Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway Ben Terrett Mike Bracken Tom Loosemore

Author:Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2018-06-18T14:39:28+00:00

Retrospective: secure statistics

The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) was long an organisation stuck under a digital cloud. Despite having some very able people working in it, the ONS was running an online presence described as ‘the worst website in the world’ by the Financial Times. For most organisations, this would be an embarrassment. For the ONS, a public body with publications that moved markets, it was a deeper worry.

Security mythology contributed to ONS’s woes. ONS was obliged to publish certain key economic statistics, such as inflation numbers, at a certain precise time. Many numbers needed to be published at 9 a.m. sharp; not a minute later, as the market demanded them on the dot, and not a minute earlier, as they were embargoed until that moment. Built on creaking old IT, the website’s frailties meant that statistics uploaded at 9 a.m. – as the rules decreed – were often not viewable until several minutes afterwards. These delays were earning the ONS some very powerful critics. Fear of security breaches, ill-informed box ticking and lack of basic technology capability had prevented any solutions coming forward.

To unblock the impasse, ONS brought in a national security expert. He gently but firmly explained that provided the numbers were securely encrypted, they could be uploaded to the site hours before. On the stroke of 9, the encryption could be removed – the job of a second. It was a simple solution, but one that could only be reached by framing technology as an enabler of meeting user needs, not as something fixed and unchanging.

As a consequence of outsourcing, many IT teams in big organisations have been effectively captured by suppliers. Denuded of their own technical capabilities, they have been reduced to the role of contract managers – buying things in the hope it will fix the problems caused by the last order of stuff they bought. Without the skills needed to properly interrogate suppliers’ offerings, organisations buy the wrong things on lengthy contracts, leaving minimal room for them to respond when circumstances change. All this is anathema to designing and running decent digital services or meet user needs.

It is often difficult to redesign or transform a digital service without tying it back in some way to the legacy IT. To have a chance of success, a digital mandate must make it possible to stop poorly conceived, hugely expensive and long IT contracts from being let. It must also ensure people with genuine technical knowledge are given the opportunity to interrogate new investments in IT; and ask the basic questions that may not have been raised in decades. Good IT managers will embrace the chance to bring new skills into their teams and have the business pay them some proper attention for once. Bad ones will resent the oversight and stick doggedly to ploughing their own furrows.

All of this requires an organisation to stop looking at IT as the dull, frustrating systems that constrain the decisions they can make, and instead consider what technology is needed to support the ever-changing needs of their customers, employees or citizens.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.