary basic example given was the company Graco that makes infant car seat and strollers; they have five design phases and hundreds of tests that add up to two years to product development, but who would rationally argue against such quality controls processes to protect our children.
They make another good point, we always here about bureaucracy slowing the innovation and product development down, but what about the "bad ideas that were quashed as a result of the same rules?"
We all rail against having to jump through hoops to get things done and rightfully so. The mission is important, time is of the essence, and resources are limited--last thing anyone wants is to be told you have x process that must be followed, y gates to get through, z signatures to obtain--and that's just for the routine stuff! :-)
But as much as we hate to be slowed down to cross the t's and dot the i's, often that's just what we really need--to make sure we don't do anything half-a*sed, stupid, or jut plain reckless.
One mistake in an operational environment can bring things to a standstill for thousands, in a system it can have a dominos effect taking down others, and in product development it can bring deadly consequences to consumers, and so on.
So putting up some "bureaucratic" hurdles that ensure good governance may be well worth its weight in gold.
Frankly, I don't like the word bureaucracy because to me it means senseless rules and regulations, but good governance is not that.
We need to stop and think about what we are doing--sometimes even long and hard and this is difficult in a fast-paced market--but like a race car taking the turn too fast that ends up in a fiery heap--stopped not by their steady pacing, but by the retaining wall protecting the crowds from their folly.
One other thing the author state that I liked was their pointing out the government which is involved in so many life and death matters needs to maintain some heightened-level of governance (I'll use my word), to get the food supplies safe and the terrorists out.
From clear requirements to careful test plans, we need to ensure we know what we are doing and that it will work.
At the same time, showing up after the party is over serves no purpose.
Like all things in an adult world, balance is critical to achieving anything real. ;-)
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Is Bureaucracy Just Another Word For Governance?
March 26, 2012
Who Are The Kids And Who The Adults
This video is hilarious as the little girl acts out what we look and sound like at work.
She is actually so good, I think she would qualify for many of the postings today at USAJOBS. :-)
Perhaps, we all need to be ourselves again at work, rather than cliche and acronym robots.
Then we could actually get some real work done, at least when we aren't busy acting like children!
Enjoy and laugh a little.
Who Are The Kids And Who The Adults
July 30, 2011
Federal Register On Steroids
Federal Register On Steroids
April 25, 2011
Turning IT From Frenemy to Friend
Fast Company (December 2008) describes Frenemies as a "thrilling intricate dance" of friend-enemy relationships.
Turning IT From Frenemy to Friend
February 28, 2010
Are Feds Less Creative?
Contrary to the stereotype, in my observation government employees are just as creative as those in the private sector. The reason they may not seem this way is that they typically think very long and hard about the consequences of any proposed change.
Once an agency has tentatively decided on a course of action, it still takes some time to “go to market” with new ideas, for a few (to my mind) solid reasons:
- We are motivated by public service. One of the key elements of that is our national security and so we must balance change with maintaining stability, order, and safety for our citizens. In contrast, the motivation in the private sector is financial, and that is why companies are willing to take greater risks and move more quickly. If they don’t they will be out of business, period.
- We have many diverse stakeholders and we encourage them to provide their perspectives with us. We engage in significant deliberation based on their input to balance their needs against each other. In the private sector, that kind of deliberation is not always required or even necessarily even desired because the marketplace demands speed.
The fact that process is so critical in government explains why IT disciplines such as enterprise architecture planning and governance are so important to enabling innovation. These frameworks enable a process-driven bureaucracy to actually look at what’s possible and come up with ways to get there, versus just resting on our laurels and maintaining the “perpetual status quo.”
Aside from individual employees, there are a number of organizational factors to consider in terms of government innovation:
- Sheer size—you’re not turning around a canoe, you’re turning around an aircraft carrier.
- Culture—a preference for being “safe rather than sorry” because if you make a mistake, it can be disastrous to millions of people—in terms of life, liberty, and property. The risk equation is vastly different.
Although it may sometimes seem like government is moving slowly, in reality we are moving forward all the time in terms of ideation, innovation, and modernization. As an example, the role of the CTO in government is all about discovering innovative ways to perform the mission.
Some other prominent examples of this forward momentum are currently underway—social media, cloud computing, mobility solutions, green computing, and more.
Here are three things we can do to be more innovative:
- From the people perspective, we need to move from being silo based to enterprise based (or what some people called Enterprise 2.0). We need to change a culture from where information is power and currency and where people hoard it, to where we share information freely and openly. And this is what the Open Government Directive is all about. The idea is that when we share, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
- In terms of process, we need to move from a culture of day-to-day tactical firefighting, to more strategic formulation and execution. Instead of short-term results, we need to focus on intermediate and long-term outcomes for the organization. If we’re so caught up in the issue of the day, then we’ll never get there.
