Bob Hanson
Public-sector information technology presents an opportunity not readily available in the competitive, for-profit, private sector: the opportunity for collaboration. Public-sector CIOs are not in competition; in fact, I frequently have the sense that we are in "commiseration," facing many of the same challenges and perceived limitations. Collaboration -- from sharing software across the Internet to joining forces in disaster recovery capabilities -- is an under-used tool that creates mutually beneficial outcomes for the relatively few communities that are testing the waters.
Assume that extremely high efficiency exists in these public institutions, and that each repetition of the same e-mail investment costs each community's taxpayers $10,000 a year to operate. The taxpayer money spent on public-sector e-mail systems easily exceeds $100 million a year. And those are low numbers. Sarasota County, Florida's e-mail system costs in excess of $100,000 a year to operate. Our situation is not unique, so the $100-million total is low.
Why not a collaborative, public-sector e-mail infrastructure? Is it technically feasible? Absolutely. In fact, there are numerous examples of global, shared e-mail infrastructure: Yahoo mail, Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail, among others.
Do public institutions gain value from such a system? Yes, we can easily envision the power of peer-to-peer communications facilitated by the directory supporting a public-sector e-mail architecture. Networks of public security officials would increase responsiveness to security threats or disasters.
The value is evident; our opportunities are clear. And remember, we focused on e-mail just to illustrate the point with a simple application. Public-sector organizations spend money on many, many duplicative architectures, applications and staff.
Think Globally; Act Locally
To this point we've focused on duplicate investments made on a grand scale. If we look locally, the situation is simultaneously magnified and made more personal. Consider the duplicate investments among county-level agencies: the government, schools and hospitals. Then there are duplicate investments among cities and public-focused non-profits throughout the county. The opportunities are huge and the need is now -- all of these agencies struggle financially.
So, this is what we believe. How has it impacted what we've done in Sarasota County? Put up or shut up, right?
When our leadership team looked at the local situation, opportunities were everywhere to do more with fewer resources by working together. The leadership of Sarasota county government formed an organization, the Center for Maximum Public Performance (CMPP), to explore and realize these collaborative possibilities.
Our initial opportunities formed around four service areas:
- GovSpace (public-sector computing utility / hosting)
- GovConnect (shared public-sector wired and wireless networks)
- Florida Disaster Recovery Collaborative (statewide collaborative disaster-recovery infrastructure)
- GovMax (application sharing/ASP)
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share high-capacity, high-availability, hardened data center space and computing power. This shared center now sustains daily operations of many government agencies and public service organizations, and will soon serve to the two largest public institutions in the community from one, shared facility.
Even a hardened facility can lose connectivity with the broader world when significant portions of our network infrastructure are above ground and susceptible to storm, accident or construction damage. The CMPP recognized this weakness, our community's critical need to provide communications to citizens displaced by a storm, and that other communities shared our concerns. The result was the Florida Disaster Recovery Collaborative, in which communities work together to leverage computer and network capacity, providing each partner with quick recovery of critical applications. Five communities are working collaboratively to create the infrastructure, processes and policies that will support and demonstrate the concept. Ultimately this "rolling recovery" capability -- the ability to recover our systems at any other site in the collaborative -- will add value and security to hundreds of communities similarly at risk.
Like many communities, our taxpayers funded several, separate networks interconnecting the operations of institutions. Our school system hobbled along with insufficient capacity of expensive leased-line architecture, while our county ran high-bandwidth, high-capacity fiber-optic networking capacity right past many of the school facilities. The result: twice the investment for lower results, a situation driven by history and a parochial view of institutions, not a community or collaborative view.
The CMPP expanded the focus of our taxpayer-funded, fiber network from the county to the community, providing our schools with more than 6,000 times the network capacity at half the cost of the previous network. In addition, the CMPP collaborated with local economic development interests to build a community wireless network. Most recently, CMPP moved to partner with a carrier for gigabit Internet service for the local public network, as well as statewide fiber to further the vision for a reliable disaster-recovery infrastructure.
