City-wide IT Services Framework

Here’s a short video of a city-wide Strategic IT Framework at work in 2005. It’s since been killed off because of a complete lack of strategic governance over IT. Short-termism is currently massively increasing Derby’s IT costs whilst reverting to an organisation-centric architecture. There is an important lesson here, that unless the long-term strategy is protected by a governance and scrutiny structure, there is little chance of protecting it against the deflective ploys of senior managers and suppliers focused on a short-term ‘quick win’. Cost to date of Derby’s lack of governance is approx £20m and rising.

I’ve been advocating regional CIOs for the public sector since 2004. I’ve had ministerial contact and input in both China and Finland, both of whom now operate such a model. I presented this same architecture as the Regional Services Centre model in Westminster and elsewhere from 2005 onwards and was immediately isolated as a threat to both empires and revenue streams. When we tried it in the East Midlands in 2006-7, one large county council sent representatives in empire protection mode to deliberately try to torpedo the regional initiative. A senior colleague admitted to having been instructed by his director to “kill it dead”.

SITFO blog March 2007: http://sitfo.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/tactical-vs-strategic/

David Gale – June 2011
CEO
SITFO.org

Not Every Cloud has a Silver Lining

There has been much furore of late about Cloud Computing, the focus becoming so intense that we are well into Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome, as organisations leap towards something they think ‘have to have’ without necessarily understanding ‘it’ or the consequences. Whilst there are plenty of examples of organisations that have benefitted from off-loading their IT infrastructure, the fledgling public cloud industry has unsurprisingly done little to highlight the downsides.

Let’s take a step back for a moment and, instead of starting with technology, look at people and their need to access information. For most organisations, people and information are their primary assets. Without unfettered access between those assets the organisation will lack efficiency and flexibility and may even grind to a halt. We have already seen the product of a lack of strategic architectural planning in large organisations where islands of information are not joined to provide a single 360 degree view of the customer. The customer suffers. In organisations with multiple services and scenarios where multiple organisations have to collaborate around the delivery of a service, joining up information from multiple disparate systems becomes a day to day necessity. In these cases, it would be right to ask a few basic questions before unhitching my corporate data centre. I had better be very sure that:

1. the available cloud-based applications are the right choice for my business
2.  I have access to my data without being bound by restrictive licence terms and conditions
3. I am legally permitted to offload the storage of sensitive information to a third party
4. I am happy that a third party has control over one of my primary assets
5. my data is not locked away inside an application over whose development path I have no control
6. I can securely share my data with people, other organisations, and other applications
7. I can respond rapidly to changing business needs without having to buy an expensive add-on to a monolithic application every time my process needs to change
8. I can push and pull information as quickly as I need to
9. I don’t have to pay an application licence fee just to access my data
10. all of my data is in one place and is structured in a way that is flexible enough to deal with network outages and any number of changes to my business processes that might be required… forever

The above list is far from exhaustive but it does serve to demonstrate that unless you are the manufacturer of a single widget and you’ll never have to deal with anything more complex than selling and producing your single widget, you might want to look at the alternatives to hosting in a public cloud. Certainly, there are many advantages of cloud computing that can be brought into your data centre to deliver your own, very much more flexible private cloud. In a private cloud, you can mitigate the lack of flexibility by mixing old with new. Not everything has to be in your cloud. The important point being that you have control.

We’ve done some informal research of our own on the new wave of public cloud offerings. Without a doubt, there are some stunningly talented and innovative technologists out there but, in our experience, very few of them are customer-focussed in a way that makes them accountable. Even fewer can begin to understand the culture, the processes, or the information needs of their larger customers. They are focussed on rapid growth. So, as with internet hosting companies a decade ago, if you’re unhappy, they will only bend so far before concluding that ‘there’ll be another customer along in a moment’.

