The Right Judgment

As the IT agenda in government matures, the challenges CIOs face grow both harder and softer. They are growing harder in that they are becoming more difficult. In the sense of technology versus people, the technology agenda in government is shifting more toward the people or "soft" side of the scale.

Government is moving from straightforward and feasible offers of "anytime, anywhere" access to more difficult tasks of redesigning workflow and public institutions. Serious change in workflow and institutions never comes easy, but have no doubt: Organizational change will be a huge part of the technology agenda in the foreseeable future.

Successfully negotiating this future will rely more on good judgment than traditional engineering. Fortunately some classic management-oriented frameworks and research can help sharpen required judgments. The work of two seminal researchers can help CIOs negotiate change and engineer value from IT in the public sector.

In the 1950s, Harold Leavitt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed experiments aimed at understanding how different communication patterns influenced task performance and satisfaction in work groups. Leavitt found that centralized structures improved performance on simple problems -- though worker satisfaction suffered. Performance on complicated problems improved with looser networked structures, which encouraged worker satisfaction, while allowing different network segments to attack discrete aspects of the problem without overloading central nodes.

In 1965, Mancur Olson of Harvard University published The Logic of Collective Action, a short book exploring the difficulty of getting groups -- especially large groups -- to cooperate in pursuing group goals. The central problem was not the technical difficulty of getting groups to perform, but the incentives for individual members to "free ride" on others' work. While Leavitt's research tended to point toward the planning and design necessary to make organizational changes operational, Olson's highlighted the need for understanding and resolving conflicts, and using top-down power to implement large initiatives.


Judgment No. 1
How feasible is your technology initiative, and how can you overcome confusion and conflict?

As the e-government agenda generates larger workflow changes and requires greater cooperation among independent organizations, projects become riskier. Leaders need better feasibility assessments of proposed initiatives. For years, of course, the traditions of systems development have mandated technical and economic feasibility studies. Technical feasibility explores whether the technology could realistically be expected to work as designed. Economic feasibility explores whether the technology, once working, could realistically meet financial goals.

The reality is that the principal reasons for failure -- especially among projects requiring significant changes in workflow and organizational design -- have not been technical or economic, but rather organizational and/or political. Even when technology works, leaders too often have not convinced followers to change their behavior to make the project successful.

What can Leavitt and Olson tell us about these problems? In combination, their insights can be used to construct a matrix outlining the leadership challenges posed by a project.

The matrix's vertical dimension measures the degree of confusion that must be overcome for followers to be effective. To estimate where a project falls on this scale, think of the factors that must be aligned for a change to become operational and meaningful.

The horizontal dimension measures the conflict to be overcome. To estimate where a project falls on this scale, think of stakeholders' incentives to "free ride," or even oppose the project directly.

Taken together, the two dimensions help assess project feasibility and the nature of the leadership required. Projects with low confusion and conflict are most feasible. Given that projects combining high value with high feasibility are relatively rare, the key advice in such cases is not to let the window of opportunity close: Just do it.

Sometimes a proposal may be widely supported but may also generate confusion. Most e-government