There Are Only 10 Types of People

I made an off-the-cuff remark about the tendency of people to use this image to illustrate articles about ‘digital’. It appears to depict some binary instructions traversing the walls of some kind of weird quantum tunnel. Or perhaps the tunnel is supposed to represent an Internet connection, who knows?

The Binary Tunnel

In the same publication, on the same day, we find a similar image used to illustrate a different story – this time we seem to be looking at a funky binary cube.

In response to my plea to photo editors to step away from these abstractions of ‘digital’ Jeni Tennison asked the (not unreasonable) question “What are people supposed to use instead?!?”

I started to reply to Jeni but only got as far as “Well, they could always use…”

What could they use? What image conveys ‘digital’? My problem with the binary cube/tunnel is that binary code is literally (and I mean that ‘literally’ literally) as far from the end user experience as it’s possible to get. Binary is the bottom layer of computing – the language of the machines. Very few people in the world have ever or could ever code in binary. It’s an old joke:

“There are only 10 types of people – those who understand binary and those who don’t”

OK Mr smarty pants, what image could we use to put at the top of all those articles about ‘digital’? Well, I’m as guilty as the rest – this is a logo for the Sheffield City Region CIO Forum that I designed a while back. Spot the binary?

To my shame, the ones and zeroes mean something – 010000110100100101001111 codes for the text string ‘CIO’. Sorry.

The image below is my take at representing ‘digital’. It’s not very good (I’m no designer) but it does try to depict digital in use in a way that most humans would recognise. Photo editors everywhere – I give it to you, copyright free. You are welcome.

 

 

 

 

 

Hey, you, get off of my cloud!

An interesting thing happened this week. A supplier contacted us to let us know that they are moving some of the cloud services they deliver for us to a new data centre (in this context I’m defining ‘cloud’ as ‘stuff that is hosted by someone else – usually the system’s vendor’).

The didn’t let us know this as a courtesy – they had to let us know because the changes will necessitate some IP/routing changes at our end.

This got us thinking – in many cases, technically speaking, a vendor could shift their systems to a new location without letting the customer know. Indeed, much of the attraction of cloud/SaaS from my point of view is that all that stuff is opaque to me. As long as they are keeping my stuff safe I really don’t need to what else they are doing.

A colleague of mine pointed out that the vendor could be moving stuff to China – we just don’t know. I’m not sure of the wisdom of choosing China here as an example of the ‘Wild West of Data’ but the point is valid – the UK Data Protection Act requires that we keep our data within the EEC.

Needless to say (I hope) whenever we let a SaaS contract there are clauses in there about security and it’s made explicit that the data must stay in the EEC. So if the supplier was to move storage to China they’d be in breach.

That’s sad though isn’t it? I drew 3 conclusions from our ruminations:

1. How frustrating it must be for suppliers not to be able to move infrastructure to wherever works based for them. Inevitably this must mean that we’re paying more than we might otherwise.
2. How archaic the DPA is in its stance on data location. I’m pretty sure (but willing to be proved wrong) that the ‘keep it in the EEC’ rule pre-dates the Internet. It needs updating to reflect the global nature of our networks.
3. All of this might be irrelevant. I’m not entirely sure that the people hosting our data always know where it’s all sitting/going. Database sharding technologies mean that it’s quite possible that a single database is split between several countries at the same time. If the supplier has data centres across the globe will they definitely have ticked the ‘keep it in Europe’ check box?

Time to do away this with geographic paternalism. If we’ve checked that our suppliers know what they are about, from a data protection perspective, then who cares where the ones and zeroes reside?

To paraphrase The Rolling Stones – “Hey, you, do what you want with my cloud!”

Indie Music Radio

Lessons for the Public Sector from the Evolution of Early Life

Nobody is really sure how life first started on this planet but there are lots of ideas and we’ll have an answer soon. Fortunately for me this gap in our knowledge doesn’t matter because I want to focus on how life evolved immediately after its first appearance and something we know quite a bit about.

