State of Change, Chapter 9: The Public Sector
There’s a reason that governments have difficulty with sharing information. They haven’t been shown how.
Information systems for any government, of any size, have developed in much the same fashion: certainly organically, but without a common sense of direction and purpose. Because governments are, at least on paper, accountable to their citizens, the requisitioning process for IT resources takes place in a very transparent manner, with such excruciating detail as to ensure that very few of those citizens take a close interest. Specific departments and agencies are given discretion to request the purchase of IT resources and services for their own exclusive purposes, which are spelled out explicitly and posted on a public bulletin board.
“IT strategy,” such as it is for governments, is simply explained: One requests what one needs, and one hopes the purchase is eventually approved. Then the purchased item is put to use until it is fully amortized, and often for several years afterward. A corporation has the luxury of being able to choose a strategy it trusts, and stick with it for the long term. But any single strategic direction for government information technology tends to give the appearance of favoritism. It cannot follow a trend with the promise of future, untold rewards. It does not have the incentive to stake out a competitive position for itself against other governments, lest it present the appearance of launching a costly and undesirable “arms race.” Instead, it must present specifications and ask multiple vendors to meet them — not exceed them, not change them, not persuade the agency to take an uncharted course.
Sometimes, governments are bound by law to select the least expensive option, regardless of whether a more expensive one offers greater value. Sometimes a government binds itself to selecting no option at all when only one exists. And when a vendor offers something... close to what an agency’s specifications entail, but not exactly matching, even if the offered alternative is significantly better, a government forces itself to look away. Some cities will actually fine a vendor for failure to adhere to their requirements for format, scope, and context.
Cloud dynamics has the potential to radically alter the way governments procure, provision, and deploy IT resources. But that assumes they are open to change from the inside, which is completely contraindicated by the historical evidence on the table.
Now Entering Elgin
Image of downtown Elgin, Illinois, by Mall Aholic Retail Adventures.
This is the story of the city of Elgin, Illinois, population 109,000, located about 40 miles west-northwest of Chicago on I-90. It’s run by a city manager, and employs about 1,000 full- and part-time employees in 28 locations scattered across nearly 38 square miles. It runs a fiber-optic network administered by more than a dozen Intel-based servers and one IBM AS/400 running DB2. They serve some 510 HP Pentium-based PC clients (because the specifications called for Pentium) running Windows XP (again, the specifications), along with some 110 mobile clients.
In October 2012, Elgin launched the first phase of a curious, new plan. It linked its public works and code enforcement employees together, ostensibly for the purpose of serving its new 311 non-emergency call center. This way, an Elgin citizen can request city services by phone or PC, and get instantaneous responses even by workers in the field. The conduit Elgin chose to link them together was, on its face, a customer relationship management platform, one devised for commercial sales teams: Salesforce’s Chatter.
If you’ve read the other articles in this series, you’re already familiar with Chatter. It’s not just a “corporate Skype.” It’s the backbone of an inter-application communications network, a conduit for a new ecosystem of cloud-based apps. Elgin knew that when it made the purchase.
So last February, the city published a request for proposal (RFP) that, just a few years ago, would have raised suspicion: It called for vendors to propose a series of new software — for code enforcement, permitting, licensing, work order management, and billing — to run specifically on the city’s 311 platform. Not on Windows XP, not on Pentium, but on the system city workers use to contact one another when a citizen calls with a problem. It’s calling this a “311 Call Center support” system, but it’s plainly obvious that a CRM collaboration platform is replacing an operating system.
Dan Ault is Elgin’s management analyst, and contributed to the RFP. In an interview, Ault tells us that his city manager (who was assistant city manager in 2008) had come to a realization: City departments were not responding well, or at all, to city counsels’ requests for city services. And it was because those departments’ evolution was following a course set for it by the previous era of IT. He tells us:
It wasn’t that we had bad employees, but there was a city of technology systems in silos that did not allow good employees to do the best job that they could do. 311 was kind of a catalyst for ushering in a new level of customer-assistive service — something you’d more commonly find in the private sector.
