Thursday, October 10, 2013

The road to public sector IT hell may not be paved with intentions at all

Something that scares me enormously is the house of cards that many (if not most) governments have built with their IT systems.

It can be witnessed every time government agencies get 'MOGed' - Machinery of Government changes where parts of agencies are shifted to other agencies to meet the latest political whim.

In these cases it's not simply a matter of moving tens, hundreds or even thousands of public servants to new offices - in fact in many cases they may not move at all - it is about extracting them from the secure environment, software and network systems of one agency and connecting them (including all their historical records, emails and files) to the network and software of another.

This is a hugely complex and increasingly expensive exercise that can have an enormous productivity and cost hit each time it occurs.

Why is it complex and expensive? Because every agency uses different systems - or different versions of systems - and agencies are now so wedded to these systems after a purchase decision many years earlier that, even though senior bureaucrats recognise the issue, they can not address it without a complete (expensive and time-consuming) overhaul of how government runs its information technology.

Another example is eTax. While I have a great deal of praise for eTax, and it has been very successful by most measures, when the system was originally procured and built it was done in such a way that limited it to the IBM-PC platform. Certainly no-one can blame the ATO for not foreseeing the rise of Apple or the arrival of smartphones and tablets - however the decisions made at the time locked the system into a single platform, which has caused significant pain over the years.

Other examples include the Department of Finance and Deregulation's choice of a document management system as a Web Content Management System for www.australia.gov.au, an entirely appropriate decision at the time based on their well-governed procurement approach, but which led to delays and cost blowouts, constraining the site from what it could have become.

A better known example would be the failure of the Queensland Health payroll system several years ago, where an enquiry is still ongoing. It even has its own website - www.healthpayrollinquiry.qld.gov.au

Indeed, there are hundreds of examples both big and small, where this has occurred - a decision has been taken with the best possible knowledge at the time, or small incremental decisions have been taken over time - all for the right reasons - which have inadvertantly led into blind alleys or very expensive remedial work years later.

And lest you think this is an issue only for the public sector, consider the disaster that was Telstra's bill payment system, the issues our largest banks have had keeping their systems operating, or Virgin's booking system.

With the pace of change accelerating and the increasing limits on public sector employment, the likelihood is that these types of issue will continue to grow and plague IT, becoming even more widespread and expensive.

Agencies could increasingly find themselves trapped into slow and inefficient systems, restricting staff productivity and absorbing more and more of their resources to maintain, with no funds to 'jump tracks' to more future-proofed solutions.

This can even affect the performance of elected governments - who may be forced to change their policies to fit IT limitations. I am already aware of government initiatives that have had to be abandoned (never having seen the light of day) not because they were bad ideas but because the IT constraints in government make them impossible to cost-effectively deliver.

This isn't the fault of public servants or of politicians - seeing that far into the future simply isn't possible anymore. Technology isn't progress linearly and the accelerating rate of change means left-field technologies can appear and radically transform peoples' expectations and strain existing IT systems within a few years (remember the iPhone).

There's many more of these technologies emerging around us. For example 3D printers, capable of printing anything from kitchen utensils to medical devices to firearms, disintermediating physical manufacturers, opening a new front in the ownership of intellectual property and providing access to deadly weapons. There's also unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones that are capable of live-streaming video, or even carrying weapons, that can be bought online for a few hundred dollars and flown with limited chance of detection by individuals or corporations.

Many others technologies from Google Goggles to driverless cars are in development and could, in increasingly shorter timeframes, radically transform societies.

So when government agencies are still struggling to manage and maintain their legacy green-screen mainframe systems, out-dated (insecure and unsupported) web browsers, where they are locked into increasingly expensive proprietary technologies (due to the cost and resourcing required to migrate - even changing email systems can cost our largest agencies $100 million or more), what are they to do?

There's little time for innovation or for thinking of consequences - the majority of resources in an agency's IT team are committed to maintenance and quick patches on existing solutions.

The likely outcome over time is that we'll start to see more catastrophic IT failures - particularly across the most complex and most essential systems - such as welfare, payroll and grants management.

So how do we fix this? How do we break the cycle before the cycle breaks us?

There's no simply solution, but there's fortunately some trends which work for government agencies facing this challenge - if they're prepared to consider them.