The first life was restricted to the ocean and ‘life’ back then meant a soup of single celled organisms floating around and not interacting much. This kind of life is known as ‘prokaryotic‘ – tiny single cells with hardly any internal differentiation – no nucleus, just a blob. Prokaryotes are still around today in the form of bacteria.

Then, about 1.5 billion years ago, an amazing thing happened.

Some single celled organisms found themselves on the inside of another single celled organism. Sometimes the big cell was ‘eating’ the other, but this wasn’t always an intentional move – it was just that one organism had somehow managed to cross the cell wall of the other:

This would usually result in the death of one or both of the organisms – or neither organism would really notice and nothing would change. And so it went on for millions of years. Sometimes though, when one organism consumed another there would be a wonderful coincidence which meant that both organisms benefited from the new arrangement.

Symbiosis – or to put it another way – teamwork!

This is how the first multi-cellular organisms came about, and these are known as eukaryotes. Humans are an example of a eukaryotic organism. Bear with me – I’m getting to the public sector bit……

Evidence supports the idea that eukaryotic cells are actually the descendents of separate prokaryotic cells that joined together in a symbiotic union. In fact, the power station of all our cells – the mitochondrion – seems to be the “great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter” of a free-living bacterium that was engulfed by another cell, perhaps as a meal, and ended up staying as a sort of permanent house guest. The host cell profited from the chemical energy the mitochondrion produced, and the mitochondrion benefited from the protected, nutrient-rich environment surrounding it. This kind of “internal” symbiosis — one organism taking up permanent residence inside another and eventually evolving into a single lineage — is called endosymbiosis.

The 2 organisms working together are more efficient and have competitive advantage over the single celled guys. Natural selection did its stuff and……wind the clock forward a billion years…..to the arrival of us lot sat staring wistfully out of office windows.

It’s important to understand that each organism had to give up A LOT in order to make the symbiosis work. Taking mitochondria as an example – the host cell was glad to benefit from the energy produced by the mitochondria but as the new symbiotic organism grew and become ever more complex it absolutely depended on this energy. Similarly, the mitochondria loved the protection afforded by the host cell but it had to entirely give up some pretty basic controls – including the ability to reproduce independently.

The Eukaryotic Public Sector

I imagine that you can see where I’m going with this. With very few exceptions our public sector bodies are like the single cell prokaryotes swimming about in a soup of inefficiency. But LOOK OUT – someone is adding a toxin to that soup – an ingredient called AUSTERITY. It’s time for us to evolve or die.

Now, it just so happens that my Council has an excellent ICT service (this is true) and that there is a bit of spare capacity within the data centre (also true). We would happily be engulfed by a, say, local NHS Trust and deliver their IT for them – in return we’d be rewarded with life giving cash.

And maybe that Trust, or perhaps a neighbouring university, has an excellent, say, Finance service that we could consume. Maybe there could even be a quid pro quo deal where we don’t need to exchange real cash. In this way the cell walls come down and a much more sophisticated set of public services evolves.

It’s not easy of course. As already noted it is necessary for each partner to give something up if the eukaryotic organisation is to be created. The thing that you’re losing is sovereignty over some functions. To my mind the kind of protectionism/sovereignty that we typically see in the public sector is a crime. ‘Sovereignty’ is really little more than macho chest thumping and posturing. It is a dog, scent marking its territory. We need to grow up.

Sure, it’s scary. If my Council does your IT then it’s going to be hard to roll that back – very quickly the new eukaryotic organisation can no more return to doing its own IT than I can get rid of the mitochondria from my cells and start generate energy by installing a solar panel on my head.

Nonetheless – it’s the right thing to do and, really, it’s the only thing to do. I’m not scared – if there’s any IT service out there (public or private) that can do a better job than ours at the same/lower cost then I absolutely 100% want them to take it on, because that’s the right thing to do for my organisation and the people we serve.

There are many services that we’re duplicating for no good reason. Legal, HR, IT, Finance, Audit, Procurement – there really is no local dimension to these services – they could be done from anywhere by anyone.

Symbiosis – yes please.

Indie Music Radio

I Hold These Truths to be Self Evident – A Constitution for the Digital Engine Room

I’m yet to be convinced about the merits of creating a Digital Strategy or even an ICT Strategy (more on this here).

