"Mary-Ann Maxwell of Gartner was right on the button when she told a conference last year that most organizations were so bad at IT governance they should throw it all out and start over," says Infonomics managing director Mark Toomey. "The place for them to start is to work out the reality of who is responsible for ICT and properly define the roles and engagement models for the top executives, including the CIO."

In Toomey's experience, federated models fail for the same reasons as other models fail: poor top-level governance that focuses on the wrong things. Organizations that get the fundamentals of governance right (by effectively adopting AS8015, for example) can make almost any operating model work. But they will only do that by discarding a lot of contemporary thinking, he says.

For instance, governments attempting to create whole-of-government control of IT miss the point that IT is an instrument of governance and business, not a business in its own right. Governments that attempt to centralize everything under a federated model may be failing to understand that the main driver of both demand and success with IT is the way that the business organization operates and uses it.

"HealthSmart [Victoria's Whole-of-Health ICT Strategy] is trying to achieve something that I think they would probably label federated," Toomey says, "but it's really mass centralization of technology that appears to lack the critical focus on driving real success."

A brief scan of the HealthSmart Web site gives the impression of an ambitious technology program aiming to achieve vague and generalized business outcomes. The program governance approach described by HealthSmart focuses on technology delivery with hardly any reference to achieving clearly defined, measurable and important business outcomes, Toomey says.

"In addition to asking whether the program is actually reducing the costs of ICT for the major health-care providers, it would be fair to ask: 'What are the specific, measurable indicators of business success, and what is being done to ensure that there is real, tangible and relevant improvement in each and every indicator?' If these questions can't be answered fully and promptly, it would confirm that HealthSmart is repeating the mistakes of many predecessor projects, focusing on the technology rather than the business outcomes."

Without specific, relevant, achievable and measurable targets, there is no compelling reason for hospital administrators to buy into the vision, Toomey says. The chance to save the government a few million dollars at the cost of their own autonomy is not that compelling a reason.

Ditto initiatives like the Bracks government in Victoria's office of the CIO (OCIO) initiative, announced in 2003 to drive ICT policy and strategy within government and have whole-of-government responsibility for the use of ICT to transform government service delivery. The OCIO was given charge of ICT investment to address the government's priority outcomes and was expected to handle architecture planning and standardization of corporate ICT infrastructure.

That all changed when the re-elected Bracks government gave way to reality by breaking up the OCIO and replacing it with a new Information Systems and Infrastructure Office within the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance (DTF). Under the new arrangement Victorian government CIO Jane Treadwell moved to the Department of Victorian Communities along with some staff, while others moved to the DTF.

A spokesperson for the Victorian government says: "The Victorian government is integrating across-government ICT functions — from procurement through to the way it interacts with the community. A new Shared Services Centre in the Department of Treasury and Finance will provide ICT services to all state government departments, while a new Information Systems and Infrastructure Office, also within DTF, will provide leadership on all government-wide ICT issues.

"Programs to help the government better interact with the community will now be handled by the Department of Victorian Communities. Strategic issues affecting the future of the ICT industry across Victoria will continue to be handled by MMV [Multimedia Victoria] (under the new name 'Information Industries Victoria'), which will sit in the Department of Innovation, Industry & Regional Development."

The spokesperson had no comment about why the previous model apparently failed, or the intent of the changes, but Toomey finds the announced changes entirely predictable. After all, he says, the OCIO's charter was almost certainly in fundamental conflict with the objectives of most business and technology leaders in the majority of the agencies. "Agencies had no good reasons to cooperate, and many reasons — regardless of their goodness — to disobey or pay lip-service," Toomey says.