A big area is open source software, which is increasingly being used by agencies in a variety of ways. While open source can run into the same issues as proprietary software, a platform with a large and diverse group of users can combine their IT assets to ensure the system is more useful to agencies and more rapidly updated as the world around it changes.

Another area is cloud-based solutions, which allow a government to more rapidly reconfigure itself to meet the needs of political masters. When software is independent from computer systems and there's a government-wide secure environment which can host software approved for use it can be far faster and cheaper for people moving agencies to retain the files and applications they require.

There's open data - which when made available in machine-readable formats liberates the data from proprietary systems and simplifies how it may be discovered and reused by other agencies (as well as the public).

These trends do not allow governments to replace all their existing systems - however they allow agencies to contain the problem to critical systems, which allowing all other services to be done 'in the cloud'. Imagine, a single email system and intranet across government. A web-based suite of office tools, graphic design tools, finance and HR tools - which can be managed centrally within a government, leaving agency IT teams to focus on the unique systems they can't share.

What does this vision take? Intention, planning and choice.

Governments that fail to proactively and intentionally plan their futures, who simply live on autopilot, will inevitable crash - not today, not tomorrow, maybe not in five years, but eventually - and the damage that their crashes will cause may take decades to recover from.

So for agencies who see themselves as being a continuous entity, with an existence that will exist as long as the state they serve, it is imperative that they plan intentionally, that they engage their Ministers and all their staff in understanding and addressing this issue.

It is not good intentions that will cause agency IT to fail, it is the lack of intention, and that is highly addressable.

CORRECTION: I have been advised by John Sheridan, the Australian Government CTO, there was no cost-overrun on australia.gov.au, it was a fixed price contract.


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Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Online challenges arrive in Australian government

With psychedelic splendour, the ACT government has become the first Australian jurisdiction to launch a serious whole-of-government online challenges site.

Through the Digital Canberra Challenge website, the ACT is now asking "Canberra's brightest minds" to help improve government services.

The first round contains two challenges, to improve the process of event approvals and to make it easier to book a government service (such as a driving test).

The process is a little vague, however the two finalists for the round (one per challenge) can receive up to $5,000 of expenses reimbursed (on presentation of valid invoices) and the winner of the competition (over a number of rounds) will receive $12,500 - with the runner up receiving $7,500.

To participate individuals must be Canberra-based, teams must have at least one ACT resident and organisations must be both ACT-based and have less than 20 people.

It's a good attempt, though in my view the complexity of the criteria to enter, the way prizes are awarded and the actual psychedelic website itself risk overwhelming the actual goal, to involve residents in improving the delivery of government services.

That said, the goal is fantastic and all kudos to the ACT Government for making a start in this area. I hope that after the process they consider making this approach a standard one for involving residents, reflecting the success of challenge.gov in the US.

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Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Where's Australia's back-up for governments shutting down access to open data?

On a regular basis, around the world, governments rise and fall.

We see this most commonly at local levels - with councils merging and demerging, however it also occurs at a slower rate at state and national levels, with new nations created out of the ruins of older states on a regular basis.

I've been thinking a great deal about this over the last week. Ever since the US Government, the richest and most powerful state in history, told 800,000 staff - about a third of their public service - to stay at home until further notice.

The result of this shutdown hasn't been limited to the shuttering of national parks and monuments, or a reduction in services to the public.

Significant online data sources have also been shutdown, including data.gov and even Census.gov, which can have a major flow-on impact to businesses and the public.

In Australia, where it has been difficult for a hostile opposition to block the Australian Government's budget supply since the events of 1975, we're not really familiar with the notion of governments abruptly shutting down - although we do see frequent mergers and demergers at council level and the appearance and disappearance of agencies at state and federal levels on a regular basis (we lost at least four Australian Government agencies following the last election).

Some of these decisions are taken very quickly, and can have major impacts on businesses reliant on government programs or data.


As the open data revolution progresses more and more companies will come to rely on government data to power their activities with the public. At the same time the public will also come to rely on this data, and the hackers and companies that make use of it, for the services that they use in their normal lives.

So where's the back-up to government if it suddenly shuts down access to its data?

This view appears to be shared by the Sunlight Foundation, whose Eric Mills recently wrote a great post on the topic, Government APIs Aren't A Backup Plan.

