We know that ICT is key to the transformation of our public service, because the Government has told us so – often. ‘Championing ICT innovation in the Public and Private Sectors’ is the heading on a key section of the Renewed Programme for Government in October 2009, the bit that includes the announcement of a Government CIO. He or she would “provide leadership for the development of ICT and other relevant technologies within and outside Government.” The high level of priority is indicated by the firm statement that “The CIO will report directly to the Taoiseach”.
In our current fiscal turmoil, it certainly looks like we can forget about most of that. The appointment of that CIO is still stalled, with the latest information from the government press office indicating that the draft job specs have recently been drawn up and distributed to the “relevant Departments”. So recruitment cannot even begin until the job spec has been agreed and we are faced with a likely change of government in the near future. The public service is stuck for the foreseeable future with diminished resources. Incidentally, all of the gossip in recent months has been that what the Government actually had in mind was a celebrity CIO from the entrepreneurial side of the private sector to advise the Taoiseach. No authority, budget, support staff or any of that stuff to disturb the even tenor of our ways.
Meanwhile, ICT in the public sector is facing something of a small, but perfectly formed, storm. We are now entering Year 4 of static or reduced budgets, both for capital investment and keeping the lights on. The moratorium on recruitment since March 2009, informally in place well before then, has meant that departments and agencies could not replace lost skills, however specialist. Natural wastage through retirement and resignations across the public sector is reckoned at about 7-8% annually. Assuming that ratio applied to ICT teams seldom larger than a couple of hundred, even in the giant departments, suggests that the cumulative staff reduction might now be of the order of 20% and more. ICT leaders in the public service concede publicly that their staff count has gone down by 15%.
Skill drain
To these storm components we can add the incentivised redundancy and early retirement schemes. These schemes are reasonably attractive and cannot discriminate between key personnel and others. It has been seen that they have added to the drain from ICT departments, including some high profile senior people, while the outsider’s suspicion has to be that ICT skills and experience offer a clearer path to private sector employment than public sector general administration. However understandable as necessary national policy, the blunt fact is that this amounts to the absolute reverse of good manpower planning.
An IDC survey last June included 55 government organisations, of which 70% expected their ICT budgets to decrease and only 5% anticipated some increase. Given the events of recent months, it seems a fair bet that any state sector ICT budget even holding its level is unlikely. Combined with the decimation of skilled staff, the challenges to ICT-generally expected to be the engine of efficiency and cost reduction-are very clear.
On the other hand, the prevailing attitude among the senior ICT people in the public sector remains positive, both as discussed with our interviewees and in the general buzz around the IT professional community. That includes, perhaps surprisingly, the vendor community which has been acutely aware of reduced state sector spending. The general consensus seems to be that the tight or reduced budgets offer a challenge but that the continued brain drain is more significant, for the future but also for the shorter term in managing within the constraints.
Root and branch
“I’m inclined to think that the biggest challenge to ICT in the public sector is the same as it has been for many years and that we have never really squared up to,” says Gerry Grogan, head of IT training and education services in the Institute of Public Administration. “That is the systematic re-engineering of services and the processes to enable them rather than, as we have done so often, computerising the old manual systems. We need root and branch re-appraisal of public services and their delivery. Then we can look at the IT that can enable those services, what is needed and-equally important-what is not needed.”
“There have been some IT projects, and there could well be more if we are not careful, which really could never have been any good because the traditional service structures were so flawed,” Grogan adds. “Using IT as a sticking plaster does not change anything. All of this review is not really an ICT role. It is an all-enterprise, CEO down re-thinking of business and process. It may be natural to come at all of this through ICT, because that is where we will be looking for solutions. But the technology is always secondary and its effectiveness will always be judged by extent to which it enables the strategy and the programme and service delivery processes to be delivered.”
What is needed is leadership from the top, says Grogan, both at government level and in each public sector organisation. “Right now the country is in something like panic mode and it will of course be argued that now is no time to be looking to fundamentals and the longer term. But in truth now is the time above all when we must think clearly, look to identify the essential and re-evaluate activities and solutions.” As for skill within the public sector, he is very clear that the gap should be plugged by training people who know their organisations in general business and systems analysis skills. “These are the skills and resources we will need most in the future. Rather than trying to up-skill in specific and often proprietary know-how we need generalist ICT people to manage the uses of technology. The specialist stuff we will just have to pay for job by job.”