Lastly, for large, complex organisations, particularly the public sector, there is an even more fundamental question with which to conjure.  Public cloud computing exists to make money. With some providers making up to 30-40% margin, why would you want to sell off the family silver of shared services when a public sector owned private cloud, delivered on a public sector network would bring national savings of £billions? We’re back to building a Strategic IT Framework that focuses on people again…

David Gale – March 2011
CEO
SITFO.org

Microsoft must clean up their act

February 2011 - Derby, England

SITFO.org PRESS RELEASE - MICROSOFT MUST CLEAN UP THEIR ACT

Microsoft’s acquisition of IP relating to security and authentication delivered by TADAG (Trusted Authenticated Domains & Gateways) continues to delay the roll out of an architecture essential for the sustainability of the world wide web. Despite having brokered a strategic partnership with Microsoft Corp delivered through Derby City Council, in which Bill Gates played a personal role, despite being a Microsoft alpha development partner and lead customer reference at the global launch of BizTalk Server 2006, and despite having demonstrated Microsoft’s clear breaches of its own code of ethical standards, Microsoft has failed to resolve the issue over TADAG that has festered for over five years. A Microsoft lawyer commented that the company’s ethical standards do not relate to matters involving IPR.

It is clear that Microsoft has reached a critical mass of bureaucracy that prevents the engagement of senior executives in ethical matters that have deep implications for their company’s future. The summary of Microsoft’s indiscretion can be found at www.tadag.com, together with a link to the TADAG report. The report, published in January 2008, was delivered to Microsoft Corp’s senior executives at the request of Microsoft’s own lawyers, and has never been contended or challenged.
ENDS.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

David Gale | CEO | SITFO – Strategic IT Framework Organisation | Derby | England | E: david.gale@sitfo.org

An open letter to Francis Maude

Dear Minister

The Conservative Party put up their Shadow Minister for Innovation and Science in 2009 with a message that the party shared the strategic vision held by key IT architects working in public sector IT, a vision for so long ignored by the last administration. We were told that the strategic vision would also herald an end to the cosy contracts that had led previously to a complete absence of governance over IT strategy. We were encouraged.

Within days of the election the window-dressing had been moved to one side and within weeks the same people were reappointed to key positions within the civil service. It was ‘business as usual’. To date, I see no evidence at all of strategic governance over IT and so, what we will end up with is smaller, perhaps more cost-effective contracts that still perpetuate the expensive, rats’ nest of ‘point solutions’.

For example: there is no excuse for perpetuating the suppliers’ gravy-train of allowing them to impose licensing costs for accessing OUR data. All public sector applications must have licence-free web services interfaces and licensing should only apply when the core functionality of the application is being used. We need to stop suppliers dictating the terms by taking a clear lead on the architectural requirements of doing business in the public sector.

We need clear strategy around how we join-up public services, with citizens at the centre of the delivery model. We don’t need more policy masquerading as strategy. Once this is in place, we need governance to protect the strategy from the deflective ploys of civil servants with performance-managed career targets and unscrupulous suppliers with short-term sales targets.

If your mission is to bring sustainable efficiencies to public sector IT, I respectfully submit that you are missing a trick.

David Gale – November 2010
CEO
SITFO.org

Key Digital Trends

What do you believe will be the key digital trends most affecting business in the next 5 years?

My draft submission to Oxford Economics’s global study of digital trends:

The key trend to date has been a hotch-potch of ‘cloud’ and ‘not-so-cloud’ based implementations that have been delivered on a ‘point solution’, individual business case, without any over-arching vision or long-term IT strategy. Largely, business people and techies have been leading the decision-making process, with neither having the requisite grasp of long-term IT strategy. Policy has masqueraded as strategy. The consequences are already manifesting themselves as organisations find their shiny new toys increasingly expensive and complex to administer and join-up. 

Strategies that deliver flexible IT frameworks that can respond quickly to changing business needs, whilst enabling sustainable transformation, will become a major influence in the sustainability of the business model. Thus there will be significant commercial advantage gained by those organisations that can deliver architectural governance over their IT strategy. The key trend going forward will be the dawning realisation that IT strategy can make or break your business.

