How Should U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra Institutionalize I.T. Best Practices?

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By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D.

To download a free .pdf version of this article click on the above image.This morning U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra released his ambitious 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management. Here’s number 10:

10. Launch a best practices collaboration platform

Within six months, the Federal CIO Council will develop a collaboration portal to exchange best prac­tices, case studies, and allow for real-time problem solving.To institutionalize this best practice sharing, agency PMs will submit post-implementation reviews of their major program deliveries to the portal. These reviews will populate a searchable database of synthesized and codified program management best practices that all PMs can access.

Of the three proposed elements — best prac­tices, case studies, and real-time problem solving — I’d put my money on real-time problem solving as having the best short-term potential for improving IT management practices.

Why do I say that?

It’s simple. By the time you document a “best practice,” the problem, event, process, or solution it addresses may have changed. The resulting archive will definitely have training, education, and planning value, but can it really contribute to solving a current problem?

OK, I admit I’m playing somewhat of the Devil’s Advocate here. After all, I’m definitely in the “knowledge is valuable only if it’s shared” camp, especially if you’re dealing with something as expensive and as complex as Federal acquisition processes. 

But I think a more immediate and effective short term goal should be to make the expertise of people discoverable and available; this is why I’ll be contributing to the GSA’s “ExpertNet” research. In other words, when you have a problem, wouldn’t it be more effective if you could pick up the phone and call an expert rather than search through a database of documents to try to locate something close to what you’re dealing with?

I remember producing a series about expertise management that included, circa 2006, a simple model of what an “expertise management system” might contain:

click image to display full size

I wrote the following to further define an expertise management system:

An Expertise management System IS NOT:

• a document retrieval or file management system.
• an “expert system” that provides diagnostic or problem solving functionality.

An Expertise Management System IS a specialized Knowledge Management system that focuses on: 

• finding out and continually recording what people (“experts”) in an organization know (“expertise”)
• making this expertise available to users so they can answer questions or solve problems that exceed personal or workgroup capabilities.

A lot has changed since 2006. We’ve seen a rapid growth in the availability of cloud based IT services. We’ve seen the rise in acceptance and use of “social networking” services such as Facebook and Twitter. These simplify making and managing relationships and exchanging information in near realtime via the web. 

I italicized that last bit since the speed with which information can be exchanged via established relationships, even relationships as “lightweight” as a Facebook “friend” who has only minimal (if any) contact with you, can exceed what’s possible through construction, maintenance and use of a formally structured database that references past experience. In other words, what we’ve seen with the rise of social networks, to some extent at least, replaces the “expertise profile database” that sits in the center of the above model.

How would you rather solve a problem — talk with an expert, or find a document that expert wrote 6 months ago? 

That’s the power of networking. For such networking to take place in the context of Federal IT operations, though, a variety of challenges will need to be identified and addressed. These range from “that’s not how we’ve always done things around here” to “we can’t talk with that person since he’s not part of our agency and doing so might get us into trouble down the road.”

I’m not suggesting these aren’t trivial barriers; they aren’t. You’ll often find an explanation for why the barrier exists. But, as the man said, the times  they are a-changing and the Deficit Monster is demanding we cut government spending while doing more.

Making it easier for problem-solvers to exchange information is a good thing. Based on Kundra’s presentation this morning, we seem to be moving in the right direction. Now we need to get serious about figuring out:

1. who needs to communicate and share information,
2. what are the barriers keeping them from doing so, and
3. what we can do to overcome those barriers. 

Technology can help but can’t do the whole job.

Copyright 2006,2010 by Dennis D. McDonald. Contact Dennis via email at ddmcd@yahoo.com.

Click here to download a free copy of “How Should U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra Institutionalize I.T. Best Practices?”

Comments

[Walter S. Dyer III]

I understand the need for the ability to connect to an expert. The business model that I am used to is one where the expert gets paid for his knowledge or his interest is such that he's willing to give the information out for free. The free information comes at your own risk. Take a look at the motorcycle and photography blogs. huge amounts of information pass through there daily from best and worst parts to buy for upgrades to multipage step by step diagrams of how to plan and implement a wedding photo shoot or rebuild a motorcycle engine. The only difference is in the blogosphere, no cash passes hands and there are no guarantees that if you use the information, your repair will turn out right. Your results may differ from those in the blog. In a business, generally, those in charge have a fiduciary responsibility to the owners or to the business itself. There's little room for taking a shot at the problem and failing, then getting back up on the horse again for another shot. It's a lot like hunting, if the wind is wrong, if a tree branch deflects the arrow two inches high, that miss will scare the fourteen pointer back into the primordial places where he stays and it may be another year before you get the chance again. The book: if you don't have the time to do it right, when will you find the time to do it over? title says it all. I say all that to really say this, If you have an expert you can trust, hire him or her then give them the room to do the work and for God's sake use him for what you hired him for. I say that because of the number of sharp people I have seen in government sidelined due to something that happened many years ago and they are still in some minuscule role dissatisfied and unhappy yet enjoying the healthy paycheck. Excuse my rant. Your friend,

Walt

[Dennis D. McDonald]

Walt-

I think an assumption I make here is that some of the experts whose knowledge you want to tap are already on the public payroll but they may not work for the organization that needs the expertise. Are there ways to take advantage of their expertise? That's a question worth asking.

- Dennis

[John Weiler]

I believe Peter Orszag's perspective that "there are no true IT best practices in Govt" should be focus on the Clinger Cohen Act, which directs government to capture COMMERCIAL best practices, recognizing that industry has almost no bureaucracy and does have many incentives to develop/acquire IT much more effectively. GAO/OMB statistics on failure rates of IT projects pegs them at 73% in civilian agencies and 80% in DoD/IC. CCA and the E-Gov Acts have yet to be implemented as few contractors and even fewer FFRDCs have access to benchmarked industry "standards of practice". Those who might have real world industry expertise to share cannot be objective about the real results without some independent assessments.

It appears that government loses memory of prior administration lessons learned, continuing to step on the very same land mines that prevented similar efforts. Non-profits who offered this service like Council for Excellence in Government went out of business due to a failure to embrace transparency and public service initiatives. What ever happen to the Economy Act and OMB A119 which prevented government from competing with industry and their standards bodies.

I like what OMB is trying to do, and hope both Kundra and Zients are able to avoid the influence of big rice bowls and tech lobby who seek to protect the status quo, and the billions in preventable wast.

[Dennis D. McDonald]

John -

Thanks for the comment. I am wondering how important "transparency" will be to the reforms that Kundra talked about. Isn't defending fiefdoms and silos more difficult when information about their inefficiencies and mistakes is public and accessible to competitors?

- Dennis