Building a smart(er) nation: Speeding up is more than going faster

One of my tasks as a Singapore Smart Nation Fellow at the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) is to help our government IT move faster. Wanting to go faster is a pretty common desire in today’s IT environment, or as I sometimes put it: “No business has ever complained that their IT is moving too quickly”. Both our citizens and our local business ecosystem expect us to move more quickly because their expectations are set by Facebook, Amazon, Grab, Go-Jek, Stripe, and many other digital disruptors. 

As far as governments go, Singapore is generally considered one of the more nimble ones - after all our nation came a long way in just 54 years. Our speed is often attributed to our nation’s compact size, but that might be a bit of an oversimplification. Being small doesn’t automatically make you go fast, but it makes you want to go fast: due to its limited size, Singapore doesn’t benefit from the same amount of momentum as larger nations. This means that changes in local or regional economics, demographic shifts, or global trade tensions generally affect us more quickly. Hence, we have to stay on our toes to continue to be successful.

When trying to speed up, living in interesting, but also uncertain times can complicate things a bit. When you have a clear plan and direction, you can go quite fast -- it’s a bit like a car on a straightway. But if you have a lot of twists and turns and course corrections, going fast isn’t quite as easy -- that’s what makes rally driving look so amazing. In the enterprise it’s similar: moving quickly while being ready to change direction on a moment’s proves to be a special challenge -- one that we are ready to take.

Architecture Provides Options

One way to maintain velocity in face of uncertainty is a good architecture. That’s because architecture gives you options. Those options come in very handy when there’s a sudden need to increase capacity or to add new functionality that wasn’t planned. Following this logic one can see that the widespread belief that architecture may slow you down isn’t true. In a rapidly changing environment a solid architecture actually becomes more valuable: it helps you not get stuck because you painted yourself into a corner.

Speeding Up: Don’t Burst the Boiler

While a good architecture is a helpful ingredient into speeding up your organization, it’s just an enabler -- it can’t magically make you move faster. So, naturally, organizations are going to look for additional ways to “speed things up” to keep pace with the so-called digital disruptors. 

Now, imagine you are building and running steam engines. Steam engines are mechanical wonders and can go pretty fast. However, someone else comes along with an electric train that moves significantly faster. What’s your first instinct? To keep up, you’ll put more coal into the fire and increase pressure on the boiler. And initially it works, your steam engine will speed up. But of course, we know how the story continues: soon, the boiler will burst and the engine will blow up.

As obvious as this may seem, many organizations do fall into the same trap of trying to speed up just by increasing the pressure. This not only leads to significant strain on the organization but it also won’t suffice to compete with disruptors, which by the very definition of the word play by different rules. 

Friction is Everywhere and Nowhere

The second major obstacle you are up against is friction. Friction is the thing that sucks power and keeps you from going faster. The tricky property of friction is twofold: first, friction isn’t in a single place but usually hidden in multiple places. Second, if you follow your instinct to overcome friction by adding more coals to the fire, friction also goes up, so you’re not gaining much and can once again blow up the engine.

Organizational friction takes many forms: slow software builds, lengthy approval processes, outdated policies, many status reports, frequent meetings, complex request forms, tedious quality gates, and endless email threads with too many recipients. Still, it’s hard to pinpoint and remove. If you want to speed up, instead of pushing harder, you need to determine which of these friction items can be removed without compromising on quality or transparency. For example, automated builds and real-time dashboards can give you quality and transparency without slowing you down. 

Speeding Up By Thinking Differently

So rather than pushing harder you need to work smarter and question some existing assumptions. The most important assumption you need to break is that compromising on quality can make you go faster. I often joke that if as a developer you were asked to sabotage your project and slow it down, the most effective strategy would be to insert nasty hard-to-find bugs. If that’s the case, then it’s the exact opposite of the well-known project management triangle that correlates resources, scope and time against quality. 

