Instant Technology Plan for Local Government – ICT strategy recreated free of charge
Petteri Heino
Sales professional & author | 5th book "AI For Economy" out now | Toastmaster | ex-Cisco, CA, HP, Tieto, Elisa, Intel | Annika's patron
Instant Technology Plan for Local Government is a pro bono consulting sprint for a refreshing the whole ICT strategy. Scope includes key areas such as cloud, data, AI, telecom, security and IT service management - and trainings.
The intended audience for Instant Technology Plan is municipalities and regions. In the Nordic context that means customers with a mission in social, healthcare, education, culture and rescue services. There is a similar sister service for nonprofit organizations.
Instant Technology Plan recreates organization’s ICT strategy. It puts on paper how ICT is going to support the substance, the asks to management and a multi-year action plan. In a nutshell, the sprint provides the why (narrative), the how (roadmap) and the wow (effective collaterals).
Some of the accents within Instant Technology Plan are contracts, new sources of income, decision making on AI & data use cases, hardening the common ICT capabilities and reinventing the telecom stack.
Clear directions are powerful
External changes, especially the very rapid development of many abstract new technologies at the same time requires narrative. These new technologies, cloud, data, AI, edge computing require it, a pan-organizational explanation, what are they to you.
Without your words and your proposal for internal alignment, culture develops its own narrative. That can result in unsafe risk-taking, or at the other end of the spectrum, not making use of new technologies either on time or at all.
The logic we follow is that it is better to try to guide with a strategy (with a carrot) than to enforce with tight rulesets (with a stick).
Having said that, local government does need some “stick” governance controls because of regulated procurement, critical infrastructure (such as water distribution) and sensitive and valuable information (such as planning).
ICT leaders may also need to protect employer’s interests, not only the interests of users and developers. The Intel team prepares to suggest some of these rulesets - API policy, ecosystems policy and cloud procurement governance, and we have templates on them.
The local government imperatives
Healthcare is a significant cost for nation states, so there is interest to find savings in it, plus to decrease costs of care using new technologies. Finding cost-savings via taking down the organizational walls between social and healthcare services is a topical theme.
Of these two, healthcare is significantly heavier user of technology. Doctors pre-emptively solve health issues by vaccinating people and if you have an issue, they diagnose you quite precisely with a stethoscope. None of that pre-emptive effective “fixing” and precise diagnosing exists in social services. Data and its analytics could become the social workers digital stethoscope.
Education – that part which belongs to local government - has witnessed a rapid uptake of online tools as result of the pandemic. Learning from home, online assessments and broadcast classes will stay in the toolbox. This puts pressures on the educators how they acquire new skills such as using video, but also on the back office where perfect security and privacy have to be maintained.
Planning is a multifaceted function. It carries both costs and provides income. New demands include minimizing CO2 emissions from traffic, which in turn results in more dense building, supporting rail and electric vehicles. All this should be carried out keeping cost of housing affordable to avoid segregation of areas. And one of them could be the town centre which has lost its attractiveness.
State throws to local government quite a curveball. How the organizations need to provide the services is often defined in legislation. Companies would be able to prioritize, divest and merge desired and undesired parts of the business, but there is little political consensus to decrease number of municipalities to get to volume efficiencies and cost-savings that way.
Within what’s allowed by legislation, many local government organizations have seized to do everything themselves, and there is work towards specialization.
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How the imperatives reflect to the ICT function
The aforementioned forming of partnerships and splitting & sharing responsibilities emphasizes importance of contracts and that’s one of our accents. Also, this that someone consumes and someone else delivers opens opportunities for new sources of income, another accent for ICT.
Use of new AI and data technologies can help local government to provide better services and decrease costs. But that’s about it – other than just being tools, they carry little value for the organization. Hence, it is important to financially rate the use cases with these new technologies to ensure benefits to the actual mission.
In the center of the ICT strategy should be the common ICT capabilities. Organization needs them anyway either as investments or services, and they should be adequate and include a change/develop facet. The “commons” are also in a state of change, especially because of cloud.
Finally, big chunk of common ICT costs comes from telecom. The telecom services and contracts therein might still reflect a situation where compute and storage in your datacenter, where in reality they are already in the cloud. Re-strategizing telecoms to wireless and cloud-centric should be appealing in the Nordics since we have two important change agents here, Nokia and Ericsson.
Statement of a lot of work
Intel’s effort commences with an exhaustive online survey on the as-is situation, wants and needs. It replaces most interviews and allows for individuals to provide their responses when they have time.
Card games are offered for cloud and AI for discovery of these subjects. Video posting on The Cloud Game is here and AI Card Game play instructions are here. Games also provide quick maturity assessments. For data, the Intel team can also hold a ? day Data & Analytics 101 training.
AI and data use cases are delivered with recommendations in a formal inventory called Big Map of Use Cases. A light security audit is provided for, resulting in a security framework to identify development items.
Strategy is just that, high level planning. If you need a bit more depth, Packs are optional (still free of charge) seasonally changing extras to dig into certain topics. At the writing of this Packs are offered for ICT sustainability, video and 3D & metaverse presence planning.
The defined narrative and roadmap are then put into a single strategy publication - you can hand over to stakeholder just one high quality “glossy” document. We would choose a suitable but striking visual theme for the publication - that could be for example cartoons.
Out of the final strategy publication we would produce a video as a summary. Alternatively, we could just provide a storyboard or other input to your communications team.
Signing up to be the smartest city you can
Customer effort is estimated to be 10 h per project team member. You should nominate a patron to provide for the practicalities, and weekly/recurring project team meetings are recommended. Duration of the sprint is 8-10 weeks in calendar time, provided your contributors have bandwidth to participate and to give inputs.
There is a brochure along the lines of this article, including a Q&A. We are happy to contribute and provide inputs within the context of this article and local government organizations ICT questions without entering into a formal agreement. Send an inMail or biz email for inquiries and signing up.