What you absolutely must have, however, is a set of principles which govern the way you do things or, as I prefer to think of it, a ‘constitution’. If you give your self a set of golden rules to dictate the way in which you respond to any request then the actual project list becomes significantly less important.

Your constitution – your philosophy is your strategy.

The list below is my constitution – I hold these truths to be self-evident.

• Secure by default: information security will be designed in to all our systems, changes and processes right from start and throughout;
• Information, not Infrastructure: Local Authorities should not be in the IT business – hardware and software is ancillary to any Council’s core activity (serving the public). Whilst the information we create and use is of ever growing strategic importance we can be less concerned about the infrastructure. We will continue to minimise our local infrastructure through a strong preference that systems will be vendor/cloud hosted wherever possible. We will review every significant application, starting with the largest and attempt to have them vendor hosted regardless of their current contractual state. Our aim is to quickly and safely reduce the equipment in our data centre and associated support activity to the absolute minimum;
• Open Standards and open data: the use of published, open, standards for data exchange will continue to be pursued, the use of open standards will ensure that the likelihood of supplier lock in is reduced and allow the transfer of services or suppliers without significant cost or loss of data. We will publish as much of our data as possible openly, online, for reuse by citizens, the private sector and other public sector organisations;
• Share and reuse: most Local Authorities do the same things in the same ways – this includes IT. This approach has resulted in an enormous duplication of effort and investment across the sector. We will always seek to join up with others and share services and our aspiration is to move away from each Council having its own IT department. We will learn from others and reuse software, processes and ideas;
• Browser delivered and browser agnostic: the web browser is already the de facto standard application delivery interface. Traditional software which runs via separate client installations will soon be a thing of the past. Wherever possible we will buy/build applications that run in a web browser and are agnostic to the type of browser and device in use;
• Any device, anywhere, any time: the traditional model of only being able to access Council applications from Council owned devices connected to the Council network is long gone. We will configure our network such that we can allow access from any device to authorised content whilst maintaining strong security;
• Buy, don’t build: our default approach is to buy ‘off the shelf’ software (rented where possible) rather than designed in-house. We will only develop bespoke ‘in house’ software as a last resort. This removes support overheads and makes it easier to move software to the cloud. We no longer have the resources to commit to developing lots of software and, more significantly, we absolutely do not have the resources to continue to support and development the software we create;
• Best of breed, not ERP: Local Authorities are some of the most complex and diverse organisations in the world. The wide range of services we deliver means that ‘one size fits all’ is never appropriate in the IT sense. We will take software procurement on a case by case basis always preferring best of breed point solutions over unwieldy enterprise-wide platforms that stifle agility and hamper cloud adoption;
• Integration and APIs: regardless of where the systems we use are hosted we will always work to ensure that the systems can ‘talk to each other’ and are integrated. This will allow us to move away from the traditional silo approach and give us a holistic view of the data we hold. Where systems are provided by a third party we will insist that APIs (application programming interfaces) are available and provided.
• Desktop and server virtualisation: physical infrastructure will be minimised through the use of server and desktop virtualisation. This allows us to extend the life of hardware and reduce the investment required in servers and laptops. In those instances when it is not possible to have a supplier host a system we will host the software in our own data centre. If possible we will use virtual servers to do so. Virtual servers are cheaper, greener, more efficient, more resilient and easier to support than traditional physical servers. We have already virtualised around 60% of our server fleet and we will review all our servers with a view to virtualising as many as possible. This will make provisioning easier and will also lead to a big energy efficiency gain as we decommission older servers which tend not to be very green;
• Rent, don’t own: where possible we will lease licences and hardware rather than buying assets outright. This allows is to respond more quickly to changing demands and removes the inertia that comes with sunk investment in assets. A move towards a more ‘rental’ model for the majority of our software will make cloud adoption easier, allow the uptake and standardisation of new software versions to reduce support costs and improve user satisfaction;
• Vanilla by default: Unlike the historic position, where software which is customisable to fit with business processes the working assumption will be that it is largely used out of the box as a standard or ‘vanilla’ version. Large scale or complex customisations to exactly meet business requirements will be avoided wherever possible; rather the expectation will be that business processes will be modified to meet the procured software’s approach to a process. This will significantly reduce the whole life cost of the software and enable the timely upgrade to new versions;
• Show, don’t tell – prototypes not slideware: sometimes we will have to build things in house because this is the only option. In these cases, new ideas and proposed changes are best communicated by demonstrating how they will work. We will eschew bullet points in presentations in favour of quick and simple wire frames, prototypes and proofs of concept.
• Minimum viable product: regardless of whether we are buying a product or building something ourselves we will adhere to the ‘minimum viable product’ principle (MVP). Rather than buying/building huge, complex unwieldy applications we will start small and move quickly. A MVP is the most pared down version of a product that can still be used and be useful.
• ICT Professionalism and organisational resilience: as the Council and customers increasingly rely on ICT and expect more from ICT the skills of the Corporate ICT department need to be managed carefully to ensure they are fit for purpose. Membership of recognised professional bodies, such as British Computer Society or SOCTIM by Corporate ICT staff will be encouraged. Further, we will reduce the risk of downtime and data loss by ensuring that the ICT organisation has sufficient resilience through strength in depth.
• Technology confidence in the wider workforce: we will create a skilled, technology-confident workforce through investing in learning, development and training opportunities for our own staff. We will, through training, enable staff to get the most benefit from our investment in technology;
• Open source software: procurement of open source software will always be considered; Open source products are rarely ‘free’ as there are usually support and productivity costs but it will always be considered.
• ICT Self-service: we will deploy self-service web tools to allow our customers to raise incidents and request changes and to give them the ability to log on to check the status of their requests. We will design these tools such that our customers will prefer this channel over telephone contact. At the same time we will reduce the number of hours during which we are contactable via phone.
• Business case driven: there will be a business case associated with everything we do. Usually this will be a financial business case (i.e. we will ‘invest to save’) but there are other types of case for change and some things are self-evidently the right thing to do.

