The change has been gradual, but the results have been dramatic.  Over the last twenty years – since the spread of the Internet and the dawn of what has come to be known as the Information Age – the relationship between governments and citizens has changed forever.   Citizens are no longer content to be passive recipients of government services, paying their taxes and expressing their pleasure or displeasure only at the ballot box.  Armed with vast amounts of information and near-instantaneous communications, citizens are seeking not only better service from government, but service that is tailored to their specific needs.  

The early stages of the Information Age – evidenced by personal computers, the Internet and mobile communications – brought us to this point.  Now there are signs from around the world that a new phase of the Information Age – featuring new technologies and more innovative uses of older technologies – is upon us, changing not only the way that governments deliver services, but the essential relationship between governments and citizens themselves.

What we are witnessing today is the shift from e-government to e-governance.  New technologies allow governments to deliver services more efficiently, but the change is deeper than that.  These technologies – ranging from social networking to cloud computing – enable governments to seek advice and counsel directly from citizens, to inform and educate them, and to engage them in the design and processes of governance itself.

Accenture has studied this trend in depth, identifying dozens of cases of governments adopting new strategies (and adapting old ones) to better engage the public, deliver more effective public services and involve citizens in their own governance.  At the same time, we have conducted an ongoing international study – the Global Cities Forum – to hear what citizens believe government should be doing to help improve the quality of their lives. 

These studies have led to the development of what we call the Public Service Value Governance Framework, a model of governance that connects people – as citizens, service users and taxpayers – with those whom they elect to lead them. 

The framework is built around four components:

1.      Outcomes – Governments are focusing on improved social and economic conditions for citizens, such as health, learning and safety, and not merely on the amount of services provided or on efficiency.

2.      Balance – Governments must balance choice and flexibility with fairness and common good, addressing gaps between those who are able to take advantage of service improvements and those who are not.

3.      Engagement – Governments are engaging, educating and enrolling citizens as co-producers of public values by seeking their views and helping them make the best use of government resources.

4.      Accountability—Governments must not only be more transparent about their actions and performance, they must provide accessible means for citizens to remedy problems with government and public services.

In our global research, we have identified many examples of governments at all levels – national, state, provincial and local – that are adapting innovative technologies to put this framework in place.  In Canada, for example, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public service provision, the Federal Government has launched a government-wide pilot for a new internal collaboration platform called GCpedia, an internal version of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.  The service allows federal employees to post articles as well as comment on and edit articles posted on GCpedia by their peers.  The federal government is using GCpedia to enable informal collaboration between federal employees within and across organizations.  

Tomorrow at GTEC, Greg Parston, the Director of Accenture’s Institute for Public Service Value, will be sharing these research findings on e-Governance. Greg will be speaking on Tuesday October 6^th at 9:15 in Theatre 1.

In our last blog entry we discussed how Accenture’s research in government service delivery revealed that service excellence and a greater impact on societal outcomes can be achieved when services are constructed and delivered in a way that makes the most sense for the citizen—irrespective
of agency boundaries, in the manner of citizens’ own choosing and with the backing of considerable communication and readily available support. We said that we would expand on the results of the 2008 study in more detail.

In this year’s Leadership in Customer Service research – conducted in 21 countries in 2008 – Accenture found that citizens in most countries are highly critical of the extent to which government seeks their opinions. In 15 of the 21 countries we surveyed, less than a third of respondents thought their governments did a good job of seeking the opinions of its citizens.

Only in three countries – Canada, Singapore and Ireland – did more than 50 percent of respondents rate their government as “doing a good job in delivering a better quality of life for themselves and their families.”

In fact, our research showed Canada to be one of the more high-performing governments when it comes to understanding that stakeholders are more than just “customers.” In fact, Canadian citizens were more likely to have positive attitudes about the job their government is doing in building trust in seven of the eight areas we surveyed, including

• Government being accountable for what it achieves
• Informing citizens about policies and services
• Targeting resources to people who need them
• Providing equal access to government services for all citizens
• Seeking the opinions of its citizens
• Tailoring services to meet individual needs, and
• Delivering a better quality of life overall

“Providing equal access to government services for all citizens” topped this list – citizens were three times more likely to express positive opinions (60 percent positive versus 20 percent negative) – followed by “government delivering a better quality of life,” where citizens were two-and-a-half times more likely to feel positive (53 percent) than negative (21 percent).

