Government, innovation, and speed all belong in the same sentence. Here’s why.

It’s not a surprise to anybody that governments have very long decision-making cycles.

Decisions involving spending taxpayer money must pass through multiple gating levels and governance processes, including reviews and cross reviews, then taken to market for tendering; and only then comes decision-making. The process takes time - and government organisations and departments of all kinds can be trapped into thinking that every decision must take time.?

But when it comes to innovation and supporting people during a health crisis, time is critical. When a policy-maker in a powerful position, such as a Prime Minister or a Premier, makes a decision and says, “This needs to happen immediately!” then it can and does happen right away.?

So, we know the capability is there. And, when it happens, it happens best in a cloud environment – that’s the only way anything can move at the necessary speed. Take contact tracing for Covid-19 as an example; we only had to blink and there were QR codes on the doors of every public outlet.

If we take away all the heavy-duty governance processes and red tape, the system can work very well. Most importantly, when people need it to.

However, when things work quickly it challenges our traditional concepts of governance. This ties into the concept of one-way doors and two-way doors; a concept that we use at Amazon.

One way door

• A decision that is very difficult to unravel or undo?
• Such as, quitting your job
• Making a significant capital investment
• It’s a decision that is virtually impossible to reverse

Two-way door

• A decision that’s simple to reverse
• Such as, using a particular type of database
• Trying a new brand of coffee beans
• It is a decision that has a small “blast radius” and no long-term ramifications

So, for a two-way door decision, you should feel happy to go forward with only 70 percent confidence in your decision, because the impact of getting things wrong is not significant, or can easily be adjusted.

And that’s one of the hidden things cloud offers; more two-way door decisions.

But governance processes are often based on one-way door decisions.? What this means is, if a project is faced with the prospect of spending a few million dollars on infrastructure that can’t be changed for the next five years, you'll need to look at that very carefully, as it involves a big capital spend.

However, if that project is built with cloud services, and you know that if you select a particular technology that needs to change that can be done with a click of a mouse or an API call, you can ask yourself: do we need as much governance?

Change the mental model

I believe there needs to be a change of mental model, based upon the ground truth of where technology is now.?

If the COVID-19 pandemic happened 10 years ago and a Premier said, “We need people to be informed of a negative results to their COVID tests in a matter of hours instead of days” it would not have happened. The concept of implementing anything like the SMS text-bot service that helped NSW Health operationalise just weeks into the pandemic, simply wasn’t there. Fast forward to 2020 and this partnership was able to conceptualise, build, and course correct a highly-innovative solution rapidly -? understanding that it could be retracted without consequence if it didn’t work.?

Why, then, do we choose one-way doors?

It’s fascinating to think about how much technology has changed while we weren't looking. We haven’t been asking questions, such as, “Can my entire workforce work from home?”? Yet in the midst of a global pandemic, here we all are. Still, we repeatedly choose one-way doors: all or nothing decisions, instead of testing new paths forward.?

Where decision-making happens in the organisation is a key consideration. An American colleague recently said; “The turkeys are not going to vote for Thanksgiving.” In other words, if my job is to provide desktops to people in an office, why would I suggest that working from home is viable, possible, secure, or safe? The fact is it’s easy to drop every innovation-related decision at IT’s door alone, when there are other voices to be included.

There’s a popular meme around Covid asking “Who has been the biggest leader in the digital transformation of your organisation?” The three choices were CEO, CIO, and COVID-19. And, of course, Covid had a big tick next to it.

The pandemic has forced us to think differently, and it’s not until we’re forced to think about things differently that we get different outcomes.

Do I believe everything in the future should be the way it is during the pandemic? The gloves are off and away we go! No, that’s not realistic. Governance is there for a reason. What I'm suggesting is we should not snap back to what it was like in a pre-pandemic world, to a point where at times we wrapped ourselves up in so much red tape that we could not and did not innovate; and citizens’ needs weren’t met as a consequence. We have proven that we can trust the two-way doors that a secure cloud application development environment provides. So, we should.

What we are likely to see is a midpoint of what was happening, but that will only happen if we question the governance processes that are not necessarily fit for purpose anymore.

How the government can innovate at speed

It’s all about changing the expectation.?

The people that truly want to innovate, need to find a way to explain it to their stakeholders so they get more green lights. Decision stakeholders often don’t understand how reversible decisions are these days, or how fast you can move. Establishing “broad running rails” vs bespoke approval for each activity combines risk management with innovation in a complementary manner.?

Everyone from IT practitioners to CIOs and CTOs need to realise that their stakeholders are now operating in a new normal. They know what you are capable of so let's make it the “new normal”.