In the US not-for-profit civic groups are beginning to replicate data released by government as a risk-mitigation step - such as this great list of non-government government data sources compiled by Code for America: http://forever.codeforamerica.org/Census-API/shutdown-2013.html

In Australia this hasn't happened as yet - but it could, relatively easily.

All it would require is a couple of different cloud-based data storage environments (for redundancy), a good front-end data catalogue and appropriate crawlers and volunteers who source and update data as it is released.

We're already part-way there with the creation of GovPond during the last GovHack. Developed in Perth, originally as a way to locate open data for state-level GovHack participants (from the dark and dusty corners of the internet), GovPond has become a fantastic resource for finding data across the plethora of Australian government data catalogues, without the incredibly messy business of checking each site.

GovPond provides the front-end data catalogue for Australian government - without all the messy politics between and within jurisdictions who each feel the need to have their own 'central' data catalogues and then undermine them by storing open data on agency sites and not listing it centrally.

The second part, cloud-based storage, is already cheaply available and is already used by some government open data sites. For example Data.gov.au made the sensible step of storing data on Amazon's system - overcoming all the security concerns with the simple fact that the data is designed to be publicly accessible.

Other agencies and states have employed a range of approaches - with much of their data still stored on servers they pay significant amounts of money to own (now that's a real waste of government funds where the data is supposed to be publicly available) - however the ability to access low-cost and high resilience cloud storage is definitely there.

The final step is the tough one - coordinating the volunteers and designing the scrapers that find, copy, file and maintain government data from the thousands of government websites across Australia.

Some of this work has been done. Volunteers compiled GovPond and adding tools that check currency is very possible within the context of the site. Many government open data sites have moved to standard platforms like CKAN, which simplify copying and maintenance of data (although the vast bulk of available government data still sits outside these platforms).

Much remains to be done. There needs to be some structure or organisation that commits itself to recruiting, supporting and empowering these volunteers, sourcing the funds necessary to pay for data storage and some technical tools to maintain data.

There needs to be leadership from within the open data community - beyond the leadership that already exists (and is largely committed to other goals).

Finally there needs to be the interest and willingness within the broader Australian public and business community to support this approach. This interest will grow as government data becomes more mission-critical for certain businesses and for the public, making it logical for them to invest in ensuring that the data remains available to them when they need it.

When it comes to open data, the public, companies and even government agencies need access to the data - they don't need the data to necessarily be held in government hands.

As we move through the process of releasing more data and it becomes more valuable to the community, the ability for a single public servant, politician or party to suddenly cut-off access to a dataset, series or service, becomes more of a risk for the community.

As a result there will be a rising interest in having an Australian back-up to government holding open data - possibly many back-ups, stored in a peer-based approach across many servers redundantly to prevent its destruction or loss of access.

In the US they're there now - seeking to build alternatives to government data storage, as governments are no longer stable and reliable custodians of data. In Australia it's unlikely to be far away.

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Friday, October 04, 2013

My presentation from RightClick - the latest in global digital government

Earlier this week I presented at RightClick in WA about the latest in global digital government.

My main points were that government in Australia has largely been doing OK in the digital stakes, although talent is thinly spread and there is not a consistent level of expertise across agencies.

For example, the fourth computer in the world was built by CSIR, an agency in the Australian government, and the WA government was using the internet seven years before Facebook was created.

Yes things have changed enormously in the last ten years, however the use of digital is now well-embedded within the public sector, not only in Australia but also across a large proportion of the world.

The challenge is to keep improving, to focus on designing services for digital which are relevance, simple and easy to use for citizens and to become better at connecting - reusing what others have done and at sharing what agencies are doing.

At the end of the day, however, it is not about the technology - that's simply an enabler - it's about meeting agency goals.

So even when you feel your agency, or you, are a dinosaur, remember that dinosaurs can survive massive change - provided they are prepared to change themselves.


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Wednesday, October 02, 2013

"There are many grey areas when it comes to the use of social media by public servants." - ABC 7:30 Canberra report

Last week ABC 7:30 Canberra featured a report on social media use by public servants, highlighting grey areas and concerns.

The report can be viewed online and is well worth watching for everyone in a public sector role across Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-27/public-servants---social-media/4986204

The piece didn't include any comments from current ongoing public servants - understandably - however did cover many of the concerns that I hear frequently from people in the APS who are concerned how their social media activities might affect their employment.

I was interviewed for the report, and you can see my views on camera.

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