The only area where Canadian citizens were more likely to feel negative about the job the government is doing is in its openness and transparency in making policy decisions. In this area, only 36 percent of Canadians had a positive attitude, while 43 percent had a negative attitude. It is becoming clearer than ever that Canadians want to talk to their governments – to explain to politicians and policy makers what they want and need, and to know that their government is listening and responding.

In the next weeks I’ll discuss how government can share responsibility for outcomes with their citizens, build more productive relationships between citizens and governments, and bridge the gap between expectations and reality.

Some recent procurement news items, courtesy of Google Alerts, caught my attention with respect to the implementation of shared service models for procurement. For starters, I was surprised that it was even news. After all, isn’t this the accepted best practice now? It seems that might not be the case in Australia and Japan.

So, I thought this might be a good time to review what makes a successful shared service model. For reference, see a whitepaper produced by A.T. Kearney on the subject. I have picked which ones I believe are most relevant for the readers.

1.       Define the scope, set realistic targets. Typically, shared service models are best applied to more transactional activities. For procurement, this might include: RFP development, marketing, and process management.

2.       Create an effective governance structure. How will the executive reporting structure work? How can service levels be improved for internal customers? These are effected through the governance structure.

3.       Take your time. A.T. Kearney suggests that full implementation, depending on scale and scope, takes approximately 2 years. Even small organizations must recognize that it will take time to define and implement an effective shared services program.

4.       Choose your management tools. Should it be Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or Chargebacks? The management and administration of SLAs can be quite cumbersome. Yet it many organizations it is unclear whether chargebacks are resulting in the desired service levels. A trade-off between effectiveness and administrative headache is inevitable.

5.       Measure your performance. As the old adage goes, “you tell me what you’ll measure, and I’ll tell you what I’ll manage”.  Thus, to get the desired service levels, you need to create effective performance metrics.

6.       Focus on internal customers. Treat your internal customers like you would if you were running a program focusing on external customers. That means adopting a “customer is always right” philosophy and an “outside-in” approach to organizational improvement.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the challenges governments face in balancing the needs and expectations of the individual being served, the collective needs of society, the concerns of taxpayers, and political agenda of government.  My last entry expanded upon this by sharing some insights from our recent Global Cities Forums on what citizens are actually saying about what they want and expect from their government and how it should improve the quality of their lives.

This week I want to continue this discussion by outlining a framework we have formulated as a result of these forums to promote a more active relationship between citizens and their governments. We’ve introduced a Service Value Governance Framework representing a more publicly engaged model of governance, one that truly connects people—as citizens, service users and taxpayers—with those whom they elect to lead them and to shape and direct their public services.

Derived from the common concerns and ambitions of all of the groups of Global Cities Forum participants and the principles of public value they defined, the framework is built around four components:

1.       Outcomes—  The purpose and mission of public service provision should be the actual improvements they produce in the lives of the people they serve—such as better health and wider learning—and not simply the amount of service produced or economic efficiency achieved. Traditional measures of public-service performance—such as student-teacher ratios or arrest rates or numbers of hospital beds, for example—no longer satisfy the public demand for improvement. What matters is the actual difference public-service organizations make in the lives of the people they serve.People—certainly the participants of the Global Cities Forum—want the realities of their lives to shape government services and to provide the strategic direction and operational alignment across government organizations.  Managing through a focus on outcomes is a means of ensuring that multilateral strategies and holistic solutions are applied to the conditions or issues that most affect local people.

2.       Balance - The people with whom we spoke believe that governments should tailor service provision to meet the wide range of different needs across the population. People are increasingly accustomed to private-sector services that respond flexibly and discriminatingly to their individual demands and see little reason why government cannot do the same. As service users, people want more choice in the type and means of service delivery.However, it is also important to make explicit the challenge of balancing choice and flexibility with fairness and common good. It will not happen intuitively; it requires clarity and analysis, even if political judgments have to weigh one side of the balance more heavily than the other.