Once we realize that quality speeds you up instead of slowing you down, you can have a completely different view on how to speed things up. That’s how modern “digital” companies work: high levels of automation both in their software delivery and operational processes affords them speed at quality.

Breaking such existing assumptions is one of the key hurdles to take in any transformation that doesn’t want to “burst the boiler”. For example, many organizations have learned that customization drives up cost, that standards inhibit flexibility, that automation reduces control, that innovation is risky, or that transparency reduces motivation. All these assumptions, while true in certain contexts, have been successfully challenged by companies that disrupt existing markets. Because existing, successful businesses must first unlearn their existing assumptions, transformation is very difficult.

Public sector over time has also learned to make many such assumptions. For example, many governments have learned that change brings risk, so to be risk averse, as we should be, we have become change averse. Also, we have learned to accept that the need for security reduces our productivity and significantly drives up our cost, often by way of complex bespoke solutions. Lastly, many governments have learned that they are very special snowflakes. In reality, though, while governments pursue a different mission than commercial enterprises, not everything they do is all that different from the rest of the world.  

Increasing Developer Productivity with Platforms

So how does one translate these concepts into action? First, we have to acknowledge that having numerous agencies going on such a journey individually won’t work terribly well. Second, we have to realize that software delivery is at the center of digital innovation. As you are looking to chart new territory, the number of innovation cycles you can make per time unit or cost element is the defining factor. And each innovation cycle requires you to deliver software to the end user - that’s the only effective way to learn whether your idea and its implementation needs refinement.  

Therefore, GovTech Digital Service has several teams that build common platforms to help agencies and our own teams adopt modern development styles like agile, DevOps, and Lean development. These platforms cover all critical aspects of software delivery, which we visualize in our “four-leaf clover”:

• Tool Chain: the build, deploy, and configuration mechanisms that compile and package code into deployable units and distributes them to the run-time platform.
• Run-time Platform: the underlying platform that distributes workloads across available compute resources, manages workloads, network routing, and can add resilience via automated restarts. 
• Communications Management: applications and services don’t live in isolation, so they’ll want to communicate securely and dynamically (e.g. if you want to test a new version of a service).
• Monitoring / Operations: Lastly, you need to have an idea of what your application is doing – is it operating as expected, is it taking more traffic than designed for, are there any warning signals? 

Our mission is to boost innovation and diversity in our applications’ functionality by taking care of repetitive or mundane tasks that distract developers from delivering business value. The platform architecture is based on open source components and modern frameworks like containers and Kubernetes, but also includes communication tools such as API gateways. 

Speeding Up Does More than Go Faster

The amazing thing is that once you speed up your software delivery and operations, it does more than just make you go faster: it allows you to work in a completely different fashion. For example, many enterprises are stuck in the apparent conflict between cost and system availability: the traditional way to make systems more available was to add more hardware to better distribute load and to allow fail over to a standby system in case of a critical failure. Once you have a high degree of automation and can deploy new applications within minutes on an elastic cloud infrastructure, you often don’t need that extra hardware sitting around - after all the most expensive server is the one that’s not doing anything. Instead, you quickly provision new hardware and deploy software when the need arises. This way you achieve increased resilience and system availability at a lower cost. Without bursting the boiler. 

Another great capability resulting from speed is disposability. Unlike in the real world, where we prefer to reuse, reduce, and recycle, in IT we prefer to throw things away and re-create them. That’s because our goods are virtual - we don’t throw away any actual hardware. Disposing and re-creating your systems assures that you are in a well-defined, clean state, free of disturbance by malware or by a developer who “just needed to make that small fix”. 

So, speeding up does a lot more for your organization than just making it go faster. It allows you to work in completely different ways that break existing assumptions. What it takes is to think out of the box and challenge the status quo. This is really a big part of what we do at GovTech: rather than be a classic “IT shop” that keeps the lights on, we see ourselves as a change agent that enables our government agencies to think and work differently, or, as you may say, more smartly.

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