What do you think?

Not just a digital strategy – it’s a business strategy for a digital age…

By fixating on the need for a digital strategy document we can often forget that the real goal is a set of digitally enabled business strategies or service plans.

You don’t just need a digital strategy – you need all of your service areas to write service plans and strategies that exploit digital.

Digital shouldn’t be handed down from the top of the organisation – it should bubble up naturally from the people who are tasked with delivering services. The business areas should be irrepressibly enthusiastic about using technology – they shouldn’t need coercing.

This is why our new strategy was co-produced with the various business units in the Council, with the aim of pulling together all aspects of the organisation’s digital work under one roof.

And here it is – our Digital Council Strategy 2016 to 2019:

Click here to see RMBC’s new Digital Council Strategy

 

 

 

 

Darwinian Forces are at Work in the Public Sector

Local Government has spent 5 years cutting back. We haven’t just cut to the bone, we’re now scraping the bone. This activity has taken massive amounts of cost out of Local Government and we have achieved savings on a scale that the 2010 versions of ourselves would have derided for being so large as to be the stuff fantasy.

Despite this we find ourselves with a set of 2015 Local Authorities which are not so different from their 2010 counterparts. Certainly our organisations are very much smaller in terms of headcount – but we persist in doing the same things in the time honoured fashions.

It’s time for us to call an end to the half-decade of inward focus – of salami slicing and thinning out – that work is at an end. We must now look outwards as we enter the second half of Local Government’s Decade Horribilis with our eyes on the real prize – changing the way we work by blurring, or entirely removing, the boundaries between many of the public sector organisations.

Like it or not ‘The State’ is in rapid retreat and the shrinkage won’t be reversed anytime soon. There are Darwinian forces at work here and only through the clever use of data and technology will the smart organisations have the requisite tools to evolve their way back from the brink.

It’s all about information – how we create it, how we store it, how we protect it, how we share it and how we exploit it. Clever exploitation of information and technology will help Local Government and the wider public sector to, not just survive, but thrive.