3.       Engagement— An overwhelmingly consistent finding from the Global Cities Forum is participants’ desire to see government offer more opportunities to involve people in setting priorities and plans for public services to deliver improvements in their own lives. Moreover, they want to be able to do this on an ongoing basis—not simply through rare public consultations or superficial user satisfaction surveys. Further, when government enables people to play a greater role in setting priorities and planning public services, and as people have increasingly more means to engage with government in a consequential manner, individuals will be empowered to assume more responsibility for improvements in their own lives.However, engagement must go beyond asking people what they want. It must also include active programs of educating people about their rights and responsibilities and initiatives to enroll them as active partners in improving outcomes.  Governments must work to ensure that the engagement they have with people is as consequential as possible. Deliberative events such as the Global Cities Forum empower local people to consider and discuss issues with others from their wider communities. Consequently, such events can provide richer and sometimes surprising insight. Clearly, the Global Cities Forum reached only a tiny subset of the population of each city, but as governments extend public-engagement activities more widely and more frequently, greater numbers of people will become involved and the benefits of their engagement will multiply.

4.       Accountability—Across the eight Global Cities Forum events, we found that all people want more information from government. Our research also shows that high-performing public-service organizations are using performance management data as a powerful tool for engaging people and other stakeholders.  Sharing performance information with people can help build understanding of government’s constraints and limitations.Therefore, our findings indicate government must move beyond simple information sharing and make information such as performance and budgeting data available and actionable. In making the right types of information easily accessible to the public and implementing mechanisms to help people take action, the public is able to play an active role in holding officials accountable, improving service delivery to the community and supporting program funding.

These four components provide meaning and a language with which to clearly articulate a relationship that is about genuine engagement of people in their governance—not one that is merely about voting in elections, answering surveys or paying taxes, as important as these things are. We consider this type of engagement critical to governments achieving high performance

I’d love to hear your thoughts on both the various components of this framework and how emerging technology could be applied to further benefit Canadian citizens in future. 

The other day I was re-configuring a VmWare instance of our SiteMinder product when a simple realization hit me. What if this was an image containing some kind of secure application or sensitive financial data? I would be able to change the application, change the data or plant a virus. And if someone else with no knowledge of my attack copied the image to a production environment, they’d have no idea that something was wrong. Imagine if I had access to 100s or 1000s of images. The amount of damage would be significant.

The answer is governance. More precisely, it’s about setting up a process to ensure that access to sensitive images is properly managed and audited. This suggests that virtual images, or virtualization itself, could benefit from some of the traditional identity management best practices. So let’s examine specific issues that would have to be addressed.

First, a virtual image needs to be given an identity. It’s not sufficient to think of an image being a simple resource. Images end up running on virtual hosts, consume host resources, and run applications. Hence images require an identity that can be tracked. We have to track not only the user tinkering with the image, but the image itself because it will run on a virtual host. And while we’re at it, we have to track the virtual host itself. But we already knew that governance must be comprehensive.

Now that we have tagged an image with an identity, we can apply traditional identity management processes to virtualization. With the focus on the administrator, we can:

¾      Administer specific images

¾      Establish role-based administrative access

¾      Delegate administrative access

¾      Enforce administrative SoD

¾      Approve administrative change requests

¾      Audit administrative actions

¾      Generate compliance reports and perform attestation

¾      Remediate excessive administrative rights

Additionally we can begin to express policies that govern the rights an image has on a virtual host at run-time. Specifically we can:

¾      Restrict image to run on a specific host

¾      Prevent image from executing specific applications or leveraging specific host resources

¾      Capture and correlate events generated by the image

¾      Generate report on run time behavior

This list of capabilities looks a lot like traditional identity lifecycle management being used to help mitigate risk and address compliance requirements, doesn’t it? With the use of virtualization on the rise, the need for IAM systems to manage virtualization will emerge.

And while IAM for virtualization will work for few virtual images, the only way to scale is for virtualization management systems to integrate with IAM systems. Such integration will facilitate end-to-end virtualization governance and drive additional value for organizations that have already adopted IAM processes.

It’s likely the existing IAM systems will be called upon to support virtualization (we don’t want redundant silos of IAM, do we?) and integrate with virtualization management systems. To support such integration IAM systems have to become service-aware and offer IaaS (Identity as a Service) capabilities.