The implementation of a viable 311 platform became the new city manager’s primary goal. But as late as 2010, there was no option labeled “cloud,” and what solutions were available at that time were geared toward communications networks, not information networks.
I think in any organization, but [especially] in local government and other levels of government in particular, you have this issue of silos. And for us, what makes it so challenging is, a lot of those silos are reinforced by laws and local ordinances. The police department does XYZ, the fire department does XYZ, public works does this, code [enforcement] will do that. And then within each one of those silos, they have their own technology system that works best for that silo, and actually reinforces that silo.
So what I mean by, “employees trapped in a bad system” is, unless a request from a citizen fits perfectly into that silo, they’re not fully able to help a citizen’s request cradle-to-grave very easily. It’s very difficult to communicate with other departments, it’s difficult to collaborate with those other departments, and it’s difficult for that employee to self-reference the information they need to fully solve those problems.
Did those silos come into existence on account of those departments’ separate and unique implementation strategies, or did those strategies come about on account of the different silos? “I think it’s the latter,” responds Ault. As he explains to me, each department in a well-functioning local government is focused on a few key tasks, which is as it should be. But the way provisioning and procurement works, those departments request resources to address those specific tasks. There’s no tool that immediately presents itself to enable a department to leverage what it has to fulfill some new task it could not have anticipated.
This goes against the whole cloud dynamics philosophy, the idea of pooling resources together. But if you think about it, there’s no easy way for any government to request the ability to leverage what it already has, to fulfill goals it could not have projected for itself. As a result, it tends to requisition new resources and generate new bureaucracy, only to face the inevitable problem of interfacing the new resources with the old ones. As National Journal reported in early July, this very fact is essentially why the Obama administration was forced to postpone implementation of the employer mandate provision of the Affordable Healthcare Act.
As Elgin’s management analyst Dan Ault continues:
You get these silo-driven systems because that’s what their mindset is. “We need a code system.” “We need a system for public works.” Their concern is not what we call a “balcony perspective,” looking at the bigger picture.
You can probably go back to the 1800s, and cities are essentially set up the same way, with basically the same departments. Basically, it’s kind of inertia that’s carried us forward. So as technology got developed for the public sector, I think the technology was more specified for each one of those silos, versus that balcony, city-level perspective.
The “Balcony Perspective”
The problem that cities and other governments face is a foundational one. In his depiction of the “value chain” for business, Michael Porter had the luxury of delineating certain classes of internal activities (or what I call roles) that intersect with all the other external activities of the organization. So there’s IT for sales and IT for research and IT for distribution and transportation. That’s because a private organization enables a business visionary to make purchasing (“procurement”) decisions that benefit everyone.
“One of the attraction points of cloud for someone like public sector is, it’s very difficult to get large capital outlays for new projects,” remarks Ric Telford, IBM’s vice president for cloud services.
You think about a municipality, a state or city government — if you need to start up a new IT project, and there’s an up-front cost in the millions of dollars for the hardware, the software, the data center space, and all of that, in tough budget times, it’s tough to get those appropriations through the system. But if you can start up a new project and pay as you go, a pay-as-you-go model works very well for the public sector.
But because the procurement process today works differently for governments (and in many cases, for no other reason) platforms do not directly benefit multiple departments, and thus IT strategies do not transcend multiple roles. It’s why Elgin had a problem with police and code and fire and billing needing the same IT functions, but needing them separately.
And it’s why the United States has a problem with the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and the DHS needing the same IT functions, but needing them separately. Ault can’t speak for them, of course, though he does offer this observation that can indeed scale up.
While you’re not literally destroying silos in all cases, these collaboration technologies are making them functionally more obsolete. Part of the reason why I think they’ve lasted so long is that, the ability to use and share information in these old systems created such a burden for these departments to collaborate that inertia continued to carry the day. But with this new 311 that uses these cloud technologies and collaboration tools that companies like Salesforce have, what you’re able to do is share information and work in a common workspace in ways that these old systems really just can’t. That’s what I think we’re talking about when we’re breaking down these silos — not changing the ordinances and eliminating departments, necessarily, but getting them more into a common workspace where they can collaborate and share information, just as the rest of the world has done.