Austerity Bites

Up and down the land, as austerity bites

All the Friday nights are leaving ‘do’ nights

In the pub on the corner colleagues (now ex) chat and mingle

On the side, back in the office, they’ve left scotch eggs but no Pringles

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On the wall a line (on A4) once seemed funny, no doubt

‘Due to budget cuts the light at the end of the tunnel must now be turned out’

To the office cleaner (English A-levels) the sentiment seems Kafkaesque

(He’s in a bad mood – they know they are not allowed to eat at their desk)

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Under halogen spots the remaining M&S chocolate cake goes dry

In the pub on the corner Estelle’s trying not to cry

She’s worked there since school, 30 years, scaled middle-management heights

It’s true what they say – austerity bites

By @Copley_Rich

We Need a Local GDS with Muscle and Teeth

SOCITM have come out in favour of a Local GDS. Or at least I think they have.

Briefing number 68 is a tentative affair – the 8 page document includes a lengthy discussion (pages 1 through 6) of things that have failed to work in the past. It is not until the end of the briefing that we see some cautious exploration of what might work in the future.

I’m a big fan of SOCITM (and I’m a SMSITM too, a Senior Member of the Society of IT Managers) but I think they are in an impossible position. It is not reasonable to expect a group of IT managers to give an objective opinion on a proposal that means IT managers should lose control and power to a new Local GDS.

What we’re lacking here is some enthusiasm, some tub thumping – come on people, let’s make things better! We do not need the optional, toothless advisory service proposed by SOCITM, here’s why…

Central GDS works because:

1. It is supported at the highest level of government.
2. It has authority to tell departments what to do.
3. It is adequately resourced.
4. It does not respect the status quo.

Central GDS succeeds at the macro level for the same reason that successful internal Council ‘digital’ programmes succeed at the micro level. When a Council ‘gets’ digital and does it well it is because:

1. It is supported at the highest level of the organisation.
2. It has authority to tell departments what to do.
3. It is adequately resourced.
4. It does not respect the status quo.

SOCITM’s version of a Local GDS will not work because it fails to incorporate any of these 4 success factors. Rather there is a strange deference/respect for localism and an odd assumption that individual authorities must be allowed to say ‘no thanks’ should they wish to.

Let’s not forget why the idea of a Local GDS was proposed in the first place – it’s certainly not because everything is hunky dory in Council IT departments. We need a Local GDS to tell (not ask) Councils how to steer a way out of the highly inefficient, complex, fractured and duplicated IT landscape that we find ourselves in. We are desperate for a Local GDS, but only if…

1. It is supported at the highest level of Government (both Central and Local).
2. It has authority to tell Councils what to do.
3. It is adequately resourced.
4. It does not respect the status quo.

Given that ‘big’ GDS are doing so well I propose that they form a Local Government team within GDS and crack on with sorting out the tangled mess that is Local Government ICT.

We know from experience that centralisation (outside of Local Gov) works. The much maligned eGovernment programme of the early 2000’s was hugely successful in changing Local Government’s attitude towards ICT. In the space of a few years many Local Gov services were dragged (kicking and screaming) in to the digital age. We didn’t like it, but we did it because we had no choice and, when the dust had settled, we could see that real improvement had been delivered. It wasn’t perfect, but it brought about real changes.

But I’m not just talking about a Local GDS that offers guidance and sets rules and targets (although that’s clearly part of it). We need to go beyond the eGovernment model and create a Local GDS that makes things.

Let’s take a real world example to demonstrate what this might look like. Take a moment, if you will, to visit this page: https://www.gov.uk/school-term-holiday-dates

Enter your postcode and you’ll be directed to the school term dates on your Council’s website. This shows that GDS are already aggregating some Local Gov data and representing it to the citizen – albeit it’s presumably just a database with a list of URLs at the moment.

Pretty small stuff? Yes, but it poses some interesting questions.

Why don’t Councils simply routinely post their term dates, in an agreed open standard, to a central location so that all and sundry (including Gov.uk) can mash it up/use it as they see fit? Then once that’s been done, why do we need a term dates page on our local Council site? Why doesn’t Gov.uk just act as an aggregator for this data?