Welcome to my GTEC blog.  This is the first in series of brief articles that will present some of the key concepts behind Application Portfolio Management (APM), Project Portfolio Management (PPM), and Enterprise Architecture.  Over the course of this series I will touch on a number of topics centered on enterprise architecture and application portfolio management, including, federated CMDBs, distributed application architectures, communication and stakeholder involvement, risk management, IT governance, application lifecycle management, and architecture transformation.

I will begin this series with a brief description of application portfolio management and its benefits, and describe an approach to continuously review and improve the application portfolio within an organization.

APM and PPM are rapidly growing areas of IT management, as organizations turn their thoughts towards reducing costs, improving business and IT alignment, and increasing business agility within their organizations.  Today, as much as 75% (or more!) of an organization’s IT budget is spent on routine maintenance activities – just keeping the lights on for existing applications.  That leaves only a small portion for new application development.

APM and PPM give management the tools they need to make strategic decisions about what work should be done, which projects to fund, and how to improve their existing applications to better meet business and IT objectives.  These tools encourage a holistic view of the enterprise, and focus on deriving business value through IT.

The key concept behind APM is that you cannot manage what you do not measure.  Stated a bit differently, you cannot control or improve what you do not know.  Application Portfolio Management is about gaining an understanding of all of the applications within your enterprise, and helps to reveal risks, opportunities, patterns, and trends within the portfolio.  This information allows senior management to establish corrective action plans at the enterprise level and make strategic investment decisions to enable IT to better meet business objectives.

Let’s have a look at what is required for effective APM.  A definitive and authoritative registry of applications is needed as the base for APM.  Most organizations have multiple lists, and these lists will most certainly not agree with each other.  They all present a partial picture of the enterprise.  Application development has their list.  Operations has a different list.  The legal department has still a different view.  These lists are maintained by different groups, each with a vested interest in one aspect of application management.  The names and application properties used by these different groups will most likely be different, and this can be a difficult problem to reconcile.  We will talk more about this later when we discuss federated CMDBs.

The second thing that is needed for APM is a means by which to measure application metrics.  I suggest a set of metrics to create a balanced view of application qualities.  Metrics can be gathered in Technology, Operations, and Business areas.  There is no magic set of metrics that should be collected – the rule of thumb I use is that they should be a) readily available, or b) easily obtainable at a low cost.  If few metrics meet neither of these conditions, a separate initiative to establish quality control measures, and supporting metrics, may be advisable.  We will discuss metrics and measurement in greater detail throughout this series.

After collecting the metrics for each of the applications in the registry, it is now possible to put together a “portfolio view” of the applications within the organization. This view can be sliced and diced by technology platform, line-of-business, cost, or just about any other dimension that you care to measure.  This provides the basis for portfolio analysis, which will expose risks, opportunities, and patterns within the portfolio.

Action plans can then be established at the enterprise level to address the findings of the portfolio analysis.  For example, it may be discovered that applications written in PL/1 have greater difficulty hiring and retaining skilled resources.  This may result in an HR initiative to attract and retain resources with these skills, a service contract with a third-party vendor, an executive decision to rewrite PL/1 applications in a different language supported by the organization, or a blend of the above.  The decision is made with the entire portfolio and organization in mind.

Finally, by reviewing the portfolio on a regular basis, it becomes possible to track changes through time in the portfolio.  Maintenance cost and quality (as measured through incidents and defects) are good indicators to track.  Three two five measurement points at regular intervals will provide a good trend indicator.  The release cycle within your organization will help determine a meaningful interval, and may also provide a convenient opportunity to collect additional metrics about these applications, such as financial data for the period.  Reviewing quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year trends can highlight areas of risk before they bubble, and provide the organization with an opportunity to proactively address these risks.  For example, if a group of applications in one line-of-business have experienced an exponential increase in maintenance costs for two years in a row ($10M, $12M, $16M), this could point to an underlying problem, such as high design complexity or lack of agility of these applications to meet new or changing business requirements.  Effective Application Portfolio Management is made possible through this in-depth understanding of the individual applications and how they contribute to the enterprise portfolio.

Next week: bottom-up vs. top-down