- And from a technology perspective, we need to continue to move increasingly toward digital-based solutions versus paper. That means that we embrace technologies to get our information online, shared, and accessible.
Innovation is something that we all must embrace—particularly in the public sector, where the implications of positive change are so vast. Thankfully, we have a system of checks and balances in our government that can help to guide us along the way.
Note: I’ll be talking about innovation this week in D.C. at Meritalk’s “Innovation Nation 2010” – the “Edge Warriors” panel.
Are Feds Less Creative?
February 12, 2010
The Do It Yourself Future
Technology is the great emancipator. With it we can do things ourselves that we needed others to do for us before.
Of course, the examples are endless. As we approach tax season, just think how many people do their own taxes online with TurboTax or other online programs when before they needed an accountant to do it for them. Similarly, it was common to have secretaries supporting various office tasks and now we pretty much have all become our own desktop publishers and office productivity mavens. I remember having a graphics department years ago for creating presentations and a research department for investigating issues, events, people, and causes, now with all the productivity tools and the Internet, it’s all at our fingertips.
Wired Magazine, February 2010 in an article called “Atoms Are The New Bits” by Chris Anderson states that “the Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of participation and participants in everything digital.”
With technology, we are free to help ourselves. We are independent, self-sufficient, and that’s typically how we like it. And not only are we able to do for ourselves, but the barriers to entrance for entrepreneurs and small companies have come way down.
The author states: “In the age of democratized industry, every garage is a potential micro-factory, every citizen a potential entrepreneur.” Similarly, Cory Doctorow wrote in The Makers that “The days of General Electric, and General Mills, and General Motors are over. The money on the table…can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.”
We all know how Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, working out of a garage building computers, started Apple. Similarly, how Michael Dell started operations out of his dorm room. Nowadays, we see more and more people going out on their own as contract workers and as teleworkers, not tied to particular companies or work locations. They have been freed by technology to work for whom they want and where they want.
At the extreme and in certain cases, there is a perception that “working with a company often imposes higher transaction costs then running a project online…Companies are full of bureaucracy, procedures, and approval processes, a structure designed to defend the integrity of the organization...[instead] the new industrial organizational model [is] built around small pieces loosely joined. Companies are small virtual, and informal. Most participants are not employees. They form and re-form on the fly driven by ability and need rather than affiliation and obligation.”
While I do not believe that companies will be disadvantaged for large and complex projects like building a bridge or designing a new commercial airline, there is no doubt that technology is changing not only what we can do ourselves, but also how and when we associate ourselves with others. We can do work for ourselves or for others practically on the fly. We can communicate immediately and over long distances with ease. We can form relationships on social networks for specific tasks or as desired and then reorient for the next. There is a new flexibility brought about by a do it yourself culture facilitated with simple, affordable, and readily available technology, and this DIY phenomenon is only going to increase and accelerate as the technology advances further and further.
Some important implications are as follows:
- One, we need to constantly look for cost-savings in the organization and at home from the new technologies that we are bringing online enabling us to do more ourselves—there are cost offsets for the support we needed before and no longer require.
- Secondly, we need to encourage our employees to take advantage of the new technologies, to learn them, and use them to their utmost and not to fear them.
- Thirdly, the next generation of workers is going to demand more flexibility, empowerment, and continued work-life balance based on their increasing ability to go it alone, if necessary.
- Finally, new technologies that are user-centric—easy to use and useful—will outperform technologies that are overly complex and not intuitive; the new normal is do it yourself and technologies that don’t simply enable that will be finished.
The Do It Yourself Future
January 22, 2010
Checklists: Safety Nets or Strangleholds
Many functions in government are guided, if not driven by checklists. For example, federal information technology management has many checklists for enterprise architecture reviews, capital planning and investment control, IT acquisition reviews, configuration management, systems development life cycle, IT security (FISMA), Privacy, Section 508, and more.
One of the frequent criticisms is that these functions are just compliance-based and are not focused on the real-world task at hand—whether it be planning, governing, executing, servicing, securing, and so on. For example, many have said that FISMA needs to be amended, because our IT security staffs are so busy with their compliance checklists and reports that they are not adequately focused on strategically or operationally securing the enterprise from attack. Similarly, EA review boards have been criticized for being an almost thoughtless checklist of architecture alignment to the FEA and not of real planning value.
Yet, inherently we know that checklists are valuable and that is why they have been so heavily mandated and incorporated into our processes. Without the checklists, we know from past experiences with failed IT projects, poor IT investment decisions, and security issues that many of these could have been prevented if only we had thought to ask the right questions, and so these questions got codified—and we learned from some of our mistakes.