Senior losses
Another outside but informed view echoes that thinking. Paul Duff, who leads Accenture’s public service and health practice, is concerned about the loss of very senior people with significant institutional knowledge through the incentivised early retirement scheme. “This loss of expertise can impact capability and places an ever greater need on the IT divisions of government departments to undertake structured skills transfer programmes from both retiring resources and externally contracted resources. There is, of course, an opportunity here too in that it creates genuine opportunities for younger, more IT literate and technology aware graduates to fill some of the vacant roles.”
Acknowledging that there have been some all too well publicised failures in public sector IT projects, Duff says that there have been many more successful deliveries. “They tend to attract less publicity – no headlines announce ‘another plane lands safely’ – but ROS, Motor Tax Online, birth and marriage certificates from the GRO, secure passports and digital fingerprinting for immigration are just some examples of ICT-enabled services at a world class level.”
“There are CIOs and other senior managers in public services who have in-depth knowledge and experience of successful technology implementation and understand the value IT can add to citizen service delivery with reduced costs,” Duff says. “The introduction of the ‘Peer Review Process’ as a governance mechanism for large IT projects has greatly helped to identify the top people in this regard. It is allowing knowledge sharing across departments and increased collaboration amongst the ICT leaders in different departments and agencies. I think that by and large the capability and the delivery track record exist to ensure that IT can be harnessed to satisfy the dual mandate of reducing costs and improving service.”
Leaving ICT
The Irish Computer Society, as the professional body for ICT, has long advocated the development of a specialist professional cadre in the public service, similar to engineers, architects, medical professionals and some others. “Among many disadvantages without that recognition is the fact that ambitious and skilled people can often only gain promotion by leaving the ICT function,” says ICS chief executive Jim Friars. “Add incentivised early retirement and you have an internally driven skills problem. With the ongoing recruitment moratorium the public service is making the problem worse by shedding skills both at the top and at the bottom.”
The potential value of a professional ICT grade structure can be seen in the idea of shared services in the public sector, Friars believes. Shared services offer cost savings and efficiencies to state organisations. They also serve to pool expertise in large enough and multi-client organisations to offer staff development and career paths in their own right. “We have an excellent example in Northern Ireland, where the IT Assist programme has migrated assets and resources from individual departments to a single shared ICT service organisation for the entire civil service. They have implemented a public service transformation programme very successfully, with shared and centralised ICT as the key. It is a huge part of the answer to cost reduction and efficiency as well as professionalising ICT in the sector.”
Shared services
We have no known ambitions on this scale in the Republic and politically are working to a ‘transformation agenda’ and some large scale pet projects under the Knowledge Society brand that may well be quietly shelved in the current economic circumstances. There are in fact several good examples of shared services in the public sector already, such as the Department of Justice data centre in Killarney administering HR for several other agencies or Agriculture, Fisheries and Food taking in Teagasc, BIM, Bord Bia and Fisheries Protection.
Local government quietly pioneered shared ICT in many respects through the Local Government Computer Service Board (LGCSB), now in the final stages of merger with the Local Government Management Services Board as the new Local Government Management Agency (LGMA). As well as developing software solutions for specific administration tasks, LGCSB’s data centre runs shared HR, financial, web site hosting and other services for a large proportion of the 34 councils.
Across those councils, ICT expertise has always been fairly thinly spread yet most of them have recognised and invested in smart ICT for consolidation and efficiency in services and their public deliver. The total number of ICT staff has been more flexible than in the civil service but generally reckoned at about 600. After recent years of attrition that may well now be under 500, serving a user population or at least a staff count of about 32,000.
Centres of excellence
“Local authorities look after their ICT budgets and staffing individually, so it reflects their local priorities,” says Tim Willoughby, assistant director of the LGCSB. “We offer outsourced solutions within the sector for those which choose to use them. From our vantage point it is clear that they are generally suffering from reducing ICT staff levels and the associated challenges. One potential solution LGCSB is promoting – and finding a very good response – is the idea of regional centres of excellence in some of the key ICT skills that they all require. It might be described as ‘shared skills centres’ rather than services, pooling specific local authority functional knowledge and the relevant technical skills.” The whole idea is at an early stage but it offers great promise in the current economy because it would not require significant capital investment or legislation to get moving.
