CIPA part 5: National solutions

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

Employees of the Norwegian Wealthfare Agency (NAV) complain about how their systems are outdated. Some must even "learn DOS commands", which we know is the umbrella term for black windows with white text where you must actually use the keyboard.

NAV is a "recently" established cooperation between local and state government bodies. Some of the IT resources are owned by the municipalities, while others are owned by the national government, and there is little information being passed between these as a result of content rights and personal data protection directives. Setting up a NAV office requires some planning to enforce all the information flow/blocking policies. Even copy/paste is disabled across the platforms, so you can't copy information between the municipal and the national systems.

And this is where the pain begins.

As each municipality runs their own systems, NAV must attempt to integrate all of them into the big conglomerate. But neither state nor NAV has the authority to override what is installed at the local municipalities as long as it conforms to certain integration standards. Because if national authorities dictated a shift of technology, then national authorities would be liable to pay the bill. In the short run, the cost of integration seems to be smaller than the cost of conversion. By publishing the integration interface, much of the integration cost is now pushed over to the municipalities as part of their annual software license fees.

The cost of convertion, as such, is what we my refer to as "the cost of exit." As each system has an entry and a maintainance cost, there is also an exit cost. What does it cost to change system? And what system should be our standard? After all, setting a national standard would kill the business of all the other tailored government system developers. Some commercial actor would be able to monopolize. So how do we get out of this?

In 2006, the Swedish police turned to an open source platform and hired its own software developers to build their own mySQL and JBoss based information system. From this, they gained tailored software, a flexible system that can quickly be altered to reflect the needs of the police, full ownership of how the system works with their own data - and economically? The project pays far more than the investment in software developers. Reduced licensing and consulting costs equals approximately 400 fully equiped police cars per year.

A similar approach may be used in other government bodies, where specific tasks have been defined. This is what you do, let's all do it on this one system which we all own. If a law changes, we can change our own software - or pay huge sums to 4-5 different software companies to modify their software for the new law.

And one could take this a step further by setting a national standard for ESB - or would that be a GSB (Government Service Bus)?

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

CIPA part 4: Local solutions: Gaining control

The public IT policy in Norway is one of purchase. That is, it is up to software development companies to create solutions that fulfill Norway-specific requirements, which the public administration in turn buys - at an ever increasing cost.

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

In many ways, one can say that a small group of software companies in Norway increasingly "own" the public sector as a result of this policy. And consultants are having a field day. I have often wondered what the rationale is and observed the following points:

1. Large systems are required, and it doesn't make sense that all municipalities hire their own programmers to develop their own systems. Let someone else reinvent the wheel.
2. When using open source software, there is noone to call if something goes wrong.
3. Anything built in-house is at the mercy of the developer - what if he/she quits or gets run over? Nobody else will be able to take over. (Interestingly, this is also considered to be true by many even if the local developer makes his work open source.)
4. Spending money on the private sector makes money go around and does, eventually, return as taxes. Spending money specifically on the IT industry thus strengthens the IT industry in the country.

There is certainly merit to all of these points. Yet, the local IT department in most municipalities still tend to be undermanned and spending a lot of time on extinguishing fires. Because large systems do crash, even if they are provided by a large vendor, even a few good men can not know everything. And what SHOULD be obvious, yet most don't fully realize: the more that happens outside the control of the IT department, the less control the IT department has.

What is going on around here?

When I started in my current position, most of the operations were outsourced to a consulting company that also had the contract for equipment purchaces - an obvious conflict of interest. Documentation was scarce. Sure, there were the passwords, there was a "kind of network map" that went into great details - albeit some of the most meaningfull details were missing, and the map had not been properly updated for four years.

Only a few days into the job, I would get a phone call asking how a certain case was going. I had no idea, I didn't know the case existed. I had to check with the consultant, who was there only two days a week. My little sheet of notes turned into a bunch of yellow postits, which turned into a hierarchic digital notebook, which eventually was impossible to keep track of. And documentation was still scarce!