ASPs and Management's Risk Aversion
We started this conversation with an exploration of e-mail as a collaborative application. The CMPP chose another application area -- one that was not served even by the private sector -- to demonstrate the power and potential of the collaborative approach. The CMPP created GovMax, an ASP focused on strategic planning, business planning, performance management and financial planning in public-sector institutions.
The human and cultural change challenges associated with the concepts of collaboration drove us in this direction. Change is difficult. Change in the public sector is extremely difficult. Public-sector organizations were founded to protect and develop the security of their constituents. The risk aversion and caution that accompanied this mission has permeated our people and has to be considered in any undertaking of the magnitude presented by inter-governmental collaboration.
Addressing the risk aversion of the institution caused us to address areas that were underserved by technology. Few software applications existed that provided support to public-sector organizations for strategic planning, business planning, performance management and financial planning. No application existed that tied them together in support of the concepts of performance-based budgeting.
Tackling an underserved application space reduced the risk for the decision makers in our partner organizations. If the collaborative application worked well, the results were very positive for their institution or community. If the collaborative approach proved a failure, their community was no worse off than before the effort. Taking on an underserved application space also enabled us to deal with the caution and fears of the public-sector workforce.
As we expand the concepts to other applications, we must anticipate and address at least three perspectives: the employee, the manager and the policy-maker.
The employee whose job it currently is to support, enhance and develop the application wants to know, "If we share e-mail systems what about my
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job? What about me?" In response, for every application we take on collaboratively, there are 100 unmet needs. Our experience has shown that employees and the institutions they serve benefit as talent is freed from the transactional applications and utilities that have constituted the bulk of IT energies for 50 years and shifted to new, value-added opportunities such as business process reengineering, e-government and e-democracy. As we experience turnover, the collaborative approach empowers the institution's leaders to decide how and in what service they apply vacant positions.
We also have to anticipate the concerns of the employee's boss, the director of IT or equivalent. For years, many institutions have based the importance (and therefore stature, pay and benefits) of managerial jobs on the flawed metrics of number of employees and total budget. We must shift the focus and measure of our managers' effectiveness to the value delivered in support of the institution's desired outcomes. This frees managers to collaborate on the most cost-effective, highest-performing solution to an application need, rather than the solution that protects the manager's employee count and budget.
Finally, we must anticipate the concerns of the institution's leader -- the elected or appointed official responsible for all of the institution's offerings and results. This person will have concerns about control. "Now if an application fails, I know employee 'x' and IT director 'y' report to me and will respond immediately to my needs. How can I be sure that the concerns of my institution will be responsively addressed by an external partner?"
Our collaborative offerings must be accompanied by service-level agreements clearly defining responsiveness. We must also illustrate that the infrastructure will be stronger, applications more capable and staffing levels deeper when we team our resources to deliver an application. This simultaneously diminishes the likelihood of system failures while increasing our ability to respond. Together, we can afford more.
Where are we Today?
Where we are today:- Through a low-cost ASP hosting agreement, the CMPP's GovMax application is being shared successfully by 13 GovMax partner communities in three states, serving over 2.5 million citizens. Public-private partnerships are in place to enable the application to scale to even more communities, tying the interests of the private sector with the public sector in firm support of the collaborative direction.
- Today, the cost of developing, enhancing and operating GovMax, estimated at several hundred thousand dollars per year, is shared by the GovMax partners. In fact, a new updated version of GovMax is currently under development and will be ready for use by the partner communities in early 2007. Everyone wins, and the value delivered by the application multiplies.
- Two of our community's largest institutions have eliminated the walls between their IT functions. Our school district and county government brought their IT teams together under the direction of a shared chief information officer. The result is a larger, more powerful team operating a stronger, shared infrastructure.
- Five of our state's most progressive communities are creating the recovery platform of the future, avoiding the enormous expense of duplicate data centers supporting each individual community.
- Collaboration enables our institutions to invest employees where they are needed the most and to pay fewer staff at closer to market rates, improving staff quality and retention.
- Collaboration enables the leadership in our partner institutions to focus on strategic planning and performance management, resulting in a powerful tool for continuous improvement.
