Previous:Governance and shared services
Vertical meets horizontal
At the federal level, the government's focus is on community-building to facilitate new ways of sharing information and resources, says Chuck Henry, CTO of the CIO Branch of the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS). "Horizontal governance across organizations is the most interesting development in this space," he says, adding a policy directive is being developed to provide guidelines. "We're just months away from having some good horizontal governance rules in place," he says.
The directive will also recommend elevating the status of the CIO Council, he adds. "Our goal is to make the CIO Council, which includes all the CIOs of larger government organizations, officially recognized as the adviser to the CIO of Canada for the purpose of managing IT policy." The objective is to create a clearer voice in setting horizontal strategies. "We can give guidance to horizontal service providers from an IT perspective."
He points out there are also vertical governance challenges to tackle as the horizontal movement grows. There are lines of accountability between deputy ministers and CIOs, which come with the traditional challenge of ensuring business and IT plans are aligned.
"We're hopefully transitioning to a time when government CIOs are part of the C-suite," he says. And there are lines between the CIO and IT staff, and ensuring they have a common set of goals. "So the CIO is the focal point for the vision to the people in the trenches."
All three areas need to be considered going forward, he says. "We want to ensure there are knowledgeable service providers dealing with knowledgeable clients, and the horizontal stuff people are building is effective in meeting those vertical challenges."
Shared limitations
Henry points out there are limits to what can be done on a shared basis. "Although we think we can do a lot shared, we can't do it all - there's still about 40 or 50 per cent of IT that's very aligned to particular organizations, like the DND and its command and control systems." But he points out even in those instances, there are other things that can be shared, if not the IT systems themselves.
"We would like to share other things around them, such as application methodologies, design styles, base technology components and so on. We need to create larger communities aligned around types of technology so we can share resources across government," he says.
All governments are struggling with these horizontal and cross-jurisdictional issues, he says. "The same thing is happening internationally. We need to talk to the U.S. government about things coming across the border."
The process to create a new governance structure around border issues and the right IT infrastructure to address them is similar to any new governance initiative: discussion about the business rules to create an interface together, a consultation framework that satisfies all parties that the rules are legitimate, and then putting the technology framework in place to support the initiative.
Doing government business horizontally means people need to talk more, he says. "This is why we're heavily focused on community, because that communication allows horizontal initiatives to be more effective quickly."
Web 2.0 technologies that allow people to collaborate across time and distance will play a big role in the future. "This is a focus I'm trying to bring to the job - I'm pushing hard on developing communities by experimenting with wikis and other Web 2.0 technology. Once those communities develop a vision, then our job at the Treasury Board is to look at the plans coming forward to see how people are sorting out their program accountabilities against that shared vision, and figuring out where it's important for IT to line up and where it's better it remains distinct," Henry says.
This won't be easy for CIOs, he warns. "They've got limited time and money, and frankly, I'll be asking them to invest some of that in communities - but the value we'll get out of that is a broader and deeper understanding of areas where we have clear opportunities to save money and address issues."
In both the public and private sector, organizations have injected more rigour, discipline and metrics into IT organizations in recent years via IT governance methodologies. An array of acronyms - COBIT, ITIL, PM and BTEP - describes methodologies that address different aspects but fit together well, says Henry.
"COBIT is a complete IT framework which basically guides how to plan, build, run and measure IT. It's our master model, except we've replaced the COBIT view of the 'run' piece with the ITIL 3.0 view on IT service management and delivery. COBIT and ITIL have done a lot of work to keep themselves aligned, and organizations around the planet use both to make IT more effective," Henry says.
Continued:Minding methodologies
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