David Gale – November 2010
CEO
SITFO.org

Government’s Missing Billions

My draft submission to the recent public sector consultation exercise announced by HM Treasury:

The lack of a coherent strategic framework for public sector IT and the political governance required to enforce it, continues to cost tax payers £Billions in duplicated, redundant infrastructure.

Having discussed strategic IT frameworks with both executive management of suppliers and senior, Whitehall-based civil servants, over the past five years, I am aware that both know that there is a better, more strategic way forward. However, government is caught in a trap largely of its own making. A short-term focus on the balance sheet, aligned to tick-box targets and some rather too cosy commercial relationships means that neither civil servants nor suppliers are rewarded for delivering a coherent long-term strategy. Don’t be fooled into thinking that ‘Cloud Computing’ or ‘Data Standards’ will provide the answers. They won’t. This is nothing other than marketing hype.

As someone who has already delivered and demonstrated the benefits of a strategic IT framework; where multiple IT components are shared and reused by multiple agencies to enable service transformation and efficiency savings, I can tell you that, whilst it is currently possible to deliver a shared IT framework in metropolitan areas, we are hampered from delivering regional IT service centres because the costs levied by the privately-owned telco networks make it unsustainable. Add to this the short-term pressures and tactical focus and you will understand that only coherent central government strategy and strong governance can make a difference.

So, what to do?

Three basic requirements:

1. A coherent national public sector IT strategy (not the ‘policy masquerading as strategy’ that we have)

2. Independent IT strategy and architectural advice to enable politicians to deliver effective governance

3. A national, publicly-owned, public sector broadband network to enable the development of Regional IT Service Centres

Unfortunately, I note that it will be the Cabinet Office that trawls through the submissions. Past events have demonstrated the Cabinet Office to be part of the problem, with blinkered, tactical thinking and some particularly cosy contractual arrangements with suppliers of government IT. Whilst this may be a deeply unsexy subject for the electorate, it is an area where there are substantial savings and benefits to be achieved but only if government is prepared to take a long-term view. Without strong action, it is safe to assume that government ministers will continue to be manipulated by Sir Humphrey and suplliers in the same way as their predecessors.

David Gale – July 2010
CEO
SITFO.org

UK Government IT Strategy

It’s been particularly satisfying to notice the hints from the UK national government of future moves towards a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for IT enablement of service transformation. The City of Derby’s (UK) Strategic IT Framework, launched in 2003, takes SOA to its logical conclusion, delivering a combination of high and low level ‘services’ in a federated architecture that others are looking to scale to a regional IT services solution.

The publication of the national strategy has prompted much discussion over the dearth of high level profesionals working within public sector IT but it presupposes that there is political buy-in to the necessity of long-term, cross-party consensus and governance around the strategic use of IT as an enabler. In the public sector, because of the lack of IT architects, ministers and civil servants have consulted with low level code-monkeys who have been allowed to shift the strategic focus to ‘data standards’, as though that alone would deliver an integrated and sustainable capability.

In reality, there isn’t any buy-in to strategic governance over IT and junior ministers don’t have the freedom to contemplate anything that isn’t within the short-term, bean-counting parameters of an accountancy-led, window-dressing charade. There is not just a shortage but a complete absence of vision and leadership around IT strategy, without which money will continue to be wasted on unsustainable ‘point-solutions’. We saw the same MBA-style, asset-stripping focus in British manufacturing industry in the Seventies and, whilst it may have tidied up a balance sheet or two in a way that better remunerated directors, its crude application cost us 35% of our manufacturing base. Now we look on as narrow, short-term objectives are met by deploying IT-enabled solutions without due regard for the sustainability of the architecture of the technical infrastructure.