This train of thought leads me to question whether local.gov.uk is really what’s needed. Why create a new layer? Why not go further and leave it all to Gov.uk? Clearly term dates are easy – but I’m willing to bet that most of the pages on a Local Authority (LA) site contain information which could easily be output direct from back-office as a CSV.

This is a key thing that I would want from my new Local GDS – a set of open standards and associated policies which compel Local Authorities to submit certain datasets to Gov.uk. In this way we can gradually build up a central repository of data and scale back our own websites. Who knows, when the time comes to renew the CMS contract perhaps we won’t need to bother.

But let’s not get fixated on this ‘one website to rule them all‘ idea because that’s just the tip of the iceberg. GDS used gov.uk as a Trojan horse to smuggle in a shed load of platform and process reengineering behind the scenes. My proposal is similar – that a Local GDS (within ‘big’ GDS) could aggregate data at the centre and that this would be a vehicle to engineer a wholesale re-imagining of the way back end systems are managed. More on that in a moment, but before I leave the ‘one website’ topic I want to dispel a persistent myth.

“If you have a central website then whither accountability, whither democracy and whither independence!?“

This is the most oft-repeated argument but also the most specious. The URL of the website via which citizens consume a Council service has no relation to or impact on the accountability of the service. To claim that a Council without a website is democratically unaccountable is to claim that democratic accountability did not materialise until the dawn of the Internet in the 90s.

The proposed aggregation of data and systems in no way diminishes a Council’s accountability or contactability, indeed most LAs already have a web presence using at least some elements of which will be geographically distant from the LA.

I think what SOCITM et al are arguing is that if you use a central website how do you know which LA you’re dealing with? Who is providing the data? I personally can’t see how this matters but there is a simple way around it. The first step in any transaction would be to capture a postcode – from then on the website look and feel can be ‘skinned’ to brand it with LA colours, logos, contact numbers etc – this is child’s play.

Key Activities for Our New, Muscular, Local GDS

It’s not just about creating open standards, aggregating data and re-presenting data through Gov.uk. We need a Local GDS that treats Councils in the same way that Big GDS dealt with the 25 Central Govt. Departments that they are currently fixing. Here are some more things I want to see from a muscular Local GDS, starting with the open data/open standards mentioned above:

• Local GDS to create a set of open standards to cover all Local Gov data and to mandate that LAs must produce data extracts and upload them to an online location provided by LGDS.
• A new policy that all planned Local Gov ICT procurement activity valued at over £10k must be published in an online register (hosted by LGDS). This register must be consulted before any new procurement with a view to fostering joint procurement and reducing the dispiriting duplication across UK Local Gov.
• A new policy that a reasonable percentage of Local Gov ICT spend must be with SME suppliers.
• The introduction of a policy whereby any new Local Gov ICT project valued over £250k must be first justified to and approved by Local GDS.
• A policy that all Local Gov ICT procurement activity must give a preferential weighting towards cloud/SaaS. This will help suppliers to become cloud ready (more on why this matters here) and, more importantly, it will help Councils to begin emptying their data centres.
• The cataloguing and categorisation of UK public sector data centres to identify a small number of locations that could act as sites for aggregation of Local Gov data centre activity. These locations will be made PSN ready (if they are not already) and rack space to be offered at low cost to Councils. This, along with SaaS, will allow Councils to work towards being unencumbered by infrastructure.
• The creation of a handful of regional ICT ‘seed hubs’ – groups of people around which strategic activity can accrete. These hubs can offer advice to Councils at the region/city region level. Membership being mandatory with a view to aggregating ICT activity/strategy and thereby dragging ICT activity out of Councils and standardising it at a higher level.
• Mandate the use of PSN circuits. When PSN Roam goes live mandate the use of that too. This will mean that any public sector employee can go in to any PSN connected building and use PSN Roam wifi to get back to their own network.

All of these proposals are aimed at blurring the lines between Councils and fostering closer working across the public sector generally.

Clearly LGDS is going to need some investment – upfront and ongoing. But this will be peanuts in comparison to the year on year savings. This is the same ‘invest to save model’ that has worked well for Big GDS.

