No Silver Bullet

Steward says one major issue for governments at all levels is to avoid the tendency to see ICT as the solution to every problem. "It's a really hard one because it seems a natural solution when in fact we can really only deliver the benefits when we have the associated business processes occurring alongside it," she says. "And that, I think, is going to be one of the hardest challenges that we will have, and not just in the individual jurisdictions but when we are trying to do our whole-of-government one."

Immediacy is also a particular issue for government she says.

"With ICT you can't just implement tomorrow and therefore everything will be a whole heap better the moment after it has been introduced. The capability needs to be designed well, constructed well, and it takes time for that to occur. But it can't be without good project management and good MIS management, so I think they are focus areas that you will see and hear from CIOs on, whether they are within government or outside government in the commercial environment."

Yet another major focus will be on reuse of processes, implementations and applications, particularly across departments and government partners, in order to streamline and to optimize investments in new development activities.

This is a particularly difficult issue for government, Steward concedes, because the various programs have their own time frames for delivery. The "trick" in working with departments on identifying opportunities for reuse will be for AGIMO to "have that overview and an understanding of those time frames and be able to pinpoint the opportunities to do that". She says the UK government during her time there was also looking at this issue and has been working to progress matters since her departure.

"Another area that will also be really, really interesting for us is to take forward further work on the benefit realizations and that will really help again I think in being able to show where the departments and agencies have done very good work; and here are the benefits that have been realized not just for the service in all business but also in their own high-quality implementations."

Steward says while she has not thought that priority through thoroughly yet, it may involve AGIMO taking a role in highlighting case studies of successful implementations, and will be coupled with the focus on project management. "That would be really good and I'm sure agencies as they take forward successful projects will be keen to be able to demonstrate those, and case studies may be a good way to do that," she says.

Yet another emphasis will be on providing a space where CIOs can exchange ideas and get a sense of relevant developments in other agencies. AGIMO has a role to play in acquiring and sharing knowledge and information to help departments more efficiently and effectively apply ICT, Steward says. She also hopes to play a role in helping identify the skills required by government departments now and into the future, and in finding ways to harness and retain corporate knowledge.

"The government environment I think continues to be recognized as an excellent training ground and we give [our people] some enormous opportunities [to use] that corporate knowledge. We can of course use our technology to help to retain corporate knowledge with some of our information management systems and our knowledge management systems, and there is again quite a lot of work that has been done, but it doesn't necessarily transplant the individuals.

"While we continue to enable our key people - both technologists and those ICT workers who work alongside them - to gain experience in the broad raft of activities that we have in any ICT arena, that's where we'll get some of that skill transfer as well as the broader corporate transfer of knowledge," she says.

Steward says she will be trying hard to balance the work she is trying to do in forging an overarching view of the utilization of technology with recognizing and respecting the day-to-day pressures on each of the individual CIOs in their own departments or agencies.

"I have certainly had discussions with my minister and he of course is very keen to see Australia continue on its good leadership program that we have for ICT, to be able to focus attention as we have been on ensuring that our services are easy to access, at as high a level of personalization as we can make available to our citizens while of course ensuring that we preserve the privacy of all of our clients in that regard.

"All of our CIOs are very well aware of the directions that the government wants us to take in terms of our use of technology and supporting improved services," she says.

SIdebar: Predictors of Success

History never repeats - unless you're talking about the skills government CIOs need to succeed

As Gartner Research noted in an April 2004 report, it is possible to draw on historical patterns to more or less reliably predict and improve the conditions that will enable a government CIO to succeed, with leadership, culture and management all playing a role.

Gartner points out that the success of a government CIO depends not only on understanding the variables embedded in the organization, but also on his or her ability to influence those variables. The alignment of enterprise expectations and the resources of the CIO can determine the appropriateness both of the current role and whether the IS organization is prepared to evolve to another stage.

"The position of government CIO has been held by individuals with divergent skills and backgrounds. In some cases, extraordinarily talented individuals have been failures in the position; in other cases, individuals of modest talent have been able to achieve significant successes. Clearly, the skills of the individual CIO are important, but they are not the only - or even the best - predictors of success," Gartner said.

"In many cases, it is possible to predict whether a person has a chance of succeeding as a CIO - even before he or she has started in the job. For the purposes of this discussion, 'success' is defined as the effective achievement of the organization's policy objectives by using the appropriate support, enablement and innovation of technology. This means that the CIO's success is integral to the success of the enterprise. Furthermore, as a key player in the enterprise, the CIO cannot be successful if the organization fails to achieve its objectives."

Among the criteria for success is cultural acceptance of the CIO: whether the operating agencies within the enterprise come to accept the role that the CIO plays in the enterprise and embrace the CIO's support role.

In that regard, given that she will have no powers to mandate change, Gartner Research VP Richard Harris discerns potential hazards ahead for whole-of-government CIO Ann Steward, with IT not necessarily considered "high enough in the pecking order of big issues to deal with".

"Now, with the federal government starting to put in place a pretty heavy reform agenda, particularly now with control of the Senate, then it's really the extent to which the CIO role is seen as essential as an underpinning for some of those reform agenda items [that will determine Steward's ability to succeed]," Harris says. He notes major agencies like the ATO and Defence, which are "big and ugly enough" to enjoy major economies of scale, have already begun significant reform programs that have seen them start to deal with some of the issues under Steward's demesne.

This had the potential to limit these agencies' flexibility in responding to Steward's calls, Harris says. "The fundamental bit [is] that unless the interests in common are sufficient across different agencies, such that they will take on things that don't necessarily fit in with what they see as the prime interests of their single agency, then the only way that you can take things forward is to have something that is mandated centrally, and that really is very rare to see across central governments."

What will most determine Steward's ability to succeed will be the extent of her ability to "hitch AGIMO's coat-tails" onto the ICT dimension within the government reform agenda. In other words, Harris says, it will depend on how effectively she can secure recognition of ICT as part of the change agenda.

However, he also says that although Steward is right in trying to knit together a coalition of major agencies to forward the government's agenda, it is the mid-sized and smaller agencies that are likely to be most amenable to the kinds of advice, input and strategy assistance AGIMO can offer, particularly around infrastructure, interoperability and shared services, since they lack the resources to do much themselves.

He praised Steward's announced intention to have a focus around enterprise architecture, an area that had enjoyed relatively little attention until now.

Gartner Research director Steve Bittinger sees the decision to move AGIMO to Treasury as a positive step, which will give the office more traction. "There's this concept that you need to align yourself at a higher level in the decision-making hierarchy, for your leverage, and that's the way that it has been promoted. It's still pretty early days to see how that will work but ideally it is a place to put more leverage," he says.

Bittinger notes in the US, the Federal Enterprise Architecture initiative works closely with the General Accounting Office and other similar organizations that are trying to align the budgeting process and the way money is handed out with how well aligned individual agency initiatives are with the enterprise architecture. The effect is that the US Treasury automatically looks with more favour on requests for budget funding of joint initiatives between several agencies than it does on initiatives that are not aligned with other agencies or that are seen to duplicate the work of another agency within that architecture.

"In Ann's speech she mentioned frameworks many times," Bittinger says, "and I can see that within the kind of parliamentary system that we have, and this federated style of governance that goes on among all the major federal government agencies in Australia, 'frameworks' is the way to go about building those relationships and so on . . . It's a long-term initiative, there's no doubt about it.

"Given the political realities, those are all promising things," Bittinger says.