“We are comparatively fortunate because our most significant technology projects have largely been delivered at this stage,” says Greg McDermott, ICT manager of the Property Registration Authority of Ireland (PRAI). “Like every other agency we are preparing for reduced capital allocation and living with some uncertainty. On the other hand, in many respects we have seen all of the challenges before and gone through the cycles. Holding on to skilled people has always been something of a challenge. I remember before Y2K when programmers with certain skills just could not be held in the public sector.”
PRAI is somewhat unusual because its migration to digital content and processes began way back in 1990 in the Land Registry, still the core function. It can now claim to be a 100% digital agency, so its 600 staff and thousands of client are totally dependent on ICT. “We have an in-house programme of re-skilling in place across both ICT and line of business, with the specific aim of minimising dependence on external resources,” says McDermott. PRAI is also committed to exploring shred services where feasible. It is a client of the PeopleSoft HR and the invoicing systems run by the Department of Finance and currently working on online payments with the LGCSB.
“We do not want to re-invent any wheels, so will take advantage of any non-core technology opportunities. We also have something to offer, we feel, and are keen to maximise the value of our unique assets,” says McDermott. “We are the authoritative repository of property mapping and have a unique Irish spatial data infrastructure that could be of commercial value to others-the NRA is already a regular client.”
Pooling
The Department of Agriculture is one of the biggest and well known for its major investment in ICT to handle the huge volume of transactions and multiple systems associated with the changing face of European agriculture. It has reduced total Department head count by almost 30% since 2005 and the ICT division has shed 12% to its current 190 people. In this instance, however, the salient point is that it was all planned. The manpower reductions were in tandem with investment in smart systems to automate routine tasks, as Michael Bunyan points out. As principal officer in charge of IT architecture and strategy as well as the key Animal Identification programme, he has seen the internal transformation succeed. “ICT is just part of our culture for many years and we have moved on from almost all of our legacy systems to modern, flexible solutions that are as far as possible generic in or tears. Grant applications and claims, payments, inspections-it actually does not matter that much what the specifics are because we have adaptable software to take on any new or changed administration. We also have a wide range of online processes, again very flexible.”
Bunyan is one of the senior ICT managers who is a firm believer in the future of shared services. “Pooling systems and skills offers advantages in many ways, not just reduced costs, and it is the key to retaining and making better use of valuable skills. For smaller agencies it is beyond question the only way to go. We have taken BIM, Bord Bia, Teagasc and other agencies into our data centre and are working with them to extend shared services. For example, the ICT help desk function could be shared across all of the users.”
Social protection
Another of the giant departments, currently under severe workload pressure because of the economic climates, is the Department of Social Protection, still better known as Welfare. Its ICT team has come down from 300-with some people on special projects-to 230. CIO Niall Barry is more concerned about the growing loss of corporate knowledge than either tight budgets or absolute numbers. “It is the same in the business generally as in IT-a comparatively few senior and very experienced people make a huge difference. Our Departmental responsibilities and functions are very complex and on a large scale. In many ways as we lose people from the business side, who understand that complexity, we are actually increasing the pressure on ICT to deliver automated or easy-to-use systems. But ICT is not regarded as a front line function, so the dilemma is that we are in danger of eroding the key supports.”
In essence, Barry says, his Department and many others are living on their human capital which is diminishing. “It is not just a question of money, either. We could have great budgets but fewer people to spend the money strategically, wisely and for real value. We also have to honour SLAs in the organisation with reduced resources, again a challenge across most if not all of the public sector. Even if we could, buying in services is not the answer either because the combination of domain experience and technical expertise in a public sector ICT team is not available from anywhere else. Right now we are all coping just by running faster.”
More and more Barry sees the answer in a mix of skills development in management combined with the sharing of major resources and investment in some key enabling technologies. “In ICT we actually need to invest in ourselves, especially the softer issues of management where we can provide some leadership contribution to our organisations. The challenges and the pain are being felt across the public sector. ICT can help, but not just as a back office, keeping the lights on function that is somehow expected also to reduce costs for the entire organisation.”
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