Strawman: 5 Tactics for proposed new ICT initiatives

In my job I often receive project proposals. These will usually say “we want to buy/develop in-house <x software> and get the IT dept to develop/install and support it for us.” Sometimes this is ok. Sometimes my IT colleagues will even accept that this is a good idea, but they are hard pressed so I have adopted the following heuristic approach and would be interested to see what others make of it. It’s a strawman.

So with the disclaimer under my belt: I always try to consider things in the following order of (decreasing) preference:

Option 1: Re-use something we already have

This works for a few potential projects. If the required functionality is already in an existing pience of software we have, why reinvent the wheel. Cheap, quick, and painless (assuming the fit is good for business requirements).

Option 2: Use a shared service from another related organisation

Again, this can work for a few more projects as there are (in my industry anyway) lots of very similar organisations working under similar constraints and trying to solve the same problem. Slightly more expensive (fees + network bandwidth), slightly slower to implement (politics, data sharing agreements, integration), but quality can be good and best practice can be shared. Also, it looks good.

Option 3: Software as a Service (“Public Cloud”) or Off the shelf remotely hosted software

Before you start flaming me, I know these are technically two very different things. But from my point of view they are equivalent. We need to do due diligence on whoever we are buying it from, there are security and governance concerns, there are performance and integration issues. But this can be good quality, quick, and relatively cheap. The G-cloud initiative should make this kind of thing easier, quicker and cheaper in the public sector.

Option 4: Off the Shelf, locally hosted

For many requirements this is still the default option. Always worth having a go to convert it to 2) or 3). Support arrangements can be a bind but we can normally deal with it. This option will always require some kind of interface with the people managing the desktop environment. This can slow things down but they are a happy bunch. I miss them (see options 1-3). We still need to do integration but because its inside the firewall its less stressful (SOA gurus might want to look away now and instead consider this rather cute video of a dog).

Option 5: Internally developed

ok, so we got to bite the bullet and develop something in-house. That means long timescales, resource conflicts, delays, long-term maintenance overhead, even using modern techniques. Most organisations the size of mine or smaller aren’t going to want to maintain an expensive pool of internal resource. There’s a slight edge to getting the solution hosted externally as it’s (slightly) less infrastructure to worry about and there are tools to help, although I’m not an expert on them – my colleague Stian Sigvartsen is better placed to advise on that.

And that’s all. I’m interested in refining, or even throwing out, this model out in favour of something better, if such a thing exists. For now this is just a common sense way of evaluating projects.

The longer-term question of what our target architecture should look like will have to wait for another day.

#ukgc12: 20 reflections

Personal Note: My first blog post for 6 months, due to a number of different factors and events which have made me not feel like it. Time will tell if this marks the return of my blogging habit or is just a flash in the pan. Either way, that’s ok.

There’s a trend this year following a suggestion by Dan Slee for attendees to this year’s UK GovCamp to try and capture 20 insights they gained during the unconference. I was one of those attendees so here is my stab at it. I can’t do 20 but maybe will update the post later to reflect new stuff I remember.

1. The Government Digital Service used to be “us”. Now it’s “them”. This is as negative as I can be about it as otherwise they do great stuff.
2. Some of the attendees are world-class drinkers. No names, no pack drill, but they know who they are.
3. At current growth rates representatives from my particular organisation will constitute the entire attendance of UKGC18. Be very afraid. On the other hand I was really pleased with the reaction of my new colleagues as they threw themselves into contributing, networking and generally having fun.
4. We all have a default way of engaging in conversations, which can – if desired – be deliberately subverted, with sometimes profound results. I hope to blog some more about this but suffice to say that I am grateful to Lloyd Davis for showing me the route to that insight.
5. After going to this event for 3 years I now have “proper” friends there.  This pleases me enormously as I make acquaintances easily but not friends.
6. Councils don’t need CRM systems. We only have them because the rest of our systems aren’t properly functional.
7. Data Quality is the new rock ‘n’ roll. It’s the foundation on which we will build our future organisations. But currently hardly anyone does it.
8. Whenever we dismantle a hierarchy there is an opportunity for a community to take power. We should do this deliberately if possible.
9. Communities have business models (in the Business Model Canvas sense) just as a “standard” business function does. Whoever models it first gets the chance to shape its development.
10. Customer Development is the primary activity of a community, specifically the testing of a hypothesis. If the hypothesis is shown to be disappointing, the community might fade away unless new hypotheses can be found. Again, more on this and #9 soon.
11. You can deploy an IT infrastructure from “box” diagram to functioning cloud implementation in under 15 minutes. But we already knew that.
12. There’s a guy who carries a dragon around. This is either a sign of a relatively harmless mental health issue or a very clever exercise in personal branding. If in doubt, suspect the latter.
13. I really don’t blog enough. This is my first entry for over 6 months
14. I am quite an effective useful idiot for testing the usability of software because I have basic skills in most things, neither clueless or brilliant. Hire me while I’m still in the sweet spot
15. In the 3 years I’ve going I’ve seen it become more diverse. This can only be a good thing. We had a councillor and a social work practitioner this time and both had good input to give.
16. I’m conflicted about the 1st day happening on a Friday. The Saturday crowd is, in theory, far more committed and self-selecting but we got a really good buzz off the Friday so maybe I worry needlessly.

That’s it so far. I want to develop some of these things a bit more but not sure if I’ll get the space or time to do it. We’ll see.