Tools to regain control

The overlap time was spent putting together as much documentation as possible. These tools worked for me, though they should be evaluated as any tool be evaluated before using:

Network documentation consisted of drawings of cables with tiny annotations indicating VLAN and port numbers. This was an excellent outdated physical map, but did little to easily demonstrate how the VLANs were routed. A created new maps using FreeMind - one for the physical connectivity and one for VLAN routing. One of the reasons for choosing FreeMind, is that the files produced are actually XML-files, which can be interpreted and put in a mySQL database - and even reproduced on the basis of a mySQL database.

Software documentation went into a local MediaWiki site edited by all IT staff - hereafter known as the "ICT Wiki". Exceptions were made for passwords and other attachments that don't make sense to put on a wiki. Any piece of software we found out was part of our operations would go into the wiki as soon as we discovered their existance.

As far as support went, I had one guy for all the schools, and 90% of everything else was dealt with by the consultant. With 700+ employees, the lack of a support ticket system was screaming at me. I installed eTicket just to get on top of things.

Cleaning up

Next, I told every department to call IT operations first, not the consultant. And preferrably, send email directly to the ticket system. This way, we were able to gain a better understanding of what the issues were, do more in-house, build documentation, make a more unified design and use the consulting company only when needed.

The contract was eventually cancelled, as we no longer needed them for the minimum amount required to fulfill the contract.

A clean-up job is something that takes a really long time. The bigger the systems and the larger the network, the longer you will have small surprises pop up at you. In this 700+ employee, 12 location organization, surprises from "the consulting era" still pop up three years after. We are not done cleaning everything up, but we're slowly getting there.

Internal strategies

Software tools are not enough to get on top of things, though. There is also work flow. As IT professionals, we tend to strive for continual betterment, which in Lean-terms is called Kaizen. We couldn't turn the entire organization lean over night, but we started to turn the IT department lean by focusing on the time consuming tasks:

• New employees: previously a two hour cost for the IT department, now 50 seconds.
• Password reset: previously a two minute cost for the IT department several times a day, particularly in august and january - now a self service.
• Moving empolyee between departments: previously 5 minutes of research and 2 minutes of doing - now a 10 second service. This will eventually become a self service for the department leaders.

Every task we find ourselves repeating over and over again are reviewed for automation. One must, however, carefully follow the procedures and remember to document what has been done in every ticket. In order to keep focus on current tasks, we have turned to Kanban. This is currently being tried out in different fashions, and I will be writing about my own experienced in this field.

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

CIPA part 3: Reasons for hiring consultants

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

The department lists a few "official reasons" why consultants are so widely used in the public sector. However, I read these reasons as the typical excuses, not the underlying reasons. As seen from the ground floor, the underlying reasons are usually:

• Lack of in-house knowledge and skills.
  Surely, the public sector can not compete with the private sector in terms of salaries. Therefore, a lot of local government agencies struggle to hire well educated IT personell.
  
  
• Lack of in-house overview and organization
  The in-house systems can get quite elaborated, as there is pressure to expand at a high rate, install new software and offer support, usually with only half of the work force needed to accomplish it all. Without good procedures for documentation, the overview is effectively lost.
  
  
• Ability to skew blame if something goes wrong
  Let's face it. The IT department is the first to get the blame for anything, even if proven otherwise. If everything was outsourced, you can just point at the consulting agency. "They did it, I haven't touched it at all," is a good strategy to keep your job safe. In the job world, this is known as "office politics", and only leads to more and more outsourcing. I have seen an employer officially declaring that the responsibility for an in-house work conflict had been outsourced.
  
  
• A wide spread belief that consultants are experts, while in-house experts are considered incompetent (thus the expression, "Noone becomes a prophet in their own country"). So in order to leverage anything, keep in mind that management is more likely to listen to the consultant than their own employee. And the consultant is also more likely to leverage their own sales than anything that gains the organization.
  
