07 Oct 2014
Politics/IT crossover moment! In his Globe & Mail column today, Gary Mason has this to say about the negotiations underway to bring LNG terminals to the BC coast:
Quick primer for the IT audience: in the last election the government promised 100s of thousands of jobs and 100s of billions of revenue (and amazingly, I’m not exaggerating those figures) should BC successfully seed an LNG “industry” on our coast. It was basically all they talked about in the campaign. Unsurprisingly, having placed all their political eggs in the LNG basket, the government is now at the mercy of the companies that are supposed to bring us this windfall, as Mason notes below.
There is an enormous amount at stake for the Premier and her government. From the outside, it appears B.C. needs Petronas and the others more than they need B.C. Ms. Clark comes out the loser if those companies walk away and her LNG dream evaporates. She can also lose if her government signs desperate deals [emphasis mine] that are deemed to be so slanted in favour of the project promoter that the province becomes a global laughingstock.
Actually no, as anyone on a failed IT project knows, after a desperate deal is signed, both the LNG proponent (vendor) and government (manager) will get together and sing the praises of the finished deal.
“It’s a world class deal, and it was a tough negotiation, but we did it”, the government will say.
“They drove a hard bargain, but we think we can make it work”, the proponent will say.
The media at best will run a he said/she said with the government’s claims against the opposition’s analysis, and we’ll all move on. The government won’t be the loser in the case of a bad, desperate deal, the people of BC will.
Just as, when a vendor and a dependent manager deliver a shitty IT project and declare it the best thing since sliced chips, it’s the users who suffer in the end.
03 Oct 2014
When analyzing the new legislation governing redistricting in British Columbia this cycle, I noted in passing that the creation of three “protected regions” creates an isolated, unprotected region in the Okanagan. If there are districts that have unbalanced population in the Okanagan, the only way to solve the problem is moving population around inside the Okanagan.
Well, there is a district with unbalanced population: Boundary-Similkameen (37,840) is 30% below the provincial population average (54,369), and 36% below the average population of unprotected ridings (58,810). So about 15,000 people need to be added.
On the face of it, this is no problem, the other ridings in the region have excess population in the 4% to 14% range, so there’s lots of people to transfer to Boundary-Similkameen, in theory. The trouble is, people don’t live in a nice uniform distribution over the whole land area of the region. They are clumped together.
Here’s what the situation looks like now:
The commission cannot take population from the east or west, those are both protected regions, the only direction to go is north. But, to the north is Penticton, with a population of 33,000. The whole of Penticton cannot be added, the only way to balance Boundary-Similkameen is going to be splitting Penticton in half.
Splitting communities in half, particularly small ones that are much smaller in population than the district itself is generally avoided by Canadian boundary commissions, because retaining jurisdictional integrity is one of the concerns they attempt to address (unlike the US of A). One of the “failures” of the last commission was the splitting of Williams Lake between Cariboo North and South.
If the commission were drawing borders without the artificial restriction of the protected regions, it would be possible for Boundary-Similkameen to discard some of it’s communities on the east and west edges (into underpopulated ridings that need the help) and transform into a simple north-south oriented riding running from Penticton down to the US border.
However, that’s not on. It’s not the only conundrum the commission will be wrestling with, either.
22 Sep 2014
A specially extended feature frenzy for FOSS4G 2014 in Portland. Usually I only frenzy for 25 minutes at a time, but they gave me an hour long session!
Thanks to the organizers for giving me the big room and big slot!
16 Sep 2014
At FOSS4G this year, I wanted to take a run at the decision process around open source with particular reference to the decision to adopt PostGIS: what do managers need to know before they can get comfortable with the idea of making the move.
09 Aug 2014
Strategy documents.
Did I just see you yawn? Let me try again. Strategy documents.
Setting high level goals is important, but the process walks a knife edge: are the goals too general to be realized? are they too specific to provide a guide to the whole organization?
Here’s the goals from the BC CIO’s strategic plan:
- Adopting and incorporating outcome management in strategic planning activities;
- Applying integrated, collaborative, consistent and transparent approach to strategy development;
- Developing and delivering on IM/IT goals and objectives; and
- Optimizing collaboration across the division and with stakeholders
It’s hard to choose where to start hating these: the focus on process; the organization-centric worldview; or the relentless use of the passive voice. You choose.
When Vivek Kundra took over as Barack Obama’s CIO, he produced a 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management:
-
Apply “Light Technology” and Shared Solutions
- Complete detailed implementation plans to consolidate at least 800 data centers by 2015
- Create a government-wide marketplace for data center availability
- Shift to a “Cloud First” policy
- Stand-up contract vehicles for secure IaaS solutions
- Stand-up contract vehicles for commodity services
- Develop a strategy for shared services
-
Strengthen Program Management
- Design a formal IT program management career path
- Scale IT program management career path government-wide
- Require integrated program teams
- Launch a best practices collaboration platform
- Launch technology fellows program
- Enable IT program manager mobility across government and industry
-
Align the Acquisition Process with the Technology Cycle
- Design and develop a cadre of specialized IT acquisition professionals
- Identify IT acquisition best practices and adopt government-wide
- Issue contracting guidance and templates to support modular development
- Reduce barriers to entry for small innovative technology companies
-
Align the Budget Process with the Technology Cycle
- Work with Congress to develop IT budget models that align with modular development
- Develop supporting materials and guidance for flexible IT budget models
- Work with Congress to scale flexible IT budget models more broadly
- Work with Congress to consolidate commodity IT spending under Agency CIO
-
Streamline Governance and Improve Accountability
- Reform and strengthen Investment Review Boards
- Redefine role of Agency CIOs and Federal CIO Council
- Rollout “TechStat” model at bureau-level
-
Increase Engagement with Industry
- Launch “myth-busters” education campaign
- Launch interactive platform for pre-RFP agency-industry collaboration
While there’s still a certain amount of navel-gazing at internal concerns, around things like CIO councils and review boards, the plan at least is made up of actions, stated in the active voice, most of which can be evaluated on a done/not-done basis over time. The organization can track whether it is executing this plan, and whether staff are allocated to it’s accomplishment.
Of more recent vintage, the UK Government Digital Service has a strategic plan (note, available in simple HTML):
- Improve departmental digital leadership
- Develop digital capability throughout the civil service
- Redesign transactional services to meet a new Digital by Default Service Standard
- Complete the transition to GOV.UK
- Increase the number of people who use digital services
- Provide consistent services for people who have rarely or never been online
- Broaden the range of those tendering to supply digital services including more small and medium sized enterprises
- Build common technology platforms for digital by default services
- Remove unnecessary legislative barriers
- Base service decisions on accurate and timely management information
- Improve the way that the government makes policy and communicates with people
- Collaborate with partners across public, private and voluntary sectors to help more people go online
- Help third party organisations create new services and better information access for their own users by opening up government data and transactions
There are fewer done/not done items here than in the US plan, but a lot less emphasis on internal processes and more about achieving results, for “people” (the word “people” shows up in four of the twelve points). The plan is focussed on not on internal processes, but on external results.
Which organization is likely to produce more positive results for the people who pay their salaries? The one “optimizing collaboration across the division”? Or the one that seeks to “increase the number of people who use digital services”?
This can be (heck, it IS) deathly dull, but these documents provide the base note over which the activities of an organization are laid: does this organization accomplish things, or does it talk about how best to accomplish things? You can tell a lot, and learn a lot, from these documents.
