Subrato Basu, vice president – Asia Pacific, The Research Board
The strength of the IT projects produced by Singapore’s government agencies is well-documented. In fact, the island nation overtook the US to be ranked as the top country this year in Waseda University International’s e-government index.
Public-sector IT projects are usually large in scale and can be ground-breaking in nature, given that they are built to serve the community at large, while private-sector projects tend to focus on the bottom line. There are a number of lessons IT executives from the non-government sectors can pick up on, according to Subrato Basu, vice president – Asia Pacific, The Research Board.
Q: So what can be learnt from public-sector e-government projects?
Private-sector CIOs can note the following critical success factors of these projects:
• Respect the organisational and cultural impacts of large-scale technology projects.
• Build change management competencies.
• Integrate change management into project-planning methodologies.
• Learn from past mistakes. Intercede early to prevent repetitious errors, and develop institutional learning mechanisms to keep change practices relevant.
Q: Change management looks like one huge learning area for CIOs to pick up pointers from.
The leaders consider the following aspects critical to their initial and ongoing success:
• Resolving sponsorship issues and obtaining active state leadership support and participation.
• Having a coalition approach to project staffing and management, building strong relationships with peers and managers in the agencies. This has been especially vital in collaborating with the still relatively autonomous departments.
• Rapidly building out baseline change management processes, tools and expertise.
• Having agency employees loaned, both full-time and part-time, to act as liaisons, provide design and testing expertise as well as facilitate decision-making.
• Having project leadership and planning, including clear objectives and effective governance.
• Having ongoing measurement and assessment of progress in relation to goals.
• Having effective communications strategies.
1: Government employees want to hear the imperative for the change from the top, and they want to see their leaders ‘living’ the change for themselves.
2: Employees want their supervisors to have a solid grounding on the impacts of the change and to be able to answer these questions: ‘What's in it for me’ and ‘How should I prepare’?
3: Change communications need to be face-to-face and two-way. They need to begin early, and they need to be consistent and ongoing.
Q: What about the e-government projects that have customer impact elements? What can we learn from them?
Let me introduce the concept of public-value-of-IT (PVIT) which is ‘measures that demonstrate how IT-related changes and investments contribute over time to improved constituent service level, operational efficiency and political return’.
The pillars of PVIT are:
• Constituent service level—This can include offering financial benefits for constituents (for example, lowering cost of interaction and more-rapid reimbursement or subsidies), new services leading to constituent benefits and a greater focus on constituent needs.
• Operational efficiency—These are operational cost reductions or other financial benefits.
• Political return—This can mean the satisfaction of political goals, an increase in consensus, and a positive impact on society (for example, providing a wider reach of information) and the economy (for example, growth of small and mid-sized businesses).
Although many comprehensive elements are associated with this model, private-sector CIOs can focus on areas as to how public value is structured and adopt the practices for their own initiatives. Group the following value factors into the three PVIT pillars.
They include:
• Direct customer (user)—Benefits to users or groups
• Social—Benefits to society as a whole
• Government operation—Improvement of government operation and the enablement of future initiatives
• Government financial—Financial benefits for the sponsoring agency as well as for others
• Strategic/political—Contributions to strategic goals and mandates
Read up more about e-government IT projects in the latest issue (Volume 3_2009) of MIS Asia that is out now.