It’s not for want of trying either. In our attempts to engage with senior civil servants and ministers, over the past seven years, SITFO.org has uncovered evidence of deliberate avoidance of long term strategy to protect civil servants’ baronial empires and their short-term performance managed career objectives, supported by suppliers that fully understand that a disjointed approach is ultimately more profitable. The words of one beknighted civil servant still ring in my ears, “I don’t care how dirty and brown-field the solution is, I’ve promised Gordon Brown a solution within 18 months and that’s what he’s going to get…”

But don’t think that technology is going to provide all of the answers. Derby’s example has demonstrated that you can have all of the infrastructure in place but, if you don’t have the strategic governance to prevent officers and politicians from sitting on their hands when it comes to using it to drive through with transformation, you’re just as likely to have cuts in jobs and services forced upon you. SITFO is increasingly being asked to deliver advice on that governance which we’re happy to do but remember, for the public sector, your politicians must be part of that process. In the private sector, an IT Director should be delivering strategic governance over IT architecture and require sign-off within every project plan. In the public sector, if you haven’t got a director capable of delivering that message to chief officers and politicians, think carefully about the long term implications for costs as your IT solutions become increasingly fragmented, expensive to maintain and unresponsive to the needs of the business.

David Gale – January 2010
CEO
SITFO.org

Tick the Box to Fail

As a patent holder and originator of designs within multiple disciplines who has seen numerous of his engineering designs shipped back to the UK as finished product by both the Germans and Japanese, I may be able to throw some light on the why the UK doesn’t benefit as much as others from its huge capacity for innovation. Irrespective of the rate at which the UK produces original design, there is a cultural malaise that owes its roots to the growth of the influence of accountants at board level.

Early in the Seventies, clever accountants began to introduce their boards to the ‘benefits’ of short-term accountancy tricks to exaggerate a company’s trading position, improve shareholder dividends and inflate directors’ bonuses. As the trend took hold, finance directors’ influence grew to the point where it was no longer remarkable that they moved upwards to become CEOs and MDs. In so doing, we lost most of the visionary, long term risk-taking scientists and engineers who could take an idea, map out a vision, and see it through to production (Dyson being a notable exception). For a PLC, the accountancy-linked, short-term focus of the stock market works against long term strategic investment. Richard Branson had to buy back Virgin because reporting to shareholders once every quarter didn’t give Virgin the freedom that it needed to pursue its ‘vision’.

In the public sector, the same accountancy focus has allowed short-term performance management metrics to dominate to the point where ministers, with a narrow window of opportunity to prove themselves, resort to bean-counting every aspect of government policy. The culture is now so engrained within government that even Her Majesty’s opposition spouts the same operational management principles spoon-fed to them by the incumbent civil servants. Examples of the consequences for the public purse are dire: hundreds of millions of pounds thrown at short-term ‘measurable’ government projects, none of which join-up and all of which leave a lasting legacy of hugely complex and expensive administration. I covered this subject in my blog ‘Vision’ of May 2006

Management consultants, many of whom come from an accountancy background, will be happy to propagate the myth that a complex business can be run by breaking it down into a series of discrete processes, all of which can be measured by their impact on the balance sheet. In reality, whilst this may be the accepted way of covering your legal backside, there are few organisations where this is appropriate for long term strategy. In some industries such practices can have serious consequences. The rail industry was convinced by the consultants that if they defined every process, everything would be more manageable. The reality is that when you try to define something like railway track maintenance by tick-box processes alone, things get missed. In the rail industry, when things get missed, people die.

What’s needed in the public and private sectors is individual responsibility and collective governance. This presumes that senior people are in position for long enough to deliver long term objectives, where it’s not so much about studying the minutiae of what they do, as the overall benefit to the customer and the organisation. It’s about boards delivering governance that ensures that strategies hold firm against the deflective ploys of the myriad of short-term opportunists, and it’s about driving organisations forward with powerful visions that create the environment for innovation to thrive and survive.