  
• A wide spread belief that the use of consultants will reduce the work load of the in-house IT-department. Experience shows, however, that anything done by an external company must be double checked and often fixed. This is because the consultant is hired for one specific job and they don't have the full overview of how things are or should be put together.
  
  
• A wide spread belief that outsourcing is a magic bullet to bring down costs. After all, you don't have to hire so many people full time. Then again, as each consultant knows only their own part, you end up with nobody having the overview, and the one person you have on staff is completely unable to do technical support on their own.

Truth is, in order to make good use of consultants, one must possess a good overview of the situation. In fact, to do anything good, you must have a good overview of the situation and proper documentation of the details. This overview must exist in-house and preferably not just in the head of a single person.

When consultants are not used properly, the overview is the first thing to go out the door. First of all, a whole bunch of details tend to never be documented. Outsourcing technical support means that a lot of the user feedback never comes back to you, so you don't really know what the situation is like. Outsourcing the daily administration means you don't see the warnings and errors produced by servers, you don't see the statistics and the details of the systems, and just have to accept anything that the consultant tells you. And guess what. The consultant wants your money.

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

CIPA part 2: Welcome to mount meta

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

As I mentioned in my previous article, DRAC is requesting a method for performing a study with the purpose of reducing spending on Consultants In Public Administration (CIPA). This is basically a meta-meta-request to enable work on meta-information on public work processes. Indeed, anything that begins at a meta-meta-level tends to continue downhill in a meta-meta-meta fashion.

I have actually been in a meeting discussing how some people are dissatisfied with the fashion in which we make plans for meetings that discuss how to conduct the meeting that are supposed to bring order to the meetings discussing the actual work flow of the project.

Hard to follow? Here it is in reverse and in layers:

1. We had actual work. This work had meetings-on-demand, discussing hands-on issues.
2. So administration set up regular meetings to discuss how the work meetings should progress with least impact on individual work flow.
3. The layer-2 regular meetings were interrupting work flow, so in order to fix this, they set up meetings to discuss how the layer-2 regular meetings should be organized.
4. Quite a few people were dissatisfied with how the layer-3 meetings were interrupting work flow and seen as an unnecessary neusance. So new meetings were set up to discuss how the layer-3 meetings were to be organized.

The meetings containing actual work flow information (layer 1) were pretty much unaffected by this, other than the fact that all the meeting activities took a whole lot of time away from actual work.

Of course, layered meta-meetings is a hallmark of public administration, and is probably a good place to start changing things. Turn it into something more lean. The most meta you should get is discussing the actual work flow and how to eliminate trash observed in the processes. Hence, I believe this particular request is to begin work at the wrong end.

This should not come as a surprise. Sitting at the top of the administration, you can only observe the statistic trend in accounting, and rely on accurate reporting from those who spent the money. The questions posed show a will to reduce spending on this specific account, which is not really addressing the real issues at hand.

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

CIPA: Consultants in Public Administration

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

The Norwegian Department of Renewal, Administration and Church (probably the weirdest combination for a department - hereafter know as "DRAC") has an article addressing the effective use of consultants in the publics sector - or rather, lack of efficient use. Consultants are used all over the place. Particularly, one is concerned with the use of IT consultants.

The typical excuses to use consultants are:

• Access to increased capacity in periods when capacity is exceeded
  
• Access to skills and knowledge that the organization doesn't have
  
• Obtain legitimacy through external experts before decisions are made
  
• It is more economical to buy services from consultants than using your own employees
  
• Buying consulting services is seen as a requirement to follow national guidelines

DRAC is beginning a study to answer the following questions:

1. Is there a potential for more efficient use of consultants and/or reduce expenses on consultants, and how much is possible?
   
2. What measurements can be done to secure better use of consultants?
   
3. What measurements can be done to reduce the use of consultants in the state, and what are the consequences of such measurements?

And their first request is: "What is a good way to perform such a study?"

In the next few articles, I intend to go into the depths of the request as well as address the use of consultants in public administration, answer all three questions and recommend the remedy as proven by the Swedish police force.

Consultants in Public Administration: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5