I call on someone, anyone and everyone to lobby Cabinet Office/GDS to create a Local GDS under the wider GDS umbrella. I call on the LGA and SOLACE to support this proposal and to pledge their individual Local Authorities to engaging fully with Local GDS in an effort to end the shocking duplication caused by 400 LAs doing the same thing in the same way without talking to each other.

In Praise of Babel Fish and Boundary Spanners

We’re all busy. In the public sector our huge workloads are compounded by the unending need to cut back on spending in response to ‘austerity’ (I don’t believe ‘austerity’ really exists, it’s just a convenient untruth, but that’s a post for another day).

Given the challenges facing us our instinct is to get our heads down and crack on – it’s difficult to find the time to do otherwise.

There’s a danger, though, in retrenching. If we retreat in to our organisational silos then we are likely to lose sight of the big picture. Organisations need boundary spanners – those rare individuals who can sit across divisional boundaries and understand the wider world. If you think for a moment I’ll bet that you can identify your own boundary spanners – people who seem to be involved in everything, people who can talk in the language of other departments. Maybe you’re a boundary spanner?

One of the things that boundary spanners do is act as an organisational babel fish. My favourite of all Douglas Adams’ amazing creations, the babel fish (when inserted in one’s ear) allows one to immediately understand anything that is being said – even if it’s said in a language we’ve never heard before.

Boundary spanners can speak the language of the whole organisation, not just the discrete area which we might consider to be the ‘day job’. Anybody at any level of an oganisation can be a boundary spanner but it’s an essential skill for leaders. A departmental leader should hold the service for which they are responsible at arm’s length. A good CIO, for example, must be as close to the business units as they are to the ICT department. This places the CIO in a position to effect 2-way translation – ie to explain to the ICT team what it is the customer really wants and to clarify/simplify the information which flows back from the ICT team to the customer.

Professionals in any discipline have a tendency to communicate with laypeople using impenetrable language strewn with 3 letter acronyms. A good leader and boundary spanner will ensure that this doesn’t happen – they’ll be a babel fish.

Another key role of the boundary spanner is to act as a ‘critical friend’. Using IT as an example again (because that’s my area) the CIO/boundary spanner will challenge the business units to clarify their thinking when it is apparent that the customer is not really sure what they want (or, more importantly, what they need). It works the other way too – the CIO boundary spanner should push back hard on the ICT team when they are saying, for example, that something can’t be done. Why can’t it be done? Are you sure? What if we do it another way? All this happens behind the scenes and can go a long way to keeping VIPs happy elsewhere in the organisations.

Sometimes boundary spanners emerge naturally – perhaps because a good leader intuits the need. Sometimes it’s just that the individuals concerned are a bit nosey and like to know what’s going on. Don’t worry though, if you don’t have boundary spanners you can make them – it’s not hard. I recommend ’embedding’ people in other departments – go talk to the various business units, attend their management meetings and, importantly, try to take a step away from your own service area and view its performance in the context of the organisation’s strategic direction.

I’ve talked about IT here but all parts of the organisation need boundary spanners – particularly the corporate support services such as HR, Finance and Legal. The cartoon below (and oldie but goody) illustrates the dangers of not having enough boundary spanners involved in any activity…

RT, MT, HT, DM, OH, #hashtag, @mention. What’s all this gubbins then?

Public Sector stuff

I use many digital channels to share my ideas, help people and promote organisations doing useful things. But Twitter only allows 140 characters, so I have to be brief.  To save characters, I use abbreviations and other techniques to type more with less.  However, not all my followers understand what I mean.  Hence this blog post.

RT = Re-Tweet = your tweet is very well typed and I’ve decided to share it, as is, without changing a thing.  Well done you!

MT = Modified Tweet = your tweet has a message which I want to share, but I’ve had to modify it before doing so.  “Could do better”, as some teachers used to tell me (please feel free to ask me why I’ve modified your tweet and I’ll happily tell you).

HT = Hat Tip = Congratulations, you have inspired me.  I may not have RT or MT your original…

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