From my own perspective, I designed TADAG (www.tadag.com), a world-leading integrated architecture for identity management and other ‘public utility’ services that puts the citizen at the centre of service delivery and gives individuals control of their data. Although I have some interest from the EU, huge interest from the Chinese (whose government upper and lower cabinets are packed with engineers and scientists), the only interest I can get in the UK is from European arms of US corporations acting on behalf of their country’s security services. Despite our advances, even MI5 couldn’t motivate themselves to check that we didn’t have something of significance before we talked to the Chinese, presumably because they don’t have a performance management metric that covers such an engagement…

David Gale – September 2009
CEO
SITFO.org

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Alan Mather’s 2003 paper, “Enterprise Architecture in Government”, espoused a strategic vision for the sustainable enablement of e-Government services. On reading it, Wayne Horkan mused, “For the life of me I can’t understand why Alan isn’t at the epicentre of Government as an integral part of the UK Government EA programme”.

Let me be of assistance: 

I can and do understand why people like Alan aren’t at the epicentre of Government, for they tell an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth that government doesn’t want to hear. I delivered the Strategic IT Framework for public sector in 2002, born out of my involvement with Lucas Aerospace in the Nineties. Starting in local government in the City of Derby (UK), a number of production implementations were rolled out that demonstrated faster transformation at substantially reduced cost. In fact, we were using the term ‘transformation’ in Derby long before it was ever mentioned by central government. I fondly remember the fun we had explaining to a bemused Project NOMAD how our architecture could deliver mobile enablement of EVERY service on the back of a single piece of infrastructure, and the difficulty they had in trying to fit our strategic solution into their tactical performance managed metrics. (Video case studies are available at www.sitfo.org)

SITFO has engaged at every level in government but no one wants to talk about the Emperor’s New Clothes, despite the horrendous legacy of hundreds of millions of pounds wasted on unsustainable e-Government solutions. We have detailed knowledge of ministers being briefed against our strategic recommendations, to further civil servants’ careers and safeguard suppliers’ revenue streams… and they’re briefing Her Majesty’s Opposition in exactly the same way.

An enterprise architecture or strategic IT framework is acknowledged by suppliers as the sensible way forward. (read Tactical vs Strategic on the SITFO.org blog to understand why suppliers are incentivised not to deliver) Understand that doing it the ‘wrong way’ avoids having to market a deeply strategic concept to people whose vision for customer service still focuses on how ‘we’ deliver ‘our’ service, and that doing it the wrong way is understood by suppliers as being ultimately more profitable. The thinking goes, “If the government is that badly advised, why should we convince them otherwise, when we’re making good money out of their ignorance?” The problem is exacerbated by multi-national corporations whose own internal product teams compete against each other, despite them having the capability to deliver a highly flexible, integrated product stack.

Inside government, it’s a different story. Amongst the technologists, there are the usual ‘code-monkeys’ who lack the vision required to understand the concept but also have a vested interest in keeping their enclaves as indecipherable as possible. However, amongst senior civil servants, there are a handful who understand only too well the inadequacies of current strategy. Their philosophy goes something like this:

“I have an empire to defend against every other government empire that thinks that it should be the cornerstone of e-Government Strategy. I will share data where I have to but I will isolate my services so that my department can resist any threat of rationalisation. I will focus on the short-term, performance-managed career objectives set by government and, to do that, I need quick results. Tactical implementations are the only way I can deliver those quick results and progress up the civil service career ladder, so I’m not interested in long-term strategic planning or implementation”. These people are banking on the fact that they will be collecting their gong and their pension before any one realises that they have committed the public purse to an unsustainable architecture(less) for e-Government enablement that will end up costing the tax payer billions of pounds. Worse still, the EU, in mimicking the e-Gov project structure of the UK, is making exactly the same mistake. One has to ask, at what point is a public servant, who knowingly turns a blind eye to the long-term public interest to further their career or political interests, considered corrupt? Certainly, the sums of tax-payers’ money involved make the MPs’ expenses scandal seem like petty theft.

There is a way forward but it involves cross-party consensus for a 10-15 year plan and a clamp down on units like the Warrington Mafia. It also needs a properly empowered national CIO, supported by regional public sector CIOs across the country, to define common standards for reusable services, not just data. We’ve worked with the Chinese and they are now doing just that. Frankly, I don’t yet see any sign of the political will required for that kind of action in Europe.

