We have to learn to think in a new way.

There’s going to be some provocation in this and possibly some challenges, too.  There’s a basic conversation that needs to be had, and frankly we’re missing it. In our rush to whatever the latest is, in a never-ending cycle of ‘chase the easy button’, we keep missing a basic question.

Are you iterating your process as fast as your tech?

Or, to be even more provocative, perhaps your process should really be iterating faster than your tech.  Today’s discussion is about where your process iteration right now is being bound, and how you might be able to break it free.

The seesaw of business and technology seems to have permanently ended up with an elephant sitting firmly on the side of technology.  And there’s no joy to be had when you’re stuck four feet in the air with your feet dangling. If you do it long enough, you end up going numb, and the shock when you get dropped hurts.  So how might we make sure that the ideals of business and technology are appropriate and proportional when used in a government context? How can we work towards iterating our processes as fast as our technology?

The Trap of Governance

The go-to answer of any institution, government, academic, non-profit, or private sector is governance.  Largely when technology first started majorly disrupting government operations around the turn of the century (isn’t that odd to say?) the very first thing to be done was to put into place governance.

At first, it was simple things labelled under the banner of the insidious “best practice”.  Change Control Boards. And Executive Review Boards. These were meant to be lightweight. A short, weekly meeting to provide some community-based transparency and executive ownership of what was happening.  The government equivalent to hoping for that open floor plan so you could watch the kids play while you prepare food in the kitchen.

But like always, as people rotated in and out of jobs, and governance in place failed to stem the tide of demands, the result was to layer on more governance.  Lightweight CCBs suddenly became ITIL frameworks, or ISO programs. Even government-specific programs like CPIC or RMF brought an ever increasing number of requirements to the agency.  Each program cost more than the last and was rolled out with fanfare and sweet, sweet government dollars for contractors.

It should come as no surprise that these governance processes failed to deliver as the marketplace and general computing environment pivoted to true commoditized and consumption-based services.  And now we have Cloud Governance Boards, FedRAMP, and a whole slew of additional process levied.

What started out as a weekend jaunt to the woods has turned into a full on expedition.  Layering governance doesn’t deliver the results executives and employees hope for.  Meanwhile, navigating the field of compliance requirements to do anything these days is nothing short of breathtaking in cost and scope.  Does anyone even have a process catalogue?

Governance has failed to deliver, mostly because we have failed to govern the process.  If that’s too pithy an answer, we can add the following things you might do to review your current governance posture:

• What does your current governance catalog look like, for the entire lifecycle of any given service?
• How much does that governance architecture add to the cost of delivering the service?
• How much of that governance architecture is actually mandated by law?
• What would your governance structure look like if you shifted to a high-trust environment which only satisfied the necessary legal requirements?

That will give you a pretty handy gap analysis along with some places to trim and use automation.  Plus the added bonus of a handy thought exercise. By the way, no one will like you asking those questions.  They never do.

Feedback is the key, but we keep trying to put it in the wrong lock

Let’s look at a meta example:  ISO 9001. There was a short stint in the early 2000s where multiple agencies were pursuing this certification as a method for proving a continuous improvement cycle based on quality.  An excellent aspiration, but how many of those organizations still maintain those certifications today? We attempted to put a framework in place to force feedback.

Feedback is both cultural and organic.  It must be perceived as safe to deliver and receivable at any time.  In fact, the more frequent and honest feedback is between people the more powerful it can be.  As numerous academic studies, including those from Google’s workforce teams have cited, Psychological Safety and Feedback are some of the most critical components to high performing teams.

If you try to constrain feedback by fencing it or only allowing it to happen in certain ways, then you are immediately reducing its efficacy.  If governance is overused then feedback is the font which has been siphoned. In fact, think about it like this: with enough feedback in place, how much governance do you really need?  Now that’s an interesting question.

Much like our governance exercise above, we can assess our feedback frequency by asking the right questions.

• Do we understand the role of feedback in our service delivery processes?
• Are our processes using feedback on a continuous basis, not only at the end of the delivery?
• What burden would additional feedback create in the delivery cycle?
• What can be done to reduce that burden while keeping the benefit of the feedback?

“We have to learn to think in a new way”

Einstein said this in a 1955 document entitled the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.  The context, of course, was the impact that splitting the atom would bring to society, but the same could be said of any society-changing event.  Certainly technology is not exempt. We are faced with the disturbing challenge of needing to find a new way to think, even as the society around us continues to change.  It is no mean feat.

But there is hope.  Take a small process that you have.  Something simple, perhaps even silly, that everyone wants to see change but for some reason doesn’t.  Maybe the paper is stored in the second shelf on the third cabinet because that’s always been the way of it.  

Take that process and run it through the exercises above.  Follow the paper, its role in the service delivery (to transport a document in a physical format), from purchase to expiry.  Ask questions about cost, and payment, and control. Very likely you’ll be appalled (or surprised) over how much control exists in certain parts and how little in others.  See where the feedback cycles map into that view.

Once that’s done, then you can really see the service.  Does it need to be changed? Are there easy places where it can change?  It becomes easier and more visible when it is explored. If you can’t fix all of it, fix the parts you can, but transparently and honestly disclose the problems with the pieces you can’t.  On the off chance there’s absolutely nothing you can do, congratulations, you’ve reached perfect bureaucracy (that’s not a bad thing, that means maximum effectiveness and efficiency in delivery).

Wait a while, see how it works.  If you’ve incorporated feedback properly, you’ll quickly learn whether any changes you’ve made are working.  If there’s no feedback, then be concerned. You’ll learn whether additional changes are needed. Or perhaps there’s been a big #failarmy this time around.  Be up front about it and even in failure you’ll succeed.

Rinse.  Lather. Repeat.  

No doubt this is hard to do in situ.  You might need outside observations, labor, or even tools to make it effective.  Understanding the impact that governance and feedback have on the effectiveness of a process is the very first step in understanding how to make that process more effective.

Communicating that information is another challenge, as is applying the right tools to iterate process effectively - and topics for an upcoming articles.