With regard to this, there was a fascinating book review in the Wall Street Journal on a book called “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande.
The author:
Mr. Gawande makes the case that checklists, plain and simple, save lives and we need them. He cites examples of “how stupid mistakes in surgery can be largely eliminated through pre-operative checklists” and how “checklists first became the norm in aviation, where pilots found that minor oversights in sophisticated planes led to tragic crashes.”
Overall, the book’s author maintains that “checklists seem to be able to defend everyone, even the experienced against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws.”
The reviewer:
The reviewer points out the important flip side to checklists as follows: “Bureaucracy is nothing but checklists. That’s part of what’s wrong with government—officials go through the day with their heads in a rulebook, dutifully complying with whatever the lists require instead of thinking about what makes sense.”
The reviewer makes the point that someone in authority needs to use judgment and that means: “relying on individual creativity and improvisation—the opposite of a checklist.”
The review goes on to then try and address the seeming contradiction between the need and value of checklists and the stifling effect that it can have by pointing out that “The utility of formal protocols [i.e. checklists, standard operating procedures (SOPs), etc.] varies with the nature of the activity—some activities are highly systematized, like engineering and other dependent on the judgment and personality of the individual. Spontaneity and imagination are important in many jobs.”
So there you have it—checklists—are helpful in defined, routine, almost mechanized areas where we can identify and itemize the necessary tasks, they are common to its performance, and they are proven to help avoid frequent oversights and mistakes. But where agility and innovation is called for, checklists can lead to either bureaucracy and/or missing the mark in getting the job done.
So are checklists helpful or hurtful with technology?
On one hand, technology is a fast-changing, innovative field that drives organizational transformation and thus it cannot primarily be a checklist function. Technology requires visionary leaders, talented managers, and customer-driven staffs. There isn’t a checklist in the world can inspire people, build meaningful customer relationships, and solve evolving, large and complex business problems.
On the other hand, there are common IT operational functions that need to get done and well-known pitfalls, and for these areas checklists can help us not make the same dumb mistakes again and again. For example, we can check that we are not making redundant IT investments. We can verify that appropriate accessibility for the handicapped has been provided for. We can safeguard people’s privacy with appropriate assessments.
The place for checklists in IT is pretty clear:
· STRANGLEHOLDS—Checklists cannot be a stranglehold on our business performance. They are not a substitute for thinking and doing. They cannot replace dedicated, talented, hardworking people addressing challenging and evolving business requirements with new and improved processes and technologies.
· SAFETY NETS—Checklists are safety nets. They are codified best practices and lessons learned that help us in not making routine, yet costly mistakes again.
Checklists: Safety Nets or Strangleholds
September 6, 2009
Is there an IT leader in the House?
Is there an IT leader in the House?
August 10, 2007
Bureaucracy and Its Impact on EA (and vice versa!)
Bureaucracy in organizations is an outgrowth of its being viewed, designed, and operated as a machine. The great sociologist, Max Weber, noted that modern organizations, that run like machines, tend to be very bureaucratic in nature, with strict hierarchies and structures. Frederick Taylor’s Time and Motion Studies advanced the mechanistic view of the organization and the production line mentality of the workplace, by promoting the division of labor and the highly monotonous, standardized work routines of laborers.
In bureaucratic enterprises, issues do not get addressed and resolved at the lowest levels where they are first encountered and can be handled most efficiently by those with subject matter expertise. Instead they get pushed up the chain of command, where ingrained organizational silos, competing interests, and empire building hamper an effective response. In frustration, management throws their hands up and assigns the issues to working groups or task forces or consultants who are assigned to try and deal with change. But these “outside groups” too, even if they can grasp the complexity of the issues, cannot effectively resolve them due to the barriers to organizational change that exist in the organization.
Despite the best intentions of all, bureaucracy is typical in large businesses and in government as well.
In user-centric EA, the impact of mechanistic organizations and bureaucracy is recognized as an impediment to change and growth of the enterprise, the ability of the organization to meet its full operating potential, and the valuation of its people as its greatest asset. EA is dedicated though to unleashing human capability and building a better organization for the future.
How does EA do this? By capturing and analyzing the as-is environment, and formulating a to-be environment and transition plan, EA not only shows the organization where its gaps, redundancies and inefficiencies are, but also facilitates a proactive solution to resolving them.
By envisioning what could be, rather than just what is, EA challenges the status quo (even a highly mechanistic one) and continues to chip away at it, slowly but surely—working to eliminate stovepipes, build integration, interoperability, information sharing, and an open environment where people can innovate, create, and truly contribute to its success.
Bureaucracy and Its Impact on EA (and vice versa!)