The new platform for government computing is becoming a communications platform, facilitated through cloud dynamics. Although bureaucracy has never yet succumbed to the forces of progress, this new platform has the potential to become bureaucracy’s most formidable opponent to date.
In the spring of 2012, Salesforce launched its dedicated government cloud service ecosystem — a separate bank of public-sector-oriented apps that use Chatter as their common communications platform. In an interview with me for another publication, that company’s senior vice president for public sector sales, Dan Burton (no relation to the Indiana congressman), literally signaled a battle cry. He declared that the procurement protocols that governments of all sizes put in place to acquire IT resources were literally “holding government captive,” preventing them from acquiring the services that citizens need to help their own governments be more “actionable” to their requests.
Well, maybe. Bureaucracy often behaves like a living organism; and life, to borrow Jeff Goldblum’s oft-repeated phrase from “Jurassic Park,” finds a way. Elgin, Illinois, is acquiring the services it needs to build its 311 platform into a full-scale cities services system, but it’s doing this by the book. Rather than breaking down Burton’s walls of captivity, Dan Ault and his colleagues are working with the walls they have in place. It’s not the ecosystem metaphor that Salesforce prefers, and it’s not the scale of IT revolution that Michael Porter and his ilk had in mind back in the 1970s. Instead, it’s a well-planned, measured, thoughtful approach that’s also respectful of the laws, regulations, and ordinances already in place.
Put another way, it’s a conspiracy to commit progress.
Ault tells me that Elgin is in the midst of a phased approach to Chatter’s implementation. In the early phases, he says, the city is putting it to use for the most collaborative tasks, so that city workers grow accustomed to this new virtual workspace.
Even within Public Works, you have different divisions, each of which almost functions as its own silo. But even with the old system, to be successful, you had to find a way to collaborate amongst those different divisions within Public Works, and also with Public Safety, the City Manager’s office, elected officials, call center folks, and so on. That meant a lot of phone calls, a lot of e-mails that went to different people.
So being able to present this common workspace... made so much sense to everybody. Even people who didn’t have experience with social media previously were able to see the value, and were able to pick it up pretty fast.
For example, a public works official could post a picture of a resolved citizen’s issue or a completed project, pretty much the same way she’d post a photo to Facebook or Instagram. For such a feature to be part of some client/server application, it would probably have been buried within some non-obvious menu, and the format of the picture would have had to be discrete. A high-resolution camera phone might upset the natural balance of things, resulting in more calls to an overstressed IT department.
Because Chatter and the apps that run on it are designed to serve as a general communications platform (sold as a CRM system) rather than as a discrete piece of software, the likelihood is higher that it’s already adaptable to serve whatever new functions that may come along. A city may have to continue its formal procurement processes to acquire such functions, but inevitably it downloads and installs their respective apps. Already, Elgin’s city officials are adopting new ways to plan events and milestones that collectively appear on a shared schedule. Even though the classic itinerary still exists, for the ordinances’ sake, the pulse of the city can be measured through a new conduit.
“You get these silo-driven systems because that’s what their mindset is. ‘We need a code system.’ ‘We need a system for public works.’ Their concern is not what we call a ‘balcony perspective,’ looking at the bigger picture.”
Whether intentionally or not, the City of Elgin projected for itself a 3D value chain. It reconceived its multiple departmental silos as interrelated roles, some external and facing its citizens and taxpayers, others internal and contributing to its core operations. But then it projected fundamental support roles that transcend all of these internal and external roles, and then began building a single platform that supports everyone. Had Elgin an infinite supply of its own internal resources, it could have launched that platform internally. But because it’s a city like every other city, not only are its resources limited, but its method of procuring resources constrained.
So to simplify matters, Elgin initially cast its new 311 platform as a call center, and deployed it as such. From that point, it began attaching new roles onto that platform, which is why billing and licensing are cast as part of 311. Elgin didn’t force itself some ill-fitting 2D model of service and value, and then take all the agonizing steps of rebuilding itself in the image of applications software. It simply reconfigured its perception of city services in such a way that the simplest solution is also the most beneficial one.
Elgin serves as proof that fundamental change does not have to be revolutionary. The incremental method works quite well.