David Gale – August 2009
CEO
SITFO.org

Government Disconnect

At the beginning of the Noughties, some of us in the UK fought long and hard to bring the excesses of the City to the public’s attention. Those of us that uncovered massive data losses by banks and the subsequent defrauding of customers being hushed-up with the connivance of the FSA, the Legal System, and Government, had an inkling of what was coming next. The relaxation of governance, as a means of maintaining consumer demand, shifted the burden of debt from the public to the private purse, a political con-trick copied from the U.S. on an epic scale.

That the lack of governance evolved to widespread establishment corruption should shake to the core the faith that we place in our institutions. But of course it won’t, since my personal experience is that media editors will wilt under the threat of legal action and the withdrawal of advertising from a bank and, if they do try to resist, then a newspaper’s owners are only a golf club away from the quiet word of an influential player of The Game. So, although some will blush and point the finger at bankers as being responsible for the current crisis, the connivance and the profit have their roots deep within the Establishment.

So, what has all of that got to do with information technology (IT) in the public sector? Whilst SITFO (Strategic IT Framework Organisation – www.sitfo.org) has been happy to engage with the strategic development of sustainable public sector IT architectures elsewhere in the world, we reluctantly concluded some time ago that, because of the lack of strategic vision and leadership around public sector IT in England, we would have to await a catastrophic collapse to engage effectively. Strategic governance is not just lacking, it’s absent, absent in a way that has a disturbing impact on the public purse, to the substantial benefit of the profits of the chosen few.

It’s an unfortunate realisation, in our dealings with large corporations and numerous government organisations, that there’s a body of opinion that regards joined-up, citizen-empowering, public sector IT services as a threat to both their power-bases and their income streams. Our conclusion being that there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way important standards are managed and controlled, aligned to real strategic IT governance. There has to be a new way of doing things that represents an opportunity to plan the long-term use of technology to empower citizens. Everywhere, it would seem, except England…

With the rest of the world having concluded that perimeter wall IT security is an expensive, unworkable dead-end for public sector IT networks, we’re now being treated to a monumental Muppet-fest, as the power-base and vested interests behind Government Connect (the English Government’s attempt to deliver secure inter-departmental communications) levy the burden of a GCSx CoCo (Code of Connection) on Local Authorities (LAs) and…

Well, here would seem to be the first problem: quite apart from ignoring the obvious logic of tying down access to applications and data, rather than hamstringing a high-speed public network, the prescribed ‘concrete wall’ security architecture and public sector thinband connection evidently never took into account that LAs have to deal with a multiplicity of other organisations. Wide-area, public utility network enablement, anyone? I don’t think so. Either exemption for specific areas of the network will become de rigueur, or swathes of submissions of revised CoCos will hamper every part of any transformational agenda. In short, someone prescribed the IT without understanding the business… or did they?

On the face of it, one might consider that this is not an unusual occurrence for central government. However, closer inspection reveals that a number of private commercial organisations have been heavily involved in ‘assisting’ the delivery of these plans. These organisations should, and do, know better. If Government Connect was always a solution looking for a problem, then one has to question the motives of those who have not just invented a problem, but have then been allowed to mandate an unsustainable, hugely expensive, dead-end implementation of that solution.

In England, whether it’s building schools, banks, or public sector IT, we’re seeing important strategic decisions being taken on the advice of a handful of favoured insiders, with little or no strategic governance in place. In the world of IT, as even major players are squeezed out of the loop, many are increasingly seeing England as an unattractive place to do business. At least one major corporate is threatening to pull out of government business completely. The bottom-line to the citizen is £100 millions of wasteful expense on public sector IT for little or no perceivable benefit. We can only hope that Barack might whisper to Gordon that, if this was the U.S., there would be a Federal Inquiry.

We got out of stocks and shares eighteen months ago…

David Gale – February 2009
CEO
Strategic IT Framework